Easter Oration, Derry, 2008

Republican Network for Unity Easter commemoration, Sunday 23d March, the Republican plot, Derry city cemetery.



It is an honour to speak here today at the resting place of this city’s IRA dead. At the same time it is a very humbling experience. The sheer vastness of what these dead comrades lost makes my own experiences appear microscopic by comparison. The IRA dead not only rest in the cold clay at our feet, they occupy a very hallowed space in our memories. I do not need a history book to remind me that Ethel Lynch died in this city in 1974, or that Colm Keenan was cut down two and a half years earlier.

And it goes without saying that no tribute to the republican dead could ever be complete if it was not buttressed by an embracing of the fallen volunteers of the INLA. Michael Devine and Patsy O’Hara are names that sit eternally in the minds of the people of this city as indelibly as the names Padriac Pearse or James Connolly are etched to some depth in the consciousness of Irish republicans.

All of those who gave their lives in pursuit of a better society unfettered by British interference or simply because they resented armed oppression and felt compelled to resist in kind, shared in the totality of loss irrespective of what republican army they served in. Their loss was complete. And with the very last breath exhaled from their dying bodies they knowingly struck out against the perfidy of the British state. We remember each of them.

Thirty three years ago I too was a member of the Derry Brigade of the IRA, by dint of where I was at that time imprisoned, Magilligan, alongside some who stand here today. In Cage F I beamed with pride when as a 17 year old I was a member of the colour party commemorating the republican dead. Then as a teenage volunteer intent on returning to the ranks of the IRA once freed, I had no idea that three decades later we would be standing at the gravesides of dead republicans in a Northern state even more British than Thatcher’s Finchley – Finchley remember has no MI5 knock out centre. Britain has no strategic reason to keep Finchley. Whatever else, the North of Ireland has more strategic value to the current British state than Finchley.

Nor as I stood on that exercise yard-cum-parade ground holding the flag of the Derry Brigade did I for one moment consider that the theocratic bigot Ian Paisley would be extolled and hailed as leader of the British state in the north by some of those who were in Magilligan by my side. That was the stuff of nightmares. He who constantly screamed throughout his career that republican graves were not yet full would be lauded as our leader, an example to be followed.

Let us be very clear about the dead volunteers of the IRA and INLA. They died opposing British rule in all its forms. They died opposing a power sharing executive at Stormont which was the political option long favoured by the British state as the alternative to republicanism. They died opposing the partition principle whereby a majority in the North would exercise a veto over the continued division of Ireland. They died opposing a British police force regardless of what name it chose to go under.

Those are the indisputable truths that today speak their name. We do not know where these dead volunteers would have stood today had they survived the conflict. It would be under the most false of pretences to assert that we can infer from their lives where they might stand many years after their passing. They left us no written words that I am aware of with which we could guide our intellects if we were of a mind to attempt some judgement on the matter. So far removed was today’s outcome from their lives and times that they never felt remotely moved to comment on how such an outcome should be viewed. Beyond conceivability, it merited no discussion.

For this reason it is a sad spectacle to watch the memory of dead volunteers being smuggled into the odious Stormont, a place they sought to destroy while alive, or prevent ever being resurrected at the moment they died. Their memory is being used as a smokescreen for the ambitions of others. These others are not legitimising our dead but are cynically using the dead to legitimise themselves. The republican dead must be allowed to rest in peace, their memories undisturbed by those who would seek to recruit them to a cause they never recognised throughout their lives or at the time of their deaths. The shameful desecration of their memory by political vandals should cease forthwith.

To suggest that the dead IRA volunteers might today be Sinn Fein MLAs has its own logic which is never fully explained for fear that it is so abhorrent that those suggesting it would be scorned for ever and a day. We are never told that in order to have served as a MLA, the republican dead would also have had to undertake to inform the British Police Service of Northern Ireland about people engaged in the type of activities they were involved in when they were cut down. And that by extension such information would be passed from the British PSNI onto MI5 so that the type of murderous operation put together to execute IRA volunteers in Gibraltar could also be hatched today against those of similar mind. Does anybody here seriously believe that Mairead Farrell would assent to the passing of information to the British police so that MI5 might use it to organise the murder of republicans? Given the role MI5 played in her execution the shameless alone come equipped with the necessary chutzpah to suggest that she too might just have stooped to their level.

Let us collectively defy anyone to honestly name just one IRA or INLA volunteer who died so that their colleagues could become micro ministers in Britain’s rubber stamp parliament. We gather here today to honour every one of those volunteers who most assuredly died in pursuit of anything but micro ministries.

At the same time we should never seek to claim that the republican dead would see matters in the way that we do. Nor do we, in order to honour them, have to hold onto every belief they cherished and shared with them while they were alive. It has been said that a thing is not necessarily true because a person dies for it. It is most certainly even less true if a person lies for it. Alongside our bonds of comradeship with our dead sits the truth that we owe them. We will not stand at their hallowed places of rest and spout lies either about them or about ourselves. I make no pretence about armed struggle. I no longer support it. It produces dead republicans and never ends British rule. And invariably those republicans die so that some Caesar might become great. And when we depart from here today the heaviness of the sacrifice of those we leave behind will burden our hearts. Let it serve to strengthen our resolve that never again should republicans go to their graves as a result of anything other than natural causes.

Republicans have by their very instinct always ended up opposed to treaties with the British for the simple reason that every treaty signed since 1916 has never advanced republicanism and has always anchored partition. A brief familiarity with republican history reveals that much. And anti-treaty republicans, whether they believe in the doctrine of armed force or not, are always excoriated, maligned and sometimes killed by those who favour treaties. While such treaties never ever produce an Ireland free from British interference they invariably produce a situation where the treatyites, aided by the British, seek to crush the very philosophy they once took up arms in defence of. Poachers becoming gamekeepers is as old as the game for which the powerful have always needed keepers.

It is worthwhile noting that it is on Easter Sunday that we gather here to honour the republican dead. Easter Sunday republicanism and Good Friday nationalism are separated by a mere two calendar days, yet stand light years apart politically. While we gather to honour our fallen the Good Friday types will gather ostensibly to honour the same dead but will use their platform to honour Paisley and lament his departure. Losing him and Tony Blair in one twelve month period will cause them more grief than any amount of republican dead.

Lately, when discussing political matters with a diverse range of people, I have been frequently asked how so many people in Sinn Fein believe the rubbish that is fed their way in terms of a united Ireland being closer than ever before. Unionists who for long were paranoid about every little move are now completely relaxed about the longevity of the union with Britain. British officials openly admit to having seen off the republican challenge to the union and smile condescendingly when probed about the extent to which agent penetration helped that process along. Dublin officialdom is supremely confident that the electoral challenge from Sinn Fein is as threatening as last year’s snow. Journalists and academics sneer with derision at the ludicrous claims made by Sinn Fein columnists that the struggle was always for equality or that the Good Friday Agreement was a serious advance on Sunningdale.

Jonathan Powell’s disclosures at the beginning of this week show clearly that an end to partition was never part of the peace process agenda. In fact a united Ireland was politically closer under Harold Wilson than it ever was with Tony Blair at the helm of the British state. When Gerry Kelly claims that the genius of the Good Friday Agreement was that it allowed trust to grow he obscures a more fundamental act of ingenuity on its part. The genius of the GFA is that it got Gerry Kelly to stand on his head and claim to believe everything he served a life sentence opposing. Let it never be said of us that we believed the nonsense just because some political snake charmer could come along and bamboozle us with peace processery. We are not their snakes and will not succumb to their charm.

And there is a corollary to this. It is this. Because we do not believe the guff we are ethically obliged to lead a strategy of ethical resistance to that which we do not believe. If it is true that Charles Haughey as Taoiseach was informed in 1987 by an element in the IRA leadership that a place in the internal government of the North of Ireland would be enough to end the conflict why then were IRA volunteers sent out to risk their lives in pursuit of a goal that had been abandoned? And if the Haughey government, as is alleged by the Sinn Fein leadership, was responsible for providing the British with information that led to the deaths of three IRA volunteers in Gibraltar, why was that government ever provided with evidence of IRA intent in the first place? How many volunteers lost their lives because the British knew that killing them was the most expedient method of getting them out of the way so that the peace process could succeed?

If such questions are painful then the answers might prove even more hurtful. But how can we as republicans demand truth inquiries yet fail to inquire into all the circumstances that pertain to the deaths of our own comrades? We should not try to shape the answers so that they conform to our own beliefs. We must display the courage to accept answers that likewise challenge our views. But we must never refrain from asking the questions. We should never stand at the graves of those who lost most in this struggle just to resolve to come back and do the same next year. We must ask and ask and ask again and in our quest be silenced by no one.

Throughout the history of the past four decades the British were a force for bad. And when they settled up with those they fought against they did it on terms most suitable to Britain. Our volunteers of the IRA and INLA do not lie in these graves because of some theological dispute between Protestants and Catholics. They are entombed because the behaviour of the British state, which in this very city inflicted mass murder on an unarmed and unsuspecting civilian population, forced them into an armed conflict not of their making.

As we walk from this hallow place today let us resolve never to absolve the British state of its responsibility for the conflict here. Greatest amongst the many lies that Britain has inflicted upon us is the Good Friday Agreement. It is a lie because it is an answer to a fraudulent question that Britain posed with its own interests above all others firmly in mind – how best to find an internal solution to a problem of internal conflict. This was not an internal conflict that required an internal solution. Our dead volunteers were not involved in some squalid conflict with unionists. They were at war with the British state which repressed, murdered, tortured, colluded, censored, manipulated the justice system, framed and imprisoned the innocent, absolved the guilty and sought to criminalise those who resisted.

Our volunteer dead were not criminals. They rebelled against the criminal state of Britain which violated every one of its own laws. When the British state refused to abide by its own laws it was ill placed to criminalise others for not obeying them. Our volunteer dead pursued neither wealth within nor power over their community. They sought freedom and found death. They lost their lives and kept their dignity unlike many of their leaders who kept their lives and lost all dignity.

Volunteer soldiers of the IRA and INLA we are indebted to each of you who lost your lives in the struggle against injustice. And we affirm to strive tirelessly to ensure that your memory is neither corrupted nor hijacked for projects so openly disdained by you when you were alive.


Photos from the Derry Easter Commemoration

The Freedom 2016 Club

Speech at launch of Ed Moloney's latest book, Paisley.

Scanning across the internet flyer advertising tonight’s discussion I felt a sense of déjà vu. In it was a question I could have asked many years ago. Where I didn’t ask the question it was because I felt I knew the answer. And in seeking to broaden upon that answer in the early days I persuaded few but did manage to lengthen the already dour faces of the lemon sucking population.

Why did Irish republicans, having prosecuted a decades-long campaign against partition and the existence of Northern Ireland, ultimately accept a place in a Northern Irish power-sharing government as de facto Ministers of the British Crown? In fact it is a question that states as much as it asks. Leading Sinn Fein members are truly ministers of the British crown and their attempts at denying it are as weighty in their powers of persuasiveness as similar denials of IRA membership.

Some years ago any such allusion to Sinn Fein serving as micro ministers for the British state would have nominated the ill-fated audacious enough to suggest it as unfit for serious intellectual companionship. The social gulag, a fitting terminus for any miscreant in the grip of such heretical notions where in the company of other inhabitants of the cerebral archipelago we could amuse ourselves by writing articles about Sinn Fein wall murals of the future dedicated to none other than Padraig Paisley. As a slogan ‘Connolly, Pearse and Paisley’ might flow pretty well - just like non-alcoholic beer. But there remains something not quite right about either.

Today, the truism that Sinn Fein leaders are ministers of the British crown is the commonsense discourse of the conversing classes. The true believer, securely but hardly safely corralled into the self-referential and intellectually challenged world of the peace process, alone dissenting from the obvious.

Sinn Fein, the sole members of the Freedom 2016 lonely club, now profess to believe that a united Ireland is only eight years away. Fewer in number, head so burrowed up their own fundament that they can’t smell the other crap they are duly fed, their adherents still harbour the intoxicated opinion that the war was, in the words of Joe Cahill, really won. But then let us be careful not to blaspheme. St Joe after all is, according to one documentary, the patron saint of the peace process. Who are we mere mortals to question the divine? Still, strange, that one of the secularly sinful, the ungodly Newton Emerson, on Joe’s passing, should note that the late IRA chief of staff was survived by his wife and … one million Protestants. Emerson’s quip was as sharp as it was barbed. The consent principle, the bane of republicans who challenged it with the coercion principle , for long the sole fulcrum on which the British presence in Ireland hinged, as manifested in the wishes of those million Protestants, has triumphed over the existence and purpose of the IRA. Apart from the one Protestant the nationalist writer Jude Collins knows who favours a united Ireland, the million continue to support the union with Britain. The IRA now embraces the consent principle, the only thing seriously sustaining that union and which legitimises in the absolute the British presence in Ireland.

Still, an orb takes a long time settling in to the land of the flat earthers, the evolutionary adaptability of the eye to its surroundings being a slow and often torturous process. It is not a peculiarly republican malaise as is evidenced by the strange belief elsewhere that our entire world is a mere 6000 years old and was created 1000 years after glue was invented by the Sumerians.

In that type of inverted Newtonian universe where apples shoot upwards the moment they fall from trees, IRA decommissioning did not in fact happen, and Hugh Orde and Ian Paisley stood poised to lead the nationalist multitudes over the orange hill and into the bright green fields of a united Ireland that would also be socialist. On one issue alone have they been wrong – Peter Robinson will now lead them to Irish unity. He is younger, has more energy and will therefore get them there even quicker. Michael Ignatieff seemingly got it all wrong when he said of cynics like myself: they have a healthy awareness of the gulf between what people practice and what they preach.

The origins of the Provisional IRA explain much about their leaders’ acceptance of their lot as British micro ministers in a Paisley led government. Although much has been made of the republicanism of the Provisional IRA it was in fact more Provisional than republican. The Provisionals were much less the unbroken thread of republican tradition stretching back to 1798 than they were a conjunctural response to post 1969 British state strategies. Whatever their ideological moments, many of which were intense such as 1981 when the H-Block hunger strikers died with such courage that the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher felt moved to comment on it, the Provisionals were in essence the cutting edge of an insurrection against not the British presence per se but against the manner in which that presence conducted itself. The Provisionals did not mushroom into a mass movement because the British were in Ireland. They did so in response to British behaviour while in Ireland.

The strategic logic of this was simple if anyone astute enough existed within the British establishment to take cognisance of it. Britain did not have to withdraw from Ireland in order to take the wind out of the Provisionals sails. They merely had to change the terms on which they stayed.

For long British state strategy was predicated on securing the defeat of Provisional republicanism through the application of strategies of exclusion and marginalisation. Republicans and republicanism were regarded as an indivisible ensemble that had to be excluded in its entirety from both the discourse and projects that were functioning to shape an eventual solution to the range of problems that plagued the North. At a certain point in the latter half of the 1980s some element of British strategic intelligence questioned the indivisibility of republicans and republicanism and began to prise an opening. From that point on British strategy moved from the old realist model of behaving like a billiard ball that endlessly knocked the Provisional IRA from one end of the strategic table to the other while in turn being relentlessly cannoned itself. And in its place it opted for the more pluralist model of creating cobwebs. It reached into the Provisionals, simultaneously pulling threads to it and knotting others less pliable. By the early 1990s strategy was clear.

The defeat of Provisional republicanism would be secured by the twin strategic prongs of excluding republicanism but including republicans. The British establishment identified who it needed from within the ranks of Provisional republicanism to work with. Above all else the British moved to secure the continued hegemony of the Adams leadership. Trimble could fall but not Adams. Today republicans, if they may still be termed such, are on the inside but sans all republican tenets which now seem to belong exclusively to the outsiders - dissident republicans.

The British state has emerged as the conflict’s one clear winner. Over the course of its strategic success it certainly ceded a lot of credibility in terms of government ministers and civil servants. They seemed publicly at any rate to buy into the bollix that Sinn Fein stipulated as being indispensable to the party leadership’s strategy of deception employed against its own grassroots. And so Downing Street became the engine room for the endless processing which has characterised the northern Irish political landscape for more than a decade and needlessly prolonged instability.

Nevertheless, for all the meandering of rivers they invariably reach the sea. The British got there. In assisting the Sinn Fein leadership bring about the demise of the Provisional IRA as a serious anti-British entity the British government ceded not one key tenet. The border is still here, as is partition, and the Unionist veto, whereby those who favour the union with Britain can ensure its continuity so long as they command the numbers to do so. Northern Ireland’s British police force is supported by the party who previously gave unambiguous support to the killing and bombing of its members. There is an Irish dimension but this was allowed for by the Tories as far back as October 1972 when it struck some of them that an Irish dimension would be a valuable asset in prosecuting the war against the Provisional IRA. Intellectually, the British state perspective that the dispute was primarily one that could be analysed through the prism of an internal conflict model has prevailed and is manifest in the outcome we have today. Who now remembers the Provisional assertions that British imperialism was keeping the country divided for its own malign reasons? As surely as the Provisional movement has been locked into the structures of the British state of Northern Ireland the very act of locking them in has unlocked the British state from the accusation that its role in the ring was something other than referee.

The North of Ireland today is a site of political parsimony rather than generosity. Consequently we have a power splitting rather than a power sharing executive. The two dominant parties are led by a theocrat and an autocrat respectively. Their mutual interest in pursuing their own separate totalitarianisms within a state system that protects them both from political opposition begs the question of how great now the democratic deficit within Northern Irish society.

Ian Paisley has now pledged to resign. His long history of broken pledges will not alter the outcome of this particular promise. Catholics rejoice - Sinn Fein will not now nominate him as pope.

London, 17 March 2008

'It remains a challenge to find any redeeming features about Big Ian'

As someone who grew up under the dark shadow cast by Ian Paisley, I don't quite see him through the rose tinted spectacles that sit perched on the noses of other writers and commentators. History, it is said, is always written from the perspective of the present, but with a false history, how can we have an accurate understanding of the present? Is everything about us to be a fiction?

From yesterday's Sunday Tribune:

'It remains a challenge to find any redeeming features about Big Ian'

FOR all his identification with Old Testament biblical lore, Ian Paisley never donned Joseph's coat of many colours, preferring a garment of only one hue -- bright orange. This colossus of sectarian triumphalism spans the breadth of my political memory.

My first experience of him was as a young child in south Belfast. In 1966 he led a march through the nationalist Markets area which resulted in a riot. The following day in primary school there was a Paisley buzz. Our teacher, Mr Marcus, quizzed my classmates about the event. Everybody was eager to describe the size of the stone their father or older brothers threw at the invading ogre and his mob of madding clerics.

Later, I was to sense my mother's trepidation when Paisley almost beat the then Northern Ireland prime minister in an election to the old Stormont parliament. Her relief at his narrow defeat was shortlived. The event almost certainly heralded the beginning of a long successful career of overthrowing unionist leaders, which eventually resulted in his seizing of the crown for his own large head. As she was waiting to die last year, my mother expressed deep dissatisfaction that one of the last events she was to witness was the big beast of sectarianism being rewarded by Sinn Fein of all parties. I guess the thought that went through the mind of Danny Morrison also gripped her own:

"Increasingly I think we must need our heads examined...What an advertisement he would be around the world. We would be a laughing stock."

Some years after my first awareness of Ian Paisley, as a young IRA volunteer I ended up serving time in prison, a willing participant in the conflagration which he did so much to fan. While I and others were being falsely labelled criminals by a genuinely criminal British government that had massacred an unarmed civilian population on the streets of Derry, Paisley was a cheerleader for those in the British state who were determined to see Bobby Sands and his protesting comrades in their graves. His vitriol served him well, allowing his Democratic Unionist Party to beat the Ulster Unionists in the 1981 local council elections.

And so it continued right up to his recent demand that those who resisted the British would wear sackcloth and ashes for their "sins". If it was not the pope on the receiving end of his rasping cow's tongue, it was someone else who had offended his self-serving pristine Puritanism. It remains a challenge to find any redeeming features about the man. When he eventually entered a government with Sinn Fein it was as part of a power-splitting, rather than a powersharing, arrangement.

Ultimately, history might be unkind to Ian Paisley, judging him as the man who abandoned all his beliefs for a slice of power, only to fall on the extremist sword he had fashioned to perfection. A more astute assessment might well conclude that, in essence, the old theocrat never really changed. In government, he secured what had long eluded him outside of it -- Sinn Fein's acceptance of second-class citizenship. His perpetual dismissal of Martin McGuinness as 'the deputy' was par for the Paisley course. That the Derry Catholic should prove so deferential to the 'big man' negated a lifetime spent insisting that God made Catholics but the armalite rifle made them equal.

Ian Paisley can step into retirement chuckling at his achievements: partition into perpetuity and the union with Britain as secure as it has ever been. His has been one political odyssey that defies Enoch Powell's dictum "all political careers end in failure".


Anthony McIntyre is an ex-IRA prisoner and writer.

The Funeral of Brendan Hughes: Setting the Record Straight

Last in the series of articles written when Brendan died, this one examines his funeral and sets the record straight regarding media reports of a 'rift healed'.

The Funeral of Brendan Hughes: Setting the Record Straight

It has been reported in some sections of the press that the attendance at the funeral of the late IRA leader Brendan Hughes by Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams was a sign of the rift between the two men having been healed. Sinn Fein itself has been whispering that shortly before he died Brendan Hughes sent for Gerry Adams and apologised to him for the criticisms that he had directed at the current Sinn Fein strategy. No doubt this too was filtered through to the media along one channel or another. A lazy media, willing to function as ‘useful idiots’ content to feed on shadow rather than substance could be expected to run with the first morsel thrown their way no matter how tasteless.

It may have been more fruitful for the media to have at least explored the possibility that the attendance at the funeral by Mr Adams and his two visits to Brendan Hughes while he lay dying in the intensive care unit of a Belfast hospital may just have been strategically designed to create a certain impression; one that would show that Brendan Hughes had repented and had been welcomed back into the fold with open arms by generous comrades eager to forgive him for his errant ways.

Unlikely as it is, it may be possible that Mr Adams had a pang of conscience and went along to apologise to Brendan for the way the former hunger striker had been treated by his party solely because he had the temerity to make public his concerns about the strategic direction of party policy. Brendan Hughes had been vilified in whispering campaigns, ignored when invitations for public discussions were being sent out, excluded from a university platform where he had been a guest speaker, had his flat bugged, and was censored when he sought to vent his concerns about improper economic practices taking place in Gerry Adams’ West Belfast constituency.

If Mr Adams made any such apology it went without reciprocation. Brendan Hughes was in a coma when Gerry Adams visited him in hospital a week before he died. The second time that the Sinn Fein president visited Brendan in hospital, the latter was unconscious still and only moments from death.

Brendan Hughes may indeed have had a soft spot for Gerry Adams based on the bond that was established between the two men when together along with Ivor Bell they directed the prosecution of the IRA war in Belfast against the British state. If he still felt in any way personally endeared to his former IRA comrade he kept it a closely guarded secret.

Politically, there was no meeting of minds between Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams. That was one rift that was never healed. Brendan Hughes at no point embraced the strategy devised by Gerry Adams. His whole being screamed out in protest against it. He believed it to be the ultimate capitulation, the abandonment of republicanism, the property of a ‘class of professional liars.’ He left us nothing to suggest that he had changed his mind on key fundamental issues. He died believing that Sinn Fein under the leadership of Gerry Adams had deserted the poor, had ignored the terrible effects of long term imprisonment on many IRA volunteers, and had made its peace with Britain on British terms. He also believed that Irish unity was no closer to being achieved than it was at the beginning of the Provisional IRA’s campaign. One of his most frequent questions was, ‘What was it all for?’

The death of Brendan Hughes has demonstrated most clearly that a rift was indeed healed. It was the rift between Brendan Hughes and Ivor Bell not the one between Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams. Brendan Hughes went to his end firmly believing that Ivor Bell could have saved republicanism and as firmly convinced that Gerry Adams destroyed it.

24 February 2008

Weep, But Do Not Sleep

The article below was an attempt to pose a counter narrative to the discourse of universal respect for Brendan that was being pedalled in the wake of his death. Some who claimed to respect him tellingly failed to show it to him while he was alive. Perhaps more telling was that Brendan did not elect one of the 'men of respect' to deliver his funeral eulogy.

Weep, But Do Not Sleep

It was an IRA funeral. It could be no other. Brendan Hughes was an IRA volunteer. The gloves and beret of the IRA adorned his coffin. He did not want a Sinn Fein funeral. He was a political soldier and had little time for politicians of any political party. In the end he got his wish. His old comrades from the IRA’s D Company took charge of his funeral. The volunteers from the battling ‘dogs’ led by the redoubtable Paddy Joe Rice came to claim the body of their most iconic leader and stood guard over him as he stepped into eternity.

It is not a matter of personal opinion that Brendan Hughes hotly opposed Sinn Fein hijacking his funeral as he put it. Having seen so many funerals where he felt the party had bullied and cajoled its way to the front pew he had often spoken on the matter. Frequently I had ribbed him that ‘big Gerry will carry you up the road and tell everybody you sent him a secret message supporting the peace process.’ He took it in good humour but never failed to make the point that the party would have no input into his funeral arrangements. D Company alone would have the honour. Nor would anyone from Sinn Fein be allowed to speak at the funeral unless it was in a personal capacity.

Late last year he had told his family of his intent but acceded to their wishes that when the fateful day arrived no one should be turned away. He was much too understanding a man to want to make things difficult for those he loved most, his family. Large numbers of Sinn Fein members did turn up. Like others there, many of them came to pay respect to a worthy man.

Others most certainly did not. It is hard to imagine that all from the Provisional mourning contingent cared for Brendan in the manner their behaviour at his funeral, coupled with their comments in the press, suggested. The leadership ordered the bugging of his flat some years ago. He found the device but against my advice opted not to go public on it. The man who planted the device was not visible, at least to me, at the funeral, but the man who almost certainly ordered the bugging was there.

Amongst the mourners were those directly responsible for censoring Brendan so that a wider audience would not hear what he had to say. As a former hunger striker and blanket man he was prevented from speaking at a university about his H Block experiences. As an exploited worker his critique of his exploiters was defanged to the point of it being unrecognisable from what he had actually written.

Did the spies and the censors, thought police the lot of them, really turn up at the funeral of Brendan Hughes because they respected him as a person and wished to pay him respect?

Since the funeral much has been written that would lead people to think it was a Sinn Fein event. One journalist wrote that the coffin ‘was carried by Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams.’ All on his own without even the strong shoulders of Simon the Cyrene to assist him? Another named no one but Sinn Fein members out of the thousands in attendance. The photos carried in the press featuring pallbearers were of Gerry Adams or Fra McCann. The prevalent discourse was of a rift healed.

The facts on the ground belie any such interpretation. True, Brendan’s wishes would have been ignored had Sinn Fein got its way. However, its attempts to muscle in were resisted and frustrated by his comrades from D Company at every turn which had mounted a robust defence of its independence in terms of having the right to bury its own dead. The Sinn Fein president was told his status at the funeral would be that of a mourner and not of a dignitary. The party’s proposal to provide one of its politicians to sing during the service was rebuffed.

In what was perhaps the most significant snub to Sinn Fein Brendan had expressly asked for Ivor Bell, the most competent and intelligent of the nine Provisional IRA chiefs of staff, to deliver his funeral eulogy. Bell, however, had taken ill two evenings previously and had been admitted to hospital the morning prior to the funeral.

On learning that Bell would deliver the eulogy Sinn Fein grew tense. The party asked that Gerry Adams be allowed to say a few words. It then suggested that the press would manufacture a major story if both men spoke and that to ward this off Adams should speak alone. The suggestion was rejected.

Bell would have needed to say very little. His appearance alone would have amounted to a serious rebuff of the Sinn Fein leadership. The choice of Ivor Bell was a significant one. It was a statement by Brendan Hughes that he had taken the wrong side in the 1985 internal IRA dispute which saw Bell sidelined in a move that cleared the path of any serious opposition and provided the found on which the peace process was built. Brendan Hughes belatedly acknowledged that Ivor Bell had been right in his prediction that the one thing to emerge from the Adams strategy would be a defeated IRA and a victorious British state.

In the event Dominic O’Neill from D Company delivered the oration. While a touching gesture from an old comrade the political impact was negligible. With Bell’s illness the moment was lost in its passing.

The Sinn Fein leadership did not need Brendan Hughes to legitimise it. But it feared him legitimising anything else. By conducting itself as it did in relation to the funeral it sought to neutralise Brendan rather than respect him. The Sinn Fein president was concerned with public image. The press gave him the boost he craved. At the big political level Sinn Fein came out on top. And on that count he won the day. But he failed to win the heart of the mourners.

At every point of the funeral voices that were highly critical of the Sinn Fein leadership made themselves heard. One mourner later wrote of the Sinn Fein president:

People were very angry & disgusted at his shameless self-promotion over Brendan's death - his issuing a press release over it, pushing his way to the front to carry the coffin in front of all the cameras, getting up in the middle of the mass, and crossing the altar, leaving the chapel in front of the coffin, breaking off and running ahead of the cortege to be in the memorial garden first, trying to put pressure on the family to give the oration, claiming 'the rift had healed' because he carried the coffin …

There would be little point in carrying such a sentiment were it not for the fact that it was echoed throughout the cortege. It captures the common sense of the bulk of people who made up the body of mourners.

Brendan Hughes is now in a state of eternal sleep. But for those who wish to protect his memory and defend the socialist republican values he espoused, his funeral should serve as a grim reminder: we may weep but we dare not sleep.