Outside of the Clique

This review was first published in Fortnight July/August 2011

When Richard O’Rawe published Blanketmen, offering a challenge to the established Provisional narrative of the 1981 hunger strike, he was met with a wave of bile, bitterness and ‘naked hatred’. It was heaved up as part of a ‘McCarthyite crusade’ by those with most to lose from the emergence of his groundbreaking account - a Belfast clique within the Provisional movement. One vitriolic salvo after another rained down upon his head in a bid to force him to take cover and cede all ground to the guardians of a historical fiction.

In the years that followed the 2005 publication O’Rawe’s critics would tell us how they had comprehensively demolished him. That they had to state it over and over again after each new encounter belied their own confidence. O’Rawe never deviated from his account while his adversaries somersaulted, contradicted each other, spewed ‘mumbo jumbo’ and shifted position. O’Rawe had a major advantage from the outset: he had no record of lying whereas those associated with the Clique had well established reputations as strangers to the truth. He prevailed and a new framework for understanding the 1981 hunger strike is now firmly in place. It is nowhere better explained than in Afterlives.

Unlike Blanketmen which was in many respects an outpouring of something that had burrowed within the author for two decades, Afterlives, while a sequel, is forensic in composition and controlled in delivery. It paints into a very tiny corner the custodians of the myth that all the 1981 hunger strikers died because British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was too intransigent to make concessions. That six of those men died needlessly is forcefully explained by O’Rawe in terms of a deleterious intervention by the Clique.

While Blanketmen filed the charges Afterlives called the witnesses for the prosecution and, in the words of one reviewer, proved the case beyond any reasonable doubt. As Ed Moloney states in the forward it exposes long reigning lies, captures the testimony of people in the H-Bocks at the time, details the documented evidence, and introduces crucial witness testimony from amongst others, Brendan Duddy, the mediator known as Mountain Climber.  In 2009 Duddy confirmed what O’Rawe had claimed in Blanketmen: the British had made a substantial offer to the Clique who overruled the prisoners’ acceptance of it.  Brendan Duddy passed on that British offer to Martin McGuinness who in turn admits to having passed it to Gerry Adams. The one destination it should have reached but did not was the prison hospital and the hunger strikers.

O’Rawe demonstrates that not only did the Clique usurp the prisoners but also the authority of the IRA’s governing entity, the army council, which as a body carried out its daily business without ever being aware that a resolution to the hunger strike was within its grasp. The army council would have welcomed a decision ending the hunger strike but was not informed by the Clique that the prison leadership had agreed to settle. One army council member of the time told O’Rawe that at that point the strike ‘should have automatically ended.’

O’Rawe is compelling in deconstructing the fallacy that the prisoners were in charge of managing the hunger strike. They were always compelled to defer to the decisions of the Clique which had a habit of withholding vital information from them. When, in October 1981, the republican jail leader Brendan McFarlane was preparing one more man to embark on hunger strike he was informed by the Clique leader that the protest had run its course and would now end, which it did. It is a travesty that the same instruction was not given to the prisoners six lost lives earlier.

Brendan McFarlane has insisted throughout that there was ‘no outside intervention to prevent a deal.’ Afterlives deftly sweeps this away as a sustainable position. McFarlane emerges poorly from this book. O’Rawe characterises him as being ruthless but dutifully obedient, while possessing a fanatical determination to keep the strike going at all costs. There are issues that McFarlane can and should throw light upon. While a multi-talented and charismatic man he was out of his depth with an issue of this magnitude. His task was unenviable and unlike the Clique members he had no careerist ambitions. He was committed to the men around him and probably made the mistake of thinking that the Clique was of a similar disposition. Fatally, he did not run with his own instinct and instead placed his trust in the Clique.

The reader is left to conclude that it was not a lack of food that killed six of the hunger strikers but a lack of information. O’Rawe asks of Gerry Adams ‘was he more interested in getting Owen Carron elected than in saving the lives of his comrades in the H-Bocks?’

Despite the remorseless logic of Afterlives, for some the myth will endure, not because myths have any truth value but because as Bruce Lincoln has argued in respect of religious myths, they are able to engender feelings of belonging and purpose, which make them an effective political instrument. For some, in spite of the weight of evidence it is more comforting to believe the earth is only 6, 000 years old, or that Thatcher alone was responsible for finishing off the hunger strikers.

Afterlives By Richard O’Rawe. Lilliput Press: Dublin. ISBN 978 1 84351 1 1847

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