And Goodbye Adams?

If a week is a long time in politics then a decade can only be an epoch. When the Belfast Agreement was finally cobbled together on Good Friday ten years ago few had the foresight to predict the movement from the then political ice age to what many political climatologists regard as the sunny season of today.

Although the republicanism of Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein was by then well into the process of thawing out, circumstances required that a few more short years would elapse before the republican project would drown in the deluge of its own watery waste.

More worrisome for the Good Friday well wishers was that a decade ago, Ian Paisley, leader of the DUP, and grand iceberg of Northern Irish politics appeared and sounded as immutable and impenetrable as ever. Little sign of him thawing out. No matter how titanic the form of any political initiative it seemed destined to splinter apart on that bellowing rock of bigotry.

Yet today not only has the rock crumbled but the old pirate who for long reigned over turbulent Irish political seas is about to make the career trip to Davy Jones’s locker. In March Paisley announced his dual retirement as leader of British Northern Ireland and leader of the DUP.

Despite the claims, true no doubt, that he was forced to walk the plank he did not take the plunge until scoring an outstanding achievement. That was to lock republicans ever more securely into a political structure they had waged a long war to destroy. The Northern Ireland state, which the Provisional IRA leadership stormed in wave after wave of ultimately futile attacks, hurling the lives of their own selfless volunteers at it, is now hermetically sealed from political unity with the rest of the country by the consent principle.

With the two extremes of Northern Irish politics, as they have long been dubbed, now cooperating in the North’s micro government, there has been some anguished wailing at the ostensible rewarding of the extremes accompanied by a lament for the collapse of the centre ground. Such a sketch is far removed from the actuality. Those drawing it use sable hair from the last century to paint the world of today.

The extremes have not been rewarded for extremism but for having abandoned it. The victor has been the centre ground. From a unionist perspective the current arrangement is Trimbleism minus Trimble. Some of the internal furniture has been rearranged since the agreement of April 1998, but the external structure is essentially what David Trimble crafted.

What Paisley achieved, only by standing on the shoulders of Trimble, was to up the entrance fee for Sinn Fein’s admission to the northern executive. In doing so he chose not, as promised, to force it to wear sackcloth and ashes. He preferred that Sinn Fein parade naked, stripped of every publicly identifiable republican asset, to the echo of his own bellowing boast that he had smashed the republicanism of the party. The outcome: he pulled the former republican body even further into the political centre, forcing it to drop most of what had earned it the tag ‘extremist’ in the first place.

The centre ground has not imploded. Rather it is now the largest political space in Northern Irish politics with virtually all elected representatives standing on it. It is not driven by the politics of the extreme but dwarfs like never before those on the extremes. In fact there are signs that those considered the great extremists are now to become casualties of the momentum that carried them to the centre.

Ian Paisley has had his short sojourn in the sun and is currently beginning his departure to the shade. Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams now stands increasingly isolated as the sole remaining dinosaur of Northern Irish politics. There are no longer kindred spirits into whose midst he can blend where the longevity of his leadership can take cover. Other public figures have been around just as long but not as leaders of political parties. The leaders of all other Northern political parties have been appointed this millennium. Adams now looks like an antediluvian figure from the 1980s. For a quarter of a century he has ruled his party unassailed. Because democracy in a totalitarian party is a façade rather than a means to initiate change, when change does come it is rarely the result of a long process of open democratic activity. The coup de grace is usually administered courtesy of a cabal conspiring against Caesar. How much did we really see of the internal DUP battle to give Paisley the shove?

In recent days prominent Adams backers – loyalists in the Irish context being an inappropriate choice of term – have been noticeable in seeking to distance themselves from any notion that he should continue holding the whip hand until death us do part. In the Andersonstown News - a local paper in Adams’ West Belfast constituency with an unchallenged history of being staffed by Adams devotees - the paper’s editor, writing under his well known pseudonym , was scathing of Adams’ record as a Westminster MP. The editor also protested the length of time Adams had been around.

20 years. Two decades. Four parliamentary terms. Four US Presidents. Two Popes. 11 Secretaries of State. Five UN Secretary-Generals. Five Taoisigh. Five Prime Ministers.

Following on the heels of this Niall O’Dowd, editor of the Irish Voice in New York, and a long time echo chamber for the thoughts of Gerry Adams, was telling students on a visit to Belfast that the Sinn Fein president had been an outstanding leader but was weighed down by too much baggage from the past to be able to take the political process to the next stage.

Interesting stuff but no guarantee that Gerry Adams will accompany Ian Paisley as he returns from the fair. But it is the most significant indication to date that the groundswell of opinion ready to question Adams, if not actually challenge his leadership, can no longer be exorcised from public discourse and banished to dark places where it can be safely strangled by the Sinn Fein thought police.

If Adams and Paisley, things of the night from Northern Ireland’s darkness, can slink off arm in arm there are many who will see in it the rise of a new dawn.



First published Parliamentary Brief, April 2008

The Enigma of Brian Keenan

Observing on television the funeral of the late IRA leader Brian Keenan, who died after a lengthy battle with cancer, the only thing it is possible to be certain about that was not part of the game plan was the moving emotion expressed by Keenan’s daughters as they heartbreakingly kissed and caressed his coffin.

Provisional funerals these days are so stage managed that it is difficult to read them. They are political funerals in the sense that they are positioned so as to make a political point or gain a political advantage. Often who attends a funeral or what is said at one is to be considered only on where it fits into the range of strategic or tactical objectives that those behind the organisation of the event hope to achieve. That the eulogy might genuinely reflect the sentiment felt towards the deceased is often coincidental. When it is said that Paisley only became the leader of the Stormont executive because Brian Keenan and his colleagues made it possible, there is the ring of the self serving to it. It read eerily like ‘blame Brian.’

While he went along with it all, Paisley presiding over an internal solution while a major blow for republicanism must have been a triple punch to the solar plexus of Brian Keenan. In addition to partition being underwritten on the same terms as before, the consent principle, there was the added insult to Keenan’s secularism with Provisional acquiescence in the appointment of a theocrat as first minister. On top of that his professed Marxism must have had difficulty reconciling itself to the right of centre administration his movement was now propping up to the point of inviting the leader of world capitalism to Stormont.

For this reason Brian Keenan remains an enigma, someone not easy to be definitive about. He was certainly a very committed member of the IRA and was president of the army council at the time of his arrest in 1979. Some of those critical of him today retain respectful memories of a man who took the same risks as the volunteers he commanded.

Perhaps his willingness to embrace a non republican, non socialist, non secular outcome to the struggle he give so much of his life to lay in his own self professed pragmatism. He argued after the first ceasefire in 1994 against internal critics that had the IRA been able to sustain its campaign in England and been financially solvent to the point of being in a position to fund its own existence the ceasefire need not have been called. Recently in an interview with An Phoblacht/Republican News he appeared to allude to this. He also contended that he wished the Provisional movement was in a better place, an unwitting concession of sorts to the criticism that the place it is in hardly warms the republican soul. It was also a much more honest observation than being told that another gigantic step towards a united Ireland has just taken place or that Ian Paisley is perhaps the Wolfe Tone of our times doing more to bring a united Ireland about than republicans opposed to Sinn Fein.

Aside from whatever pragmatic considerations Brian Keenan judged necessary, he was also regarded as a Stalinist in the organisational sense. He favoured hierarchical structures, the undisputed hegemony of a leadership line imposed on the rank and file via democratic centralism which invariably means more centralism than democracy. Dissent was anathema to him. For someone with a strict sense of organisational loyalty this would have meant going along with the line even if it came up against his own set of beliefs. So it is possible that Brian Keenan had difficulties with the peace process strategy but agreed to be bound by democratic centralist convention.

A more compelling explanation is that he was constrained by factors other than pragmatism or democratic centralism from developing a strategy more consistent with his natural republican, socialist and secular leanings. What such a constraint may have been is a matter for conjecture, but if it existed it certainly gave others a lever with which to prise open his grip on any preferred strategic atenatives. It is dubious proposition that either pragmatism or democratic centralism could lead a man with the strength of conviction Brian Keenan is said to have had to a position so fundamentally at odds with those convictions.

He certainly told enough people at different stages of his misgivings. At one point he urged activists to mobilise to block an Adams appointee being selected as a MLA. On occasions this approach reportedly led to vociferous disagreements between him and others in the movement who felt he argued outside army council meetings against the policy being pursued, but never confronted those council members most in favour of the project when the council was in session. At times his public pronouncements ran so bizarrely against the grain of the reformist and partitionist terminus the Provisional movement was heading to it seemed inconceivable that he would allow himself to be held captive by the peace process without trying to break out.

In 1998 he made the prediction that:

I can categorically state the only time the IRA will decommission, we will decommission in agreement with a government of national democracy, a government that derives from the first Dáil. That's when we will decommission—never, ever before.

Keenan was assumed to believe what he did for his own reasons. He was not considered as one of the types who believe anything so long as it is whispered to them. Despite the imprudence of allowing himself to become a hostage to fortune, when such undertakings went unfulfilled the voice of Brian Keenan did not wax critical. For those hoping for a switch of direction it seemed that at each turning point Keenan inexplicably was not for turning.

Without question he was equipped with the intellect to see that his fellow leaders had already sold the pass on the weapons issue at the very time he was predicting decommissioning would never happen. When the arsenal was given up Keenan fiercely resented the use of the term at Provisional meetings, insisting that whatever the IRA had done with its guns it had not decommissioned them. His republican critics revelled in what they hoped was his discomfort.

Decommissioning eroded Brian Keenan’s ability to act as a foil against charges of sell out levelled against the leadership. In the early days of the peace process when activists were suspicious on hearing Gerry Adams talk of alternatives to armed struggle, Martin McGuinness was held up as the immovable rock against which would flounder any attempt to dilute the core tenets of republicanism. When he took on the persona of the suit, activists looked to Gerry Kelly. As he quickly morphed into a pebble Brian Keenan with his granite like reputation came to be relied upon. On one of Martin Meehan’s early paroles I expressed reservations about the path we were pursuing. Meehan’s response was that he had spoken to Keenan and that there was no way Keenan would support a peace process unless it delivered a victory. Therefore, if Keenan supported the ceasefire it looked a safe bet. Meehan was not alone in viewing matters through this prism.

Although his acceptance of decommissioning made him appear as a less reliable anchor, there was no one that could really step into his shoes. Others heavily associated with the military campaign had a reputation for being either politically limited, blind faith adherents or place seekers. They could hardly play to the armed struggle gallery with the same powers of persuasion as Keenan.

Unlike many of his colleagues Brian Keenan escaped the charge from republican opponents that he was tailoring himself in order to better embrace the establishment. He was not a suit. Any time I saw him he always seemed as poor as a church mouse. He preferred Rock Bar pints to junket wine. While some stingy comments have been made that he benefited from the Provisional movement having paid for his cancer treatment, if true, it was one of the better things it did with its money.

Having been a target for Keenan’s wrath and his ostracism I bore him no ill will and regretted his passing. I find no consolation in the view that if we sit on the banks of the River Ganges long enough we will see the ashes of our opponents come floating by.

In a time when social pressure to conform is so great that even atheists have been known to receive church burials, Brian Keenan in a personal capacity remained true to a much overlooked element of the republican tradition since the time of Tone – secularism. He had no need for priestcraft and went to the end without any of it.

Ashes

The obituary below for Brendan Hughes prompted me to post a piece written shortly after the scattering of his ashes.

Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided … that other men be ready to intone our funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine guns … 'Che' Guevara

Travelling into the heart of the Cooley Mountains for the spreading of Brendan Hughes’ ashes was an experience given to quiet reflection. I had met Tommy McKearney close to the border and we made the winding drive deep into the mountainous area, the location where Brendan had requested most of his remains be scattered. The Hughes clan had family origins there and Brendan had always loved the freedom of the place and the solitude it afforded him, far from the madding crowd.

The quiet reflection far from being brooding had something uplifting about it. I have always found it with cremations as distinct from burials. Whenever I have gone to collect the ashes of family members there was a sense of having got the lost one back again. In a burial they are handed over to someone else for their remains to be disposed of. The hands-on style of goodbye is always truncated by the intervention of the grave digger. The mourner is reduced to a powerless spectator with burials which is redeemingly absent with a cremation.

Moreover, it has always rested uneasily with me that anyone who had been in prison should ever want to be buried. As if we had not spent enough time already banged up without having to do it for eternity. Brendan being scattered in the Cooley Mountains was an act of setting him free; like a bird cupped in hands which open to the whispered word ‘farewell.’

Tommy McKearney spoke at the short secular ceremony attended by around 30 family and friends. Tommy and Brendan had been old comrades and had come through both the blanket protests and 1980 hunger strike together. He delivered a very powerful oration about the role that Brendan had played in ensuring that whatever judgement one could make on the IRA campaign it had forced the British state into ending the policy of croppy lie down. No longer could the surrounded Catholics of Belfast be held hostage as a means to secure nationalist good behaviour and enforce conformity throughout the North.

Following Tommy was Arthur Morgan the Sinn Fein TD for Louth. Arthur was another old comrade and whatever views Brendan had of Sinn Fein and the peace process he never lost his strong personal warmth for Arthur who always made him feel welcome whatever the political climate. The Sinn Fein TD carried on in the same vein as Tommy McKearney, reinforcing the point made about Brendan’s role in pushing back British and unionist malignancy.

In the Cooleys there was a dignified serenity about it all more in keeping with Brendan’s outlook, which was not in evidence at the funeral in Belfast three days earlier. There, the clash of perspectives manifested itself in scowls, silences and jockeying for position. That serenity lends to the Cooleys a sense of being a ‘natural’ resting place for the remains of a man who cherished peace of mind. Now when I look on the Cooley Mountains thoughts of the ‘wee Dark’ roaming free somewhere deep within the hills warm me. They can never bring him together for the purpose of caging him in again. He is beyond all that now.

The following day in Belfast some remaining ashes were being scattered in the Falls Commemorative Garden. It was a place revered by Brendan. We had sat in it alongside him one Sunday morning while tears streamed down his face as he remembered those comrades who had gone before him. I am not aware of other ashes having been spread in the garden but it seemed a worthy spot to receive Brendan. He had a deep love for his comrades.

I missed that ceremony, unable to catch a taxi up the Falls Road in time. When I arrived the crowd that had gathered was dispersing. A volley of shots had been fired. It was in keeping with the tradition represented by Brendan. Although some claimed it was intruding on the grief of his family, few could argue that it would have contravened his wishes. He had been an IRA volunteer and traditionally those volunteers have received that form of salute.

Imposing itself on the discussions about the merits or otherwise of the armed salute was a gulf that has polarised many on the ground including those who once shared the comradeship of the IRA. While present for the Falls scattering of Brendan’s ashes were those who unambiguously supported the firing of the volley, they mingled with others publicly committed to informing the PSNI on anyone engaged in that type of action.

There is a very good convention which holds that we can never say with authority where the dead would have stood today. It is a custom we should stick with come what may. At the same time, Brendan lived along enough to see the lurches and spins of the peace process and wince at the staggering fumbling shambles which the republican struggle had been reduced to as a result. Try as they might no one managed to persuade him that informing on republican firing parties could somehow be spun as an act of revolutionary touting.


February 2008

This Rock of Republicanism

We come to say goodbye to you today
I am so glad we did not bury you after your final journey
It is fitting that we followed you once again through the streets
And then said goodbye as your spirit went up in the flames
That reignited our hearts

Our personal Phoenix

I did not expect the catch in throat upon seeing you
coffin clothed with beret atop lifted by many hands and the lilt of a pipers lament
I miss you, I missed you, and understood I think
what those stark names etched in black
did to you each time you paused to remember

You carried them all in your heart so many years
As today we carried you.

Rest in peace, my love, my friend, comrade, volunteer.
The true peace that cannot be bought

Excerpt from 'For the Dark'


On the day that The Blanket shuts up shop it seems appropriate to sign off by penning a tribute to Brendan ‘The Dark’ Hughes who died three months ago to the day. Brendan was a stalwart of The Blanket. In those issues where his writings appeared the hits counter went through the roof, such was the interest in what he had to say. His passing has left a vacuum in the hearts and lives of those who were his friends. In the time that has elapsed since his life ended, there has been much commentary both in public and in private. Many discussions of his legacy have taken place, aided in no small measure by the widely available writings and interviews he had left for people to mull over. There have been suggestions that he may have bequeathed the public a record of his life in the IRA. But no one has come forward with anything that would remotely resemble a testimony.

Thirty three years ago this month was the first time I met him in ‘A’ Wing of Crumlin Road Prison. While his capture was a major loss for the IRA, his Lower Falls comrades in the jail were excited at the thought of him being on the wing alongside him. His status was legendary. ‘A’ Wing proved to be a roller coaster life for him. It was there that he led a riot, during which he was badly beaten by British troops, in solidarity with the Long Kesh IRA which had burned the prison housing its volunteers. He would later lead a hunger strike against a prolonged post-riot lock up. And it was in ‘A’ Wing that he would learn – the news shouted through his cell door by a screw– that he had become the father of a son.

Despite a life of daring-do in which Brendan rubbed shoulders with some very heroic people including those who died during the 1981 hunger strike, it is instructive to learn that he had one solitary hero in his life, his father. A widower with a large family, his father ‘Kevie’ struggled single handed to bring up his children - five sons and one daughter. Times were hard but the family made it through. It was from his father that Brendan developed a class-based view of the world. This was reinforced by his own experience on the boats as a young seaman where he witnessed terrible poverty in the African port towns and cities his ship would pull into.

His desire to see a socialist outcome inspired him but his political shelter was in a republican structure rather than a socialist one. He had little time for the organised left, viewing it as a mish-mash of sects. He sought to avoid them like the plague, declining to turn up to events if they were involved in putting them together. One winter evening in a deprived Manchester housing estate we were on our way out from a public meeting when one of the paper sellers tried to physically assault a member of some other sect; the target of the attack deemed guilty of some deviation which he had expressed from the floor. Brendan seemed appalled. I merely said to him something along the lines of ‘it’s just them, pay no heed to it.’ While none of this put him off from publicly backing the socialist Eamonn McCann during an election foray it did leave him loathe to work in any organisational capacity with the left.

In the closing years of his life he achieved a life long ambition which was to visit Cuba. For years adorning the walls of his small living room in Divis Tower were pictures of Che Guevera. He had long been a fan of the Castro experiment. ‘The revolution improved ordinary people’s lives there. It was a waste of time here.’ However, the facts on the ground in the country punctured his faith in the Cuban social system which he found discriminatory against Cuban citizens, reserving some hotels only for rich people from other countries. Brendan refused to patronise these hotels in solidarity with the Cubans he felt were the victims of social apartheid.

Genuinely open minded and forever determined to do his own thinking he jealously guarded his independence. Consequently, he was given to an innate caution when it came to ‘advice’ in case it was a Trojan horse trying to smuggle words into his mouth. He was invariably dismissive of people telling him he should say this or that the next time he faced an interview. ‘If it is so important say it yourself’, his usual retort. It was one of his great strengths that if he needed advice he sought it but if he didn’t want it he would give short shrift to those proffering it. Often the first any of his friends knew that Brendan had given an interview was when he was heard on the radio or read about in the print media.

His open mindedness left him with little time for dogma. This lent to his character a suspicion of totalitarians masquerading as liberationists. One Sunday afternoon saw the two of us standing in London’s Hyde Park listening to someone from the Nation of Islam at Speaker’s Corner berate the few curious enough to stop to see what the ranting was about. The speaker was surrounded by acolytes who nodded their heads or loudly proclaimed ‘yes’ at anything they agreed with – which was everything the speaker roared. My attitude to them was much the same as it had been to the irrelevant left of Manchester – something to find fun in for a while before going on to do something more purposeful, like attend a march in support of hunger strikers in Turkey. Brendan was affected by it. He felt the people at the soap box were fascists. The menace they exuded made him very uneasy.

His concern at the emergence of fascistic tendencies amongst ostensible freedom fighters was also evident closer to home. He remarked a number of years ago that he could see ‘paranoia’ within the Provisional leadership: ‘anybody who criticises must be condemned, there must be no debate; “we must not be questioned”. We have something that is almost fascism developing out of this, and that is scary.’

The active suppression of political discussion riled Brendan and went against his natural inquisitive nature. He had often encouraged open discussion in Cage 11 which along with Cage 9 regarded itself as a centre of progressive thinking in an otherwise conservative environment. He and Gerry Adams had shared the first cubicle on the left to the entrance of the middle hut. Adams had promoted a culture of learning which Brendan ensured continued on after his cell mate was freed.

We had debates, we had discussions, we had arguments, we had read about the Palestinian cause, we read about the South African cause, we debated all these causes and we became politically educated, we became not just a soldier who was just a person who was able to fire a gun, but a person who was able to think before he fired a gun.

Like all cages, 11 seemed to have an abundance of books but it benefited from having no one who seemed to frown on any literature. Unlike Cage 10 where prisoners on occasion were advised to keep certain books in the locker and not on the book shelf, in 11 everything was on open display. One of Brendan’s favourites which he regularly revisited was The Technology of Political Control. He felt then that republicans would need to grow au fait with its contents as over time the British state would become increasingly technologically sophisticated as it moved to crush republican resistance. While Connolly always appeared as the icon of the republican left Brendan leaned more to Liam Mellows, again a taste he acquired from Gerry Adams.

Cage 11 was also a place where documentaries would be viewed avidly. Anything remotely political would take priority on the black and white television screen that provided our lens on the wider world. The Orlando Letelier murder in Washington by Chilean security services, the coup that overthrew Bhutto in Pakistan, William Hague’s address as a 16 year old to the annual Tory Party conference, the Khmer Rouge mass murder in Cambodia, the Baadar-Meinhoff kidnapping and killing of Hans Martin Schleyer, the death of former Italian Prime minister Aldo Moro at the hands of the Red Brigades, and the PLO defence of the Port of Tyre were all followed closely in Cage 11. In terms of intellectual exploration Cage 11 was in the avant garde, much of it a consequence of The Dark’s influence.

In the H-Blocks his distrust of ‘lectures from ‘on high’ grew more pronounced. He disliked formal education and readily embraced the then in-vogue concepts developed by radical educationalists Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich which he saw as challenging to hierarchy. Nor was he ever enamoured to the organised study groups that took place in some wings, preferring instead what he called ‘one-to-one’ informal exchanges.

Brendan carried a charisma which won him the respect of opponents as well as the admiration of friends. In the prisons the screws showed him a particular deference. Out for a drink in the Empire in South Belfast we bumped into a few former prison staff from the Kesh. They offered to buy us a round. We bought them one instead. Shortly before he died he relayed an account of a former prisoner officer calling to visit him in his flat. One night as we entered Liverpool British police detained Brendan for over an hour only to ask him about his experiences and request his autograph at the end of it.

Brendan Hughes was for long the leader of the blanket protest. Ironically, while he is heavily associated with the imagery of the blanket man defying the power of the British state to force republican political prisoners to wear the prison uniform, the no-uniform protest was not his preferred option. He felt it allowed the prison administration to confine republicans to their cells, from which their ability to create havoc within the echelons of prison management was attenuated. And he had been familiar with too many republicans from earlier IRA generations who had worn prison uniform during their bouts of incarceration but who could never be criminalised as a result. The prison arena was merely another battle field and Brendan like all capable military commanders assessed the matter in strategic terms. He did not want to give any advantage or commanding heights to the opposition. However, he could read the mood of his men and was sensitive to how the beatings and deprivation endured by them in their refusal to wear the uniform had become the mark of IRA and INLA pride.

The 1980 hunger strike of which he was the leader failed to resolve the prison issues that had given rise to it. Again Brendan felt that a head on assault should be avoided and he disagreed strongly with the decision by Bobby Sands to launch a second strike. While Bobby and his nine comrades who died eventually broke the British on the substance of political status Brendan concluded that it came at ‘too big a cost.’

Brendan had a deep affinity with those he served time with in the prison wings and cages built by the British for the purpose of crushing republicanism. He was regularly visited by ex-prisoners and would instantly change course in the run of his day if he learned that a former prisoner needed assistance. From the ceasefires one of Brendan’s big bones of contention lay in his firm belief that ex-prisoners had been abandoned by Sinn Fein. The early death of the first blanket man Kieran Nugent particularly upset him.

Kieran died in 2000. They called him a ‘river rat’ because he spent his last days drinking by the river in Poleglass. Why didn’t somebody in the movement not see he’d problems and help him? He was the bravest of the brave.

I was never quite sure that he was altogether right on this. We publicly disagreed on the life and death of Kieran, he taking the view that more could have been done, I feeling that it was Kieran’s independence, so manifested in his ability to go it alone as the first man on the blanket protest, which may have militated against him seeking help. But Brendan remained adamant and publicly clashed with a Sinn Fein ex-prisoners body in the closing years of his life.

Brendan hailed from one of the great IRA companies in Belfast. Known as ‘the Dogs’, D Company fought with the ferocity of a wolf in its war with the British Army. It was soldiers with the British Army who gave Brendan his long standing nickname ‘the Dark’. British fatalities in the area were rivalled only by South Armagh, and then over a much longer period. South Armagh had a land mass whereas the area covered by the Dogs, the Lower Falls, was less than a mile squared. And being a warren of streets it had none of the foliage of South Armagh. British squaddies dreaded the Dogs and were known to have driven through the district with religious paraphernalia adorning their vehicles in the vain hope that the IRA might not fire on them.

Yet Brendan was clinical without being ruthless. On one occasion he spared the life of a British soldier he could easily have killed. On another he expressed his regret at failing to arrive quickly enough at a place where Lower Falls locals had captured a young British soldier who stood crying for his mother. The loss of British life on that occasion ate at Brendan who always regretted that other IRA colleagues arrived first and did what the IRA did when it captured enemy troops.

As the operations officer of the Belfast Brigade from late 1972 Brendan had prosecuted the war against the British with vigour. Such was his energy that when an opportunity for escape from internment in December 1973 presented itself other Belfast Brigade figures of greater seniority opted for Brendan to go, given that he more than anyone else had the hands on experience to up the ante against the British. In the six month period that he was free the Belfast Brigade bombed the Grand Central hotel, the British Army HQ in Belfast on two separate occasions. The BBC was also car bombed. Brendan had also set his mind to working on the bombing of Stormont in response to the Sunningdale Agreement which was the early mark 1 version of the Good Friday Agreement.

Brendan’s entire role in the IRA in the period that he was on the run, having escaped, was directed towards stopping the agreement working. He realised that for it to have succeeded the IRA’s self defined national liberation struggle would have been truly reduced to the pejorative status termed recently by novelist Glenn Patterson as ‘the war of devolution with a north-south dimension.’ In many ways the period helped mould his thinking and made his opposition to the Good Friday Agreement much more trenchant.

Throughout his entire political life Brendan adopted the stance of the dissident. He was unshakeable in his belief that republicanism was a philosophy of dissent. With his death dissenting republicanism has lost one of its great voices. Quiet in tone but penetrating in logic, Brendan never failed to make his point.

There is so much that could be written about Brendan Hughes that any obituary will fall short of the mark. A full blown book would be required to capture the life of this rock of republicanism. He deserves no less.




Brendan Hughes' Archive Material

Only What You Do

Enlightenment is on the side of those who turn their spotlight on our blinkers – Pierre Bourdieu

The life of the writer Nuala O’Faolain has finally come to a close. Since her announcement last month that the ends were closing in on her, it was only a matter of time before they would meet in the middle. If there is any silver lining on this cloud it is that her condition was diagnosed in New York. In Ireland, 'this damp little shambles of a democracy on the edge of the Western world', as O’Faolain once put it, discovery of her cancer might have waited until stumbled across by a pathologist during an autopsy. Too late the diagnosis for it to have been of any value to her should she have chosen to battle the disease. She died a few weeks after publicly discussing what remained of her future on RTE. Time left to her was little but she did manage to visit a city as beautiful as Madrid. Now, that’s something that gives human meaning to life in a world which, were it not for human meaning would be void of any.

Apart from an odd column here and there I had never read her material. As John McGuffin said there are so many good books that have to be read but still there are bastards writing more. I now intend to read her memoir which she claimed to have ‘sneaked out’ when ‘no one was looking.’ That comment alone was replete with imagery of tip toeing past the censorious attitudes that incessantly whisper ‘hush’. I am pulled by the lure of what had to be sneaked out. I don’t expect to be disappointed but if I happen to be, a negative review will not bother her now.

What stirred my belated interest was her unbridled willingness to be frank and open about her pending death. And she did it in her own way. Not for her any pseudo brave-facing it for the sake of others. In this she found support from the psychiatrist Patricia Casey, who simply said ‘there is no right way or wrong way, only what you do.’

Quoting Shakespeare’s King Richard II, Casey said ‘The worst is death, and death will have his day.’ We will all get there eventually. Most of us hope to push its boundary back, gain a little time, do one more thing one last time, or one new thing for the first time in the sure knowledge that we will always be bowled out before the close of play. Death is never like some elastic which if pushed hard enough will give way and snap. Nor is it a fence over which a merry skip and the last rites will take us spiritually to the other side.

This was O’Faolain’s view. She believed in no afterlife. Surrounded by a din of utterances from those enchanted by the notion of intelligent design, she refreshingly spoke up for intelligent choice. It might have struck her in the days before she died that god was demonstrating how he loved humanity with his heavenly cyclonic gift to Burma. An interventionist god that will not intervene when it is most needed but who only refrains because he loves us – even let his son be crucified for us a lot of centuries back - is a great measure of how self delusional people can be. Religion is a paradox at the root of the human condition. Our exclusively human ability to reason leads us off in pursuit of unreason where we irrationally invent supernatural beings who we believe sent us cyclones and then worship them for having done so.

My own lack of faith sustains me. I am never troubled by thoughts of being eternally tormented by devils or having to go through the indignity of endlessly eulogising some heavenly big brother who demands that we praise him each minute of our eternal life. Being dead is a tantalising prospect compared to that. As Mark Twain said, he had been dead for millions of years before he was born and not one iota had it harmed him. Now, life forever - what a dread-inducing thought it would be were we to contemplate that someday we would have to praise the god who presided over the Rwandan genocide or the unholy murder in his holy land of Palestinian children.

Religion is a sick theological double act meant to terrify the wits out of us. Big Yahweh tells us ‘if you don’t fall down on your knees in front of me old Lucifer there will ram his poker up your priest path.’ Well praise the lord for loving us so much that it is just the poker.

Last year I watched my mother approach the finishing line without the slightest need of the ignis fatuus offered by religion. She had neither faith in nor fear of deities and demons, between them pushing and pulling her into the never never land of the hereafter. Their invidious supernatural tug of war is surplus to requirement. Nuala O’Faolain reassures us of that much.

5th of May

The 5th of May is a solemn occasion in the republican calendar. Few republicans young or old would fail to instantly recognise it as the date on which the leader of the H Blocks IRA, Bobby Sands, lost his life after a 66 day hunger strike against the degenerate policies of a malign and murderous British government. Those 66 days came back-to-back on a thousand plus days spent naked, locked in a cell as punishment for refusing to wear prison uniform because to do so would have legitimised British state terror and criminalised republican opposition to it.

In the protest blocks brutality, every bit as much as boredom, was the tireless adversary endlessly gnawing away at the will to resist. The boredom Bobby Sands fought through prolific writing, and while he could never hope to halt it he also used his pen to highlight the brutality. Apart from being, in the words of the late Denis Faul, the greatest prison reformer of the last century, he was also one of the great bulwarks against censorship, flouting it with a pen refill and cigarette papers which he had to conceal inside a body cavity to foil the censors.

The lengths to which punitive vindictive thugs at all levels of the British penal administration exercised their minds in the search for new ways to inflict deprivation, has long forced me to ponder on what Hanna Arendt termed ‘the banality of evil.’ Shortly before he died Bobby wrote:

There is a certain screw here who has taken it upon himself to harass me to the very end and in a very vindictive childish manner. It does not worry me, the harassment, but his attitude aggravates me occasionally. It is one thing to torture, but quite a different thing to exact enjoyment from it, that's his type.

That somebody as non-banal and prodigious in mind as this gifted and talented IRA leader should die surrounded by so many uniformed morons whose sole intellectual challenge consisted of agonising over whether to kick or punch a naked prisoner, is probably one of the greatest indictments of the British penal establishment in the last century.

Throughout the years of the blanket protest Bobby Sands played a pivotal role in leading the resistance. His day to day struggle on the blanket is finely documented in the biography by Denis O’Hearn. Also meticulously covered in that book is the death agony he underwent. One of the characters in Gil Courtermanche’s brilliant novel, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, philosophically mused that ‘dying was simply one of the things you did one day.’ Death on hunger strike was much less simple. Dying was not something to be done one day. In the case of Bobby Sands, the dying lasted for over two months. The narrative detailing the pain-wracked and prolonged dying does not make for pleasant reading.

Every year at this time those of us who were on the blanket protest, regardless of what political perspective we may hold today, reflect on the tremendous courage of Bobby and those who followed him to certain death. This was not a death that came like a thief in the night, creeping up on the unsuspecting but one that was seen from a distance and met with an unwavering eye. Margaret Thatcher who displayed a venom all of her own when it came to republican prisoners challenging her writ admitted to having admiration for his courage.

Over the past three years there has been much public controversy about the hunger strike generated by the former republican prisoner Richard O’Rawe in his book Blanketmen. In spite of this, regardless of how the hunger strike was managed by the republican leadership, the fact that it ever came about was the direct consequence of an intransigent British government determined to criminalise a political armed struggle brought into being by its own criminal behaviour in the North. Had that government granted at the start of the hunger strike what it conceded at its end it is certain that the strike would never have taken place.

Today I took my children to a local park. On the way we stopped at a monument to all republican hunger strikers who died in the struggle against the British. My wife photographed us there. As they later laughed and played in the park, the words of Bobby Sands that our revenge would be the laughter of our children played back and forth though my mind. 27 years ago it was all so different. Then there was nothing but suppressed tears and a hatred so burning there seemed nothing capable of dousing it. Time may have dulled the hatred but has done nothing to diminish the awesomeness of Bobby Sands’ epic victory over malevolence.

Enniskillen Revisited

The following comment appeared on this blog in response to a recent article on the Enniskillen bombing of 1987.

Why would the IRA leadership's response to the Harry Keyes killing invalidate the view that bad operations like Enniskillen assisted the peace process faction in the leadership? Both Enniskillen and the Keyes murder brought discredit to the militarists’ argument and strengthened the view that a political alternative should be followed. The expulsion of the unit that killed Keyes, almost unprecedented in IRA history, in fact introduced and made respectable the notion that some IRA operations could be counterproductive, an essential prerequisite to the eventual discrediting of the armed struggle tactic and its replacement by the peace process.

It was a probing question, the response to which ended up being considerably longer than originally intended. For this reason a separate piece is probably the right way to deal with it.

It would be a risqué venture to assert without equivocation that bad operations per se hindered the peace process lobby. Yet, in as far as they may be said to have been enabling rather than restricting, this was almost certainly determined by their timing. At the specific strategic moments of the Enniskillen bomb and the Harry Keyes killing it remains doubtful that these military actions helped that lobby. Other than argument by assertion little has to date emerged that would substantiate the view that either operation was put together or allowed to happen in such a way as to produce an outcome that would strengthen the peace process lobby over its armed struggle rival.

The IRA had demonstrated as far back as 1970 a capacity for serious mistakes and by 1971 for errors that would result in the loss of civilian life. The challenge is to find the point, if there is one, where operations which produced overwhelming negative public reaction stopped being the result of debacle and became the product of deliberation.

The notion that it was ‘essential’ to discredit IRA operations in order to allow a political alternative to develop is arguably not as persuasive as the suggestion that more advantageous to the emergence of a political alternative than botched operations was an inability to carry operations out. The former leads to demands for more caution when conducting operations, the latter to considerations of something to fill the vacuum caused by an inability to perform militarily. The IRA’s inability to effectively perform in the North in the wake of the Thiepval Barracks bombing of 1996 earned it the pejorative dismissal of being engaged in a ‘pathetic grubby little war.’ Bill Lowry then head of Belfast Special Branch later claimed that the leadership’s position in the hiatus between the two big ceasefires was not to seriously wage war but ‘to let the army carry on until they seen for themselves how futile it was.’ That futility was rooted in failed as distinct from disastrous operations.

The argument that ‘bad’ operations aided the peace process acquires more merit when pitched in relation to the ‘human bomb’ attacks of the 1990s where there would appear to be stronger grounds on which to base the contention that the leadership approved such operations in the full knowledge of the consequences. This does not mean that it did calculate the negative effects on armed struggle, merely that the case for it having done so is stronger.

Even well into the peace process when it was clear that a ceasefire was only a matter of time and did not require bad operations to make it possible they still occurred. It hardly needs saying that the peace process lobby in the IRA leadership, if it benefited by botched operations, did not need to organise or approve them. The IRA on the ground managed this as was demonstrated in the Shankill bombing which caused the peace process lobby more trouble than it was worth.

Quite frequently in the attempt to make sense of a certain phenomenon an order is imposed which seeks out continuity while the discontinuities are downplayed even though they may prove more revealing. What might hold good for one phase of the IRA’s campaign should not be extended back in time beyond the circumstances that gave rise to it.

Post-the Peter Brooke 100 day statement of 1989 where he referred to an IRA that could not be militarily defeated and his utterances the following year about Britain having no selfish strategic interest, the IRA found itself in a different discursive era (although a major strategic reversal on the part of the organisation had long been in the making by the time Brooke arrived). Brooke helped create conditions in which the language of peace processing could be more effectively cultivated before it shifted from discourse to full blown strategy. Subsequently, the leadership had more space internally to make the case for exploring some sort of political adjunct that might, given the right conditions, bloom into an alternative. At that point bad operations could be evaluated by militarists through an alternative lens. This would seem a more suitable point for cynical minds to flirt with the concept of ‘atrocities for peace’. While highly speculative it was at this juncture that ‘human bomb’ operations occurred.

Prior to Brooke the environs in which the IRA leadership conducted its business were more constrained. If it is true, as alleged by Peter Taylor, that Gerry Adams suggested a ceasefire immediately after the Enniskillen bomb he seems to have felt compelled, in spite of his legendary caution, to rush his fences. It would not have fitted into his overall strategy of which a ceasefire was only a part, albeit crucial, and the optimum moment for such a shift was still some years off. Before botched operations could become a strategic asset rather than a liability certain conditions had to be fulfilled. Nowhere does it seem that Adams had in the 1980s reached the commanding height from where he could safely take the movement down the full blown peace process path. Operations that forced the hand of the peace process lobby cannot at the same time be said to have been under the guiding hand of that lobby.

It is in this context that the death of Harry Keyes should be evaluated. What was so particularly repugnant about his death that would place him at the apex of a hierarchy of victims? His killing was consistent with what the IRA did. Former members of the British security forces often found themselves targeted either as a result of intelligence failings within the IRA or as a manifestation of a moral malaise which cared little for demarcating between current and former membership. It was not on a par with Enniskillen, Bloody Friday, Claudy et al. That he was killed was less important for the leadership than where he was killed. Location prompted leadership ire.

1988 was a year when the IRA by its own standards bungled many operations in the North. In terms of human tragedy some dwarfed the unjustified taking of Harry Keyes’ life. The wiping out of the Hanna family serves to illustrate the point. Yet the IRA leadership saw no need to publicly whip those responsible. Its response to the Harry Keyes killing in Donegal in January 1989 was arguably an attempt to stave off a hostile southern opinion making ominous noises about the prospects of Sinn Fein vote growth in the Republic. His death threatened the electoral strategy largely devised by the peace process lobby.

The IRA leadership’s response to the killing was forced for a public audience and not a private IRA one. Internally, the leadership did not have to make any public statement flaying those responsible, instead moving against the culprits in time honoured clandestine fashion. It has yet to be shown how public flagellation of the unit involved was designed to discredit the militarist case within the IRA and strengthen the view that a political alternative should be followed. Moreover, little more than two years after the 1986 Ard Fheis, which got by on the basis of an army convention, the way to ensure no militarist head of steam was hardly by embarrassing those of militarist persuasion in public, and thus run the risk of increasing hostility against the now emerging peace process lobby.

What was ‘unprecedented’ in IRA history was the public expulsion of the unit involved. Volunteers had often been disciplined internally and on occasion expelled over botched operations. The suggestion that the idea of counterproductive operations developed with the killing of Keyes overlooks the IRA statement post-La Mon in February 1978. It made it very clear that some IRA operations were counterproductive. Sinn Fein also condemned the La Mon attack.

Overall, the evidence available at the minute would not lend itself to a firm conclusion that at any point in the 1980s botched operations were a necessary condition for the peace process to develop or that they were advantageous to the leadership rather than disabling.

Benazir Bhutto

Reading Barry Gewen's piece on two women who have resisted Islamicist totalitarianism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji, my mind drifted to another woman who had stood up for secular values and was eventually murdered. Benazir Bhutto died last December and her death prompted this obituary.


Benazir Bhutto

She had been a student at Oxford, eventually becoming the president of the Student’s Union there. Having been in Oxford University on a few occasions I felt that the sights and streets that I had known were familiar to her as well. While I and many others languished in the H Blocks in the summer of 1981 in the midst of a tenacious hunger strike she was in a Pakistani prison, also a political prisoner. These vignettes helped flesh her out in my mind as a person rather than some abstract entity termed a politician.

When Benazir Bhutto’s father was hauled from his cell and unceremoniously hanged by Zia ul-Haq, the shock felt in my own cell revisited on the news of her murder. In some ways her premature death was more expected. Since her return from exile to Pakistan she seemed a strong candidate for assassination. Her father, I felt, would escape the noose. But that was to misunderstand the malignancy that permeated the mind of his killer, President Zia. Benazir Bhutto’s death lends something of the ‘Kennedy curse’ to her family history. She had earlier lost two brothers to deaths described by the Guardian as having occurred in murky circumstances.

Maybe it was fortuitous rather than planned that her assassins should strike in Rawalpindi close to the site of her father’s own judicial murder. There was the emission of an eerie punitive symbolism – a warning that there are some areas that brook no trespass. For Benazir Bhutto the ‘verboten’ signs were everywhere after many years exile, much of it in London. Theocratic fascists had threatened to end her life and were the suspects for the October mass murder inflicted by nihilist bombers as she made her way from Karachi’s International Airport on her return from exile. They could not brook her gender, secularism, or democratic discourse.

Groomed by her father for politics from the age of 9 Benazir was thrust into role as leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party upon his arrest in 1977.

My father was the Prime Minister of Pakistan; my grandfather had been in politics too. However my own inclination was for a job other than politics. I wanted to be a diplomat, perhaps do some journalism, certainly not politics. But when my father was imprisoned, then assassinated, I had no other choice but to continue in the work that he had started because so many of his followers wanted me to do so.

Subsequent to the murder of her father tension increased between the army and the Pakistan People’s Party. Party members were hunted down by the military and killed. Benazir campaigned incessantly against Zia and was often detained under house arrest as a result. Her tribulations would be many. Apart from losing her father to judicial assassination, there was imprisonment, exile and legal battles; her husband had been jailed and she had been tear-gassed while pregnant with one of her children.

Debate has for long taken place over the nature of her marriage, some suggesting it was based on realpolitik rather than love. Despite being in many ways a modern woman she had wed her husband as part of an arranged marriage. Without a husband to ‘rule’ over her and keep her in line it was suspected that the electorate might not have tolerated her as a leader of the nation.

As distasteful as the concept of arranged marriages might be, as a political formula it will have admirers who will contend that in the case of Benazir it worked. At the same time it worked against her as she was forever deemed guilty by association, her husband’s history of sleaze and venality leaving her susceptible to charges that she must have been in on his act.

Having returned to Pakistan in 1986 to give leadership on the ground to the Pakistan People’s Party it was a mere two short years before she was swept to power at the age of 35 despite the opposition of the clerics who resorted to taunting her that she had ‘sinned’ abroad by dating men. That she was the first female prime minister of a Muslim country must have set their theocratic minds alight with burning hatred.

She barely lasted two years before the country’s military ousted her under the cloak of presidential decree – the charge, a failure to stem the flow of ethnic violence and corruption. Her husband’s business affairs had tainted her regime with corruption. The clerics hated her, the military conspired against her and women felt she never delivered on her promise to improve their rights. While more progressive on human rights than her predecessors, coupled with a willingness to tone down the amplifications of the country’s religious bigots, her critics argue that she made much less progress in both areas than she claimed. To compound her difficulties she ran up large amounts of foreign debt.

She returned to power in the early 1990s but again her enemies homed in on her husband’s business affairs to undermine her credibility. Alongside the charge of nepotism stood that of undermining the country’s justice system. By 1996 she was out again, once more ousted by the armed forces. Convicted of fraud in absentia she later availed of a corruption amnesty issued by Pervez Musharraf, to re-enter Pakistan in what was to prove a fatal move.

Many within her own party resented any détente between her and Musharraf, believing that she had sleighted the memory of her murdered father by supping with the military institution that had ended his life. This was hinged to other misgivings that although the US war criminal Henry Kissinger had promised her father a terrible end if Pakistan under his leadership pursued the nuclear option Benazir had began to politically date US power.

The writer Arianna Huffington described Benazir Bhutto her as fearlessness epitomized. It was a quality detested by those whose power rests on the rule of fear. Fear cannot coexist with those able to overcome it. And so it killed her.

31/12/2007