At 7.25 pm on 12 February 1989 a masked gunman of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) smashed through the front door of Northern Irish defence lawyer Patrick Finucane’s home and murdered him in front of his wife and three children. The family, including nine-year-old John and teenagers Catherine and Michael, were sitting down for their Sunday evening meal when they heard the crash of breaking glass from their hallway. Finucane and his wife Geraldine jumped up from the kitchen table and opened the glass door which separated the kitchen from the hallway. Halfway down the hall they saw a gunman, dressed in black and wearing a camouflage jacket, striding towards them with a gun in his hand. Finucane threw himself against the glass door in an abortive attempt to keep the gunman out. At the same moment the gunman opened fire, shattering the glass and hitting Finucane in the chest and stomach. Pat Finucane fell back on to the kitchen floor, lying face up. The killer then entered the kitchen and finished off his target at close range, firing twelve rounds into Finucane’s head and neck as Geraldine and Catherine began screaming and the youngest child John looked on in bewildered silence. ‘He was very cold, cool, methodical. I definitely got the impression that this was not the first time he had done this,’ said Geraldine, who was hit in the ankle by a ricocheting bullet. The gunman left and drove off in a hijacked taxi later found abandoned near the loyalist Shankill Road district.
‘At about 7.30 I got the phone call from Geraldine. She was hysterical, crying,’ said Seamus, Patrick Finucane’s younger brother.
I’m not too sure if she knew at that stage he was dead, I think she did. I dropped everything. When we got there the street was sealed off but I just ran up through. I ended up nearly fighting with the RUC at the door, they were not going to let me in. They were using the family phone for communications and they had their radios in their hands. There was us, Pat’s family, wanting to make phone calls and us waiting on phone calls and the cops are using the phone. I told them to stop using it. Once they had the SOCO team in, I went in and identified the body. I knew there and then that whoever had shot Pat had done it before. Pat had one [bullet] in the forehead. He was hit fourteen times altogether, five times in the head. It looked very professional and clinical.
Patrick Finucane was not a typical victim of the Troubles. He lived in a prosperous area of Belfast and had a lucrative career as a founder-partner of the successful legal firm, Madden and Finucane, which specialized in criminal law. He was a graduate of Ireland’s most prestigious university, Trinity College, Dublin, and had an international reputation. He had two legal test cases against the British Government before the European Commission on Human Rights in Strasbourg at the time of his death and had spoken at legal rights conferences in America and Europe. He was not, like Judge Doyle, an official of the Crown in Ireland, nor was he active in a paramilitary organization, nor was he a random Catholic victim of Protestant paramilitaries. He was the first defence lawyer to be killed in Northern Ireland.
Three weeks before Finucane’s murder the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the British Home Office, Douglas Hogg MP, told the House of Commons: ‘There are in Northern Ireland a number of solicitors who are unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA.’ Hogg did not name these ‘sympathetic’ solicitors but in the tiny world of the Northern Irish criminal courts it was obvious at whom Hogg’s threats were directed – Patrick Finucane. Geraldine said:
I was frightened of Hogg’s comments and so was Pat. He was visibly upset. We had not taken the threats so seriously before but now they took on a whole new meaning. We had security around the house but it was security against burglars not assassins. We thought about applying for firearms but that was a big step. There was only three weeks between Hogg’s statement and Pat being shot. When you are living a busy life and you are both at work and the kids, three weeks is just a flash.
Hogg’s statement and Finucane’s subsequent murder produced a host of conspiracy theories linking Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, with the killing. Later, at the trial of a Crown agent in the Northern Irish courts, it was revealed that British Military Intelligence did have a high-level spy at the heart of the UFF and was manipulating the organization’s targets. Outside the courtroom it was further alleged that the spy, Brian Nelson, had supplied the head of the UFF’s active service unit with intelligence material on the lawyer and had allegedly driven the assassin on a dummy run to reconnoitre the Finucane household. The plan had been to kill both Finucane brothers – ‘the Provo with qualifications’ (Pat) and the ‘Provo bomber’ (Seamus) – as they met for their regular Sunday night dinner. No warning of the impending attack was ever passed on to the Finucane brothers and it appears that members of Britain’s intelligence forces played a role in Finucane’s killing. But Nelson’s testimony only revealed the mechanics of assassination, not the rationale for the murder of Pat Finucane.
The group who killed him, the UFF – a cover name for the then legal Ulster Defence Association – claimed Finucane was ‘an officer in the IRA’ who was murdered as part of their ‘inevitable retaliation’ for attacks by the IRA on Loyalists ‘and those members of the security forces who share their lunch with them’. The UFF allegation was strenuously denied by Finucane’s close legal partner and friend Peter Madden and greeted with scepticism by journalists and lawyers in Belfast. Said Peter Madden:
Pat expressed his disapproval of the system by challenging it in a court of law. He was concerned that the criminal justice system was being used as a weapon in a battle to classify a violent political uprising as a criminal conspiracy. But he wasn’t someone who would go out and make political statements. He wasn’t a member of Sinn Fein. He was very professional about the way he voiced his disapproval of the Diplock system [special juryless courts that tried IRA suspects] and would only have done so at legal conferences and the like.
The UFF did not provide any evidence to substantiate their allegation, but then they did not need to; the only justification necessary in the Troubles was the sanction of your own community. In loyalist eyes, Patrick Finucane was guilty: guilty of being the brother of two well-known IRA Volunteers, Seamus and Dermot, and guilty of being the brother of a dead IRA Volunteer, John; guilty of defending too many IRA Volunteers successfully in the courts; guilty of having too high a profile; and guilty of being a smart Fenian.
Finucane’s murder was investigated and condemned by a number of international civil rights organizations. There were reports from the New York-based Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights, from Amnesty International and from the London-based civil rights pressure group, Liberty. The investigators found that Finucane was not the only defence lawyer to complain that the security forces had told clients during police interrogations that ‘their lawyer was a Provo bastard who they were going to get’. All the reports concluded that RUC interrogators systematically threatened the lives of defence lawyers appointed to represent paramilitary suspects.1
The reports merely confirmed the obvious: that the legal system in Northern Ireland was deeply compromised by the Troubles, and its investigative and court procedures distorted in favour of the Crown. Dissent in Ulster has always been viewed as a threat to the state, and Finucane’s work in continually challenging legal statutes, seeking judicial reviews of inquest procedures or representing IRA clients in prominent trials was perceived as an act of rebellion. Finucane’s killers and his many enemies in the police and the British Army did not recognize any division between his professional conduct and his private beliefs and personal relationships. They saw no difference between being an IRA man’s brother, defending IRA men and being an IRA man. ‘Even I have got to admit that Pat’s killing was a good hit,’ says Seamus.
* * *
I knew Pat Finucane. He was a good person who led a frenetic life trying to help people, either innocent or guilty, who were being overwhelmed by a very powerful prosecution machine. He was a tall, lanky man who held his own counsel; if you asked a question he would pause a little before replying, as if debating precisely how much he should tell you or what sort of angle he should take. Like a good lawyer his face never betrayed his thoughts, a trait I was later to discover he shared with his youngest IRA Volunteer brother Dermot.
In 1979 Pat Finucane and Peter Madden formed the legal partnership, Madden and Finucane. Pat’s background and his family’s reputation in republican circles were instrumental in attracting a steady stream of republican clients accused of paramilitary offences, but the firm also had Loyalist clients and did not discriminate by religion or politics as a basis for representation. The firm specialized in what were known in Northern Ireland as Scheduled Offences under the emergency power legislation of the Troubles and it quickly gained a reputation for pioneering a variety of legal devices to win compensation for or defend its clients’ interests against the authorities. The compensation claims were almost always directed at the security forces, particularly the RUC, on the grounds of alleged mistreatment whilst in police custody or for false imprisonment, and the total compensation figure ran to many hundreds of thousands of pounds.
‘Pat revolutionized the whole detention system, the whole prison system. He took habeas corpus actions in the courts and won them and forced the police to produce prisoners in court who were being beaten up in police custody. He was successful in a whole range of cases that were embarrassing for the British Government but were unknown outside legal circles,’ said Peter Madden as we sat in his law offices.
Pat first became publicly known in 1981 when he represented the dying Bobby Sands during his hunger strike and was repeatedly interviewed on television about his client. He also represented clients in a string of high-profile cases involving alleged shoot-to-kill tactics by the authorities, where IRA suspects were killed by members of the security forces in disputed circumstances. Sinn Fein hired him to represent one of their councillors in a test case in 1988 to challenge the legality of the British Home Secretary’s decision to ban interviews with Sinn Fein members from television and radio.
Pat never hid himself away behind secretaries or answering machines; his home phone number and address were listed in the Belfast telephone book. The family’s evenings were often interrupted by desperate calls from suspects in police custody requesting Pat’s attendance at the interrogation centre. To cope with the calls, Geraldine Finucane bought an ansaphone but her husband frequently turned it off; Pat liked the calls and liked to be needed.
Geraldine had first met Pat at Trinity College when they were students together in 1968. It was a middle-class Belfast Protestant girl meets working-class Belfast Catholic football player type of romance that resulted in what is still known in Ulster as a ‘mixed marriage’. The couple met at a sports fixture where Pat, a keen and almost professionally skilled soccer player, was representing one of the University teams. Pat, his wife says, never forgot the sacrifices his family made to send him to what was still in the 1960s the cultural citadel of Ireland’s Protestant Ascendancy, but his charm and sporting abilities made him a popular student. The couple married in 1970 and after toying with the idea of emigrating to the States or London, returned to live in Belfast. At first Pat had been unsure what career to undertake; he had studied philosophy and English, and it was some time before he chose law, but he quickly established that it was his métier. ‘Pat wanted to make his mark. He enjoyed the law. In Pat’s view the law was there for everyone to use,’ said Geraldine.
Pat Finucane was not a saint. His legal career in later years was both personally and financially rewarding by the modest standards of the Northern Irish Bar. He enjoyed the trappings of wealth and success; he chose to live in the comfortable but dangerous leafy lanes of middle-class North Belfast away from the squalor and safety of his clients’ communities. In the early years of his marriage as he studied for his legal articles, the couple had been forced to live in the grim republican Lenadoon district and endure the barricades and foot patrols of military occupation. ‘Pat once told me that he “didn’t want to walk around with empty pockets”. He remembered that from his childhood, walking around with empty pockets. So when we had money he enjoyed it, he enjoyed the space in the house, meals out and holidays, even though it would take him a week to wind down,’ recalled Geraldine.
I first met Pat in the early eighties when the Northern Irish legal authorities were staging large trials against paramilitary defendants on the uncorroborated statements of turned paramilitaries known as supergrasses, who were given immunity from prosecution and a new identity overseas in return for testifying against their former comrades. The trials were held in Belfast’s high-security Crumlin Road Courthouse with its anti-rocket wire fences, armed guards, metal detectors, body searches and identification procedures that required all visitors to give their names and addresses to two separate squads of RUC men. In the vast high-ceilinged courtroom, green-uniformed RUC men sat at the end of each bench in the public gallery at the back of the court and filled all the front rows. The dock of the court, which often contained forty defendants, was surrounded by a human wall of blue-uniformed prison officers, whilst in front of them rows and rows of black-gowned bewigged barristers fiddled with their papers; the redundant jury box was packed with the sun-tanned faces of Ulster’s well-paid secret policemen from RUC Special Branch. The top of the court was dominated by the vivid scarlet splodge of the judge’s robes and the wigged man within them, who under the juryless Northern Irish Diplock court system was the sole arbiter of guilt and innocence. These forbidding show trials were largely ignored by the British media and the only outsiders who regularly attended court were a few local journalists and the prisoners’ relatives, hemmed in by the green uniforms of the RUC men.
The term ‘supergrass trial’ was a misnomer because what was taking place was not one but many separate trials of different defendants on totally unrelated charges compressed into one set of judicial proceedings. In one case some defendants were jointly charged with conspiring to murder members of the security forces but also faced separate charges of conspiring to murder each other as part of an alleged dispute within their paramilitary organization. Some supergrass charges were trivial – such as failing to disclose information about an act of terrorism, which normally carried a maximum six-month sentence. But others were deadly serious – murder, attempted murder, causing explosions – all of which could carry life sentences. In Britain, such serious charges would have necessitated a separate trial over many days for each individual defendant. Yet within one morning I listened to a supergrass relate to the court the material evidence for a murder charge – it took twenty minutes. The only common element in the proceedings was the evidence of the supergrass and the two armed Special Branch men who flanked the witness box whenever the informer testified. Many of the defendants, both Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries, were probably guilty of something but it was impossible to distinguish truth from falsehood in the mouth of a coached witness whose main concern was pleasing his RUC masters by convicting as many of his former comrades as possible.
Pat fought the supergrass trials both as a lawyer and as a legal expert in the media. He was generous to journalists with his hard-pressed time and was always ready to explain an abstruse legal point. His cool and detached manner never entirely concealed the depth of his opposition and dismay at the abuse of legal procedure by the authorities. Many of the supergrasses had dubious criminal records and a proven propensity to lie about the seriousness of their own involvement in the crimes they accused their former comrades of participating in. A number of Finucane’s clients were indicted on charges so vague and all-encompassing they were impossible to refute. It was not uncommon for a defendant to be accused of conspiring with persons unknown to murder persons unknown between the dates of 1 January 1977 and 31 December 1977. ‘The standard of evidence the cops are using,’ Pat told me as we sat in a Belfast solicitors’ club one evening, ‘is akin to me and you having this conversation and then in the morning the police breaking your door down at 5 am and charging you with conspiracy to murder the Lord Chief Justice on the basis that I said you did that. It’s all verbal. There is no material evidence, no proof, to back up these claims. But that doesn’t seem to stop the cops arresting dozens of people.’ Eventually the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal agreed with Pat Finucane, overturning all convictions based on the sole evidence of supergrasses.
Pat always came across as someone who genuinely cared about his clients. Some of the supergrass defendants were imprisoned for up to four years as they awaited trial on charges that were continually chopped and altered as different informers added to or retracted from their statements. This judicial delay was also bitterly criticized by Pat as a form of internment on remand. In our many conversations together I became convinced that if I ever got into legal trouble in Northern Ireland, Pat was the best lawyer I could hope for.
When word of his death came on the Monday morning news, I was filled with the futile anger that all the Troubles’ deaths brought. I was angry at his killers, angry at Douglas Hogg for his arrogance and apparently casual licence with someone else’s life, and angry at the police and intelligence services who set Pat up and who must have welcomed his death.
Pat Finucane had touched a lot of lives and my own grief was a pale shadow of that felt by his family and friends. Four years after his killing, I went to interview his partner in Madden and Finucane in the same suites of offices from where Pat had worked. The shabby office seemed even more run-down than it was in Pat’s time. Old files tied up with fading pink ribbon littered desks and filing cabinets. It’s hard to judge these things, but there was a mood of defeat and resignation in the air. Pat’s killing had hit Peter Madden hard; the spirit of what once had been Northern Ireland’s most creative and crusading legal firm had been savaged. Pat had been the star, the fighter, Peter had been the accountant, the office manager, the solid bottom in the firm; they had made a good team.
Peter Madden is a clever, dependable man, a lawyer not given to fanciful construction, but it is his firm belief that his partner was murdered on the orders of the British Government. When I asked Peter Madden to talk about Pat’s assassination, he stopped and told me: ‘I don’t like to talk about it.’ And then this moderate man began to cry at his desk in memory of Patrick Finucane.
* * *
Seamus Finucane was right: killing Pat was a good hit because Pat was a far greater danger to the Crown than any individual IRA man. Pat Finucane was a living symbol of what it was possible for someone from the underclass in Northern Ireland to become. His parents were working class, his brothers were in the IRA, but he was a lawyer, a man with standing and position, someone who could not easily be pushed around, someone who could challenge and humble the judges and policemen in the courts, someone whom his community could turn to for help and someone who had not turned his back on the Republican cause. Pat Finucane was a rebel in a courtroom and his weapons were the Crown’s own laws. Killing him drew a new, more circumscribed, limit around the nature of acceptable legal opposition in Northern Ireland; after Pat, defence lawyers were also ‘legitimate targets’.
Pat Finucane’s life and death, like his brothers’ lives in the IRA, was a creation of the Troubles. His story is not the story of an individual but a tale of brothers, of a family, caught up in catastrophe and living or dying in its aftermath.
Belfast is a small city. It was three miles from the place on the loyalist Shankill Road where Finucane’s assassins hijacked the taxi to his home at Fortwilliam Drive where he was shot. The killers’ route would have taken them along the Shankill past a small road, Percy Street, and its abandoned lots, that runs towards the neighbouring Catholic district of the Falls. The rationale for the UFF’s journey of murder on that winter’s evening in 1989 started here twenty years before on the very night Ulster’s Troubles began again.
In August 1969 the Northern Irish state, founded in 1922 with the partition of Ireland, collapsed in the flames of communal riots. The initial flashpoint was Derry, where a Protestant march near a Catholic area provoked the two-day riot that became known as the Battle of the Bogside. Northern Ireland’s security forces were driven to the point of collapse, the Stormont Government lost control and British Army troops had to be called in to restore order. But by then it was too late to preserve Ulster’s Unionist state; the rioting spread to Belfast where the majority Protestant working-class population vented their rage on the far smaller Catholic community. Whole streets were burnt out and thousands of Catholic families made homeless as Protestant mobs, with the support of an ill-trained B-Special police reserve, rampaged unchecked through the streets, redrawing territorial divisions and expelling the traditional enemy.2
For one family, the Finucanes of Percy Street, on the wrong side of the unofficial boundary between the Protestants of the Shankill and the Catholics of the Falls Road, the night of 14 August 1969 would for ever change their lives as their home and the homes of Catholic neighbours were attacked and firebombed. The family were forced to become refugees in their own city. Percy Street was the fountainhead from which the family’s future sprang, a future that inflicted injury and death upon the Finucane family and inflicted death and injury upon the family’s enemies. As they grew to manhood, John, Seamus and Dermot were each in turn to join a revived IRA and forge a place close to the most dramatic and violent events of the next twenty years. That day of 14 August 1969 was the beginning of a cycle of violence that would leave two of the brothers dead and result in two other brothers spending decades in prison. Soldiers and policemen would be shot, some would be killed, and civilians would be injured as the Finucane brothers struck back again and again at the Crown in Ulster.
* * *
In the spring of 1968 forty-eight-year-old Patrick Finucane (senior), his wife Kathleen and their eight children had moved into No. 78 Percy Street. It was a large five-bedroomed house, a mansion by the grim standards of Catholic West Belfast, which had some of the poorest social housing in Western Europe. The family of seven boys, Pat, John, Liam, Gerard, Seamus, Martin and Dermot, and one girl, Rosaleen, quickly settled into what was a religiously mixed neighbourhood on the boundaries of Shankill Road. ‘We moved from Sevastopol Street off the Falls Road,’ said the second youngest brother, Martin Finucane, who was nine in 1968.
Sevastopol Street was damp and cramped, there were four or five kids to a bed, but in Percy Street, Dermot, Seamus and I had our own room, we even had our own beds for instance. It was great. Percy Street had a parlour, its own living-room, a kitchen and then upstairs two rooms on the first floor, three or four rooms on the second floor and then there was two attics. My mother was a housewife and my father worked in Andrew’s Flour Mill, which was opposite the house. We inherited the house from my father’s sister, who died, and when we moved in the neighbours were great. But being so young I did not realize that the neighbours that were helping us were Catholic. All the people to the right of us going towards the Shankill were all Protestant.
The Finucanes were not Republicans. The family’s father, Patrick, was a devout Catholic who was not interested in politics. ‘My father was a daily communicant. He went to Mass before he went to work and every Sunday we were bathed, washed and frogmarched off to church. Every night we would sit down and do the rosary. If anyone knocked on the door no one answered until the rosary was finished. We were not allowed to go out and play. My Da always used to say, “The family that says the rosary together, stays together.”’
The higher Catholic birth rate and the pressure on West Belfast’s limited housing stock made it inevitable that Catholic families in the relatively peaceful sixties would encroach on former Protestant territory. Percy Street was part of the new front-line and exposed the Finucane children to hitherto unknown dangers. ‘We were playing hurley [an Irish ball game] with sticks and a ball in the street in Percy Street and these big boys came along and the next minute they got leathered into us. They started to kick the shit out of us. We were kids, Dermot was eight and I was ten, Seamus was eleven. They started calling us “Fenian bastards”. We did not have a clue what Fenians were and then when they were going away they shouted down to us “Fuck the Pope”. We looked at one another and said, “Who is the Pope and what has he got to do with it?”’ recalled Martin.
In August 1969 the simmering religious tension broke out into open sectarian warfare outside the Finucanes’ front door. Said Seamus:
I was twelve at the time. On the opposite side of the road was a shop where the local Orange band used to practise and that was our first big clue that something big was happening. Up until then there had been the odd bit of trouble; you could not wear a Celtic scarf or play hurley and one weekend a crowd of drunken louts tried to break into the priest’s house on the corner. But the difference in religion would not have been a big thing, I had Protestant friends.
A couple of people in the Orange band lived at the back of the shop and so when we saw them putting their shutters up during the day of August 14 we knew that there was going to be big trouble that night, things were going to be intensified. And then we noticed that the B-Specials were out on the corners patrolling and that they were getting tea and sandwiches. Naively, we also thought that it was just going to blow over in a couple of days. We had only lived in Percy Street for a year and my family had put a lot of money and effort into that house. We did not understand the danger we were in and so when it started we were petrified. My mother and father watched everything from their bedroom window and we sat on the stairs with hammers, hatchets and pokers, waiting on them coming in.
What the Finucane parents were watching as their children waited on the stairs was a mob rampaging down Percy Street looting and burning Catholic homes as they went. The Finucanes were trapped in their own home and cut off from the safety of the Falls Road by barricades designed to seal the Catholic district off from marauding Protestant rioters. Their oldest sons, Pat, eighteen, and John, sixteen, were unable to reach the house because of the mobs, the riots and the barricades. Outside, the enraged crowd screamed and chanted and attempted to smash their way through the shutters hastily erected by Mr Finucane. His parents’ fear etched itself on nine-year-old Dermot’s memory:
I was just a kid watching the adults talk about life and death saying: ‘The Loyalists have broken into such-and-such an area and they are burning everyone’s homes out.’ And you would be sitting there terrified, not making a sound; you were like a mouse, just listening. I had these visions that the Loyalists were going to overcome the barricades and I knew from the way that the adults were talking that we did not have enough to defend ourselves. I didn’t really have a sense of who ‘they’ were. I just thought of them as crazy people, angry people, who would just come up and stab you to death, shoot you.
The Protestants first attacked the home of a local Republican. ‘He had some sort of republican tie and the mob were doing their damnedest to break into his house and burn him out,’ recalled Martin.
Obviously some people in the street, some of our Protestant neighbours, knew of his connections. It was the same with us. They tried to smash the front door down to get in but my father’s barricade prevented them. When that failed the windows were smashed and they tried to get in through them but the boards held. My father would go up the stairs to get a higher view of things to see what the crack was and that was when I was first aware that there were B-Specials outside and they were lined up on the opposite side of the road just watching what was going on.
By daylight the rioting had burnt itself out. Said Dermot:
Our whole street was engulfed in flames. In the morning I remember going out and seeing that the bottom half of Percy Street and all of neighbouring Divis Street was gutted, the houses burnt to shells. It looked as if two armies had been fighting each other. There was smoke from the remains of a double-decker bus and the street was full of smashed glass and bottles. I remember going out and seeing the Loyalists shooting down into the Falls area.
Martin recalled:
My brother John arrived back. He had been working in the Flour Mill on the night shift but had had to flee after he was shot at by a Loyalist sniper. He spent most of his night getting people out of nearby Beverley Street, he was helping them to flee. Our Pat was out too, probably rioting, but neither he nor John could not get anywhere near our house because that was where most of the Protestants were congregating.
The next morning we all got together to see what damage had been done and my parents were standing at the door and they came down and said: ‘If youse ain’t out tonight youse are getting burned out the night.’ They were our neighbours, just neighbours. John then left and came back with a Land-Rover from the Flour Mill and took some of our stuff, but mostly it was just our bodies. Overnight we were refugees. The Falls Road was still blocked off by barricades so the only way out was through the Shankill. The troops were on the streets then and we had a British Army escort all the way.
Being the youngest, Dermot’s memories are vaguer:
My mother and father told me that they tried to burn us out that night and some Protestant man was shouting: ‘Don’t burn it, it’s too good a house. We’ll keep it for one of our own.’ The next morning we were out at four or five and all the houses were smouldering in the street and shops were burnt out and these women came over to us and said: ‘Youse are next ya Fenian bastards. Get out tonight or else youse are next.’ And we just went in, packed suitcases, and left, leaving furniture and everything else. Later on the house fell into the hands of the UDA. I remember seeing it in a UDA magazine. It was their headquarters for a bit, 78 Percy Street. The thing I most clearly remember is that the adults were terrified and as a child you picked that up. I can remember thinking we were going to be killed soon, our area would be overrun by hostile Indians.
Said Seamus:
We had our holidays booked for Butlins for the Saturday. It would have been the Friday morning we moved out, so we all decided to go there anyway as we did not get that many holidays. My aunt got transport and went over to the house to rescue our possessions. When she arrived she found our neighbours brazenly walking out of the house with the spin-drier and clothes. She grabbed our things back. At the same time my father had to give up his job in the mill because of the threats alleging that he was a member of the IRA, which was laughable if you knew my father.
Martin recalled a slightly different version of the flight from Percy Street:
My mother went back to get our stuff and found the neighbours inside our house lifting whatever they could get. My mother went in and screamed her mouth off but they did not take any notice of her but slowly left in their own time. My father only had a small Land-Rover, there was no way he could have got the beds, the wardrobes. We lost everything; my mother lost all her wedding rings, her jewellery rings, all her valuables. Seventeen years of hard work, buying settees, carpets, beds, everything, the house itself, was just gone. We had to start from scratch. If 1969 had not happened we would have been a very, very well-off family. Pat would have been a lawyer, John’s wages were just starting to come into the house, my dad had two jobs. Me, Seamus, Liam and Dermot would have probably ended up in college, but 1969 just blew everything away. John lost his job; he was threatened with death at the mill and he did not go back. My father had to give up his job at the mill as well and we lost our home.
The Finucanes were not alone. One thousand five hundred Catholic families and three hundred Protestant families were burnt out or lost their homes. Along with the rest of the displaced, the Finucanes fell back on their community in the Catholic heartland of West Belfast. At first they stayed with relatives and then squatted in a two-bedroom flat; the family’s brief taste of private home ownership and separate bedrooms was over. As the Finucane family’s economic fortunes plunged, Belfast descended into an urban battleground, where sectarian riots, shootings and bombings were a daily occurrence.
* * *
British troops were first deployed in Belfast on 15 August as peacekeepers. The troops were hailed as saviours and a local priest was quoted in the following day’s Catholic nationalist paper, the Irish News: ‘People rejoiced when British troops arrived.’ Seventeen months later, on 5 February 1971, the Provisional IRA shot and killed the first serving British Army soldier in the recent Troubles; Gunner Robert Curtis died within a mile of Percy Street. By then the British Army were no longer viewed by Catholics as peacekeepers but as oppressors and assassins. Even if they had wanted to, it is unlikely that the Armed Forces of the Crown in Ireland could ever escape the burden of their historical actions. Called in to protect the Catholic population, the troops were soon imposing the Protestant-dominated Crown’s version of civil order on Catholic streets and shoring up the old sectarian Stormont regime. It was impossible to be neutral. The RUC and Stormont Government ministers, seeing everything through the prism of the past, were convinced they were dealing with another insurrection by the IRA and ignored the role of the B-Specials in burning and looting Catholic homes. Any action undertaken by Catholics to defend themselves was automatically interpreted as offence.
The Catholics viewed the Army’s actions from their own sectarian standpoint. The British Army’s attempts to restore peace in Belfast without a fundamental shift in the balance of power meant restoring a Protestant peace and leaving the Catholic population once again at the mercy of the better-armed Protestant population. Every seizure of illicit arms was an attempt to deprive Catholics of the means to defend themselves, every arrest of a Republican, the loss of one of the community’s sons. Through a series of heavy-handed security operations, culminating in the June 1970 three-day curfew of the Falls Road district and the indiscriminate firing of tear-gas into the crowded residential district, the Catholic population grew to see the troops as an army of occupation. The Provisional IRA were reborn from the ashes of August 1969.
The Provisionals’ campaign sprang spontaneously from the despair and anger of the Catholic population. It was a defensive rage that desperately sought out an ideology to explain its actions and that of its enemies. Catholic alienation might have confined itself to futile resentment towards British troops had it not been for a score of old IRA men in the North and the Republic who had nurtured the dream of a United Ireland across decades of public indifference and failure, and who, more importantly, had access to a limited supply of weapons. These die-hard Republicans pulled out the old ideological cloak of Irish republicanism, with its myths of continuous rebellion, and reworked the siren call of the rebel heart. They imposed the elemental categories of the old order on the chaotic demands of the civil rights protests and urban riots of 1969, and once again it was Rebels versus the Crown. Nothing the British could have done except leave would have appeased them.
The IRA leadership based in Dublin had split into two factions, the Officials and the Provisionals, over the supply of weapons to the North. The Provisionals were keen to fight but had no great plan or strategy to wage war. In Belfast, the riots caught the few men who considered themselves allies of the Provisional faction by surprise and it was months, years, before there was any systematic attempt to arm and train a Belfast Brigade.
When the Provisionals, the Catholics’ self-declared defenders, went into action in that role, like everyone else they were party to, not the controllers of, the conflict, defending their homes, streets, schools and churches from marauding Protestants. The official obituaries of the Belfast Brigade’s Volunteers in the republican publication Belfast Graves give an insight into the first few years of IRA activity. In 1969 the Brigade lost two Volunteers, one in a traffic accident and one in the sectarian rioting of August 1969. In 1970 four Volunteers were killed, two of them in a chance traffic accident with a British Army truck near the border as they returned from a training camp in the Republic. But by 1971 the IRA’s military operation was gearing up and twelve Volunteers were to die; the details of their deaths in the obituaries highlight the IRA’s increasingly aggressive campaign. ‘Charles Hughes … shot dead in a Worker’s Party feud … Billy Reid … ambushed a Brit mobile patrol and was shot dead … Tony Henderson … died as a result of an accidental shooting at a training camp near Portlaoise … Gerard Bell fell victim to an accidental explosion.’ By 1972, Northern Ireland’s most violent year, the death toll for the Brigade, still the IRA’s largest and most significant unit, rose to thirty-four, the vast majority of the deaths being the result of premature explosions and gun battles with British troops.
The effective collapse of civil power in the August 1969 riots produced an anarchic vacuum in which competing military forces – Protestant paramilitaries, the British Army and the IRA – fought for strategic advantage. The IRA at first were defenders, but as the battle on the streets escalated into a sniping and bombing campaign, the Republicans increasingly took the initiative in their encounters with the British Army.
A reborn IRA bombed and rebombed Northern Ireland’s towns and fought daily gun battles with the British Army and Protestant paramilitaries. In 1969 there were eight recorded explosions, in 1972 there were 1,382. In 1970 there were 213 recorded shooting incidents, in 1972 there were 10,628. The civilian government of the last Stormont regime lurched from one security crisis to another until its final dissolution with the introduction of Direct Rule from London in 1972.
‘It was probably a gut feeling more than an articulation of any political ideology at that stage,’ said Seamus, who was soon to join the ranks of the IRA’s Volunteers.
The campaign was very destructive with little direction I would have understood at that time. I would not have been able to understand why the IRA were bombing Belfast city centre, killing Brits or killing policemen. But I knew that the IRA were our defenders, looking after our interests, fighting for our rights. There was a great sense of anger.
Percy Street was a turning point, it was our introduction into politics. We lived through fifty years of misrule by Stormont, all the bigotry, the gerrymandering and sectarian killings. I can remember my brother John going for jobs and once they heard where you lived or what school you were at, then they knew you were a Catholic: ‘Ah don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ We were always at the tail end of things. But after 1969 it was like: ‘Out of the ashes arose the Provisionals’ and ‘The great only appear great because we are on our knees.’ There was a sense that this was the time to change things and stop being pushed around, stop being downtrodden. ‘Let’s get off our knees and do something – start fighting back.’ None of us were brought into the world to become involved in politics and fight wars. The politics of the struggle ended up taking over our lives, even the RUC man who arrested me said: ‘You have never known anything else, how can anyone expect you to change.’ It was something that we all felt we had to do when we were fifteen.
Not everyone in the Finucane family agreed. Over the ensuing years Pat Finucane consistently attempted to persuade his younger brothers to stay at school, get educated and avoid joining the IRA. Pat was on the cusp of the generation whose lives would soon be swallowed up by the Troubles. His degree from Trinity, the future career he planned as a lawyer and his maturity made it inevitable that he would be less euphoric about the IRA than Dermot or Seamus. ‘He tried to talk to them all but was of course powerless to stop them doing what they wanted to do. They were determined. Pat respected them for their decisions but thought it foolish,’ said Geraldine.
John Finucane, who became a member of the Brigade’s 1st Battalion, was amongst the first wave of recruits to join the newly formed Provisional IRA soon after his nineteenth birthday in the spring of 1970. Belfast was at war and the IRA was for most Catholics a heroic organization, its Volunteers fêted as the people’s defenders. ‘1969 was a new phenomenon for all of us but we were all proud of John. There was a sense of adventure about people taking up the gun and the bomb at that time. Yes, it was exciting at times. You got satisfaction out of it. If you are playing centre-forward for Manchester United then you get satisfaction out of that as well,’ said Seamus, recalling the motivation that led his brother, himself and many others to join the Provisionals. ‘We would have been delighted in all honesty to hear of Brits getting whacked, delighted in the sense of scoring goals. But when you bring it down to brass tacks, when you are talking about the grief of that person’s family, the misery and the anguish that this death will cause to that family – no, it is not exciting and it is not funny, it is real.’
Dermot and Martin, who spent their spare hours with other neighbourhood kids on the streets, were the IRA’s strongest admirers. Said Martin, who was thirteen in 1971:
These people were our defenders, although the whole concept of what they were fighting for and why the soldiers were shooting at them was a mystery. We had no idea at that stage why the IRA wanted the Brits out. Every day there were gun battles on the streets. You enjoyed it when you heard gunfire against the Brits, you did not understand that it also meant the taking of someone’s life. You just thought it was fantastic to hear the roar of gunfire and there was also that hatred, that intense dislike of these people who came in and invaded your area in these big foreign metal vehicles. The only time you ever saw them was when they were invading or arresting someone.
I remember seeing the IRA ambush a foot patrol in Glenvale [an area of Belfast]. Six or seven IRA men cautiously crept up behind them, got into a position and were shooting down at the soldiers. There was a big mass of kids watching those IRA men just casually walking back from it – no one was running and dispersing, thinking the soldiers were coming back after them. You looked up to the IRA because they had fired at the soldiers.
I saw a British soldier, a black fusilier, being killed in the riots of ’71–72. He crouched down in the middle of the street and he would have been too far away to have been hit by a stone or bottle but the IRA appeared from behind a hedge and shot him a number of times. He fell and you could see that the man was in agony. The IRA disappeared into the crowd and the soldier was retrieved by his comrades. Later on that night it was reported that the soldier had died. Being caught up in the euphoria you cheered – the enemy was shot, the people who we supported had gotten away. That is the way that I looked at it then. Obviously now I am sad that the soldier died. I do not wish for the death of any soldier or any IRA man. I am sure his relatives still grieve for him but I also think that it is pathetic that he was over here and died for such a pathetic cause.
Dermot, aged twelve in 1971, recalled the early Troubles as a time of excitement and fear mixed with a dawning realization of the relative weakness of the IRA.
The IRA would walk about openly armed. You knew them all – there is so-and-so – and they acted as if there was nothing to be afraid of. I remember the first time I heard the IRA were coming, I stood in a bombed-out park, near where we lived at the time. I stood and waited for them. I was waiting on tanks and armoured personnel carriers coming, the way the allied forces came into Paris. That is what I was expecting and then these three guys walked down the road with rifles and I felt so embarrassed … not embarrassed, but it was an anticlimax. I was expecting not our John but the likes of our John riding on the top of tanks. It was deflating because I knew what was against us.
The Troubles were soon beating their way through the Finucane front door as John’s involvement in the IRA provoked British Army raids on the family home. The raids searching for John, now a fugitive and living on the run, only inspired his younger brothers to support and join the IRA. ‘The Brits came to the house this night, raiding, looking for him and then they raided it every other week looking for him. The whole area was against them so I was against them, it was a community thing,’ recalled Dermot.
When they came into the house it was exciting, it was something that you boasted to your mates: ‘They did our house last night.’ My Da was always good at defusing the situation. Once they came in he would have made them tea, if they wanted a fry he would have made them a fry. I have to say that my father was not a Republican in any shape or form and he did not like what the IRA did; my father was too soft on the soldiers. His logic was that if he was nice to them they would think we were a respectable family and they would not beat his sons. Our logic was: ‘Da, do you not know that they are going to beat your sons anyway?’ You knew that they were going to take your brothers away and there was a sense of anger that you should not make them tea. We thought that my father did not really understand and that we did, though we were kids. He was just a real family man. My Ma would have been more angry and militant. We would have wanted to see hostility being shown towards them but my Da would not have permitted it.
Recalled Martin:
I can only remember their voices. They were taking away your brothers but my memory is of the English voice in uniform just ordering you about. I believe they would have knocked on the door but they would have then come into the house in great numbers. I remember them telling my father what to do. It was my father’s house, it was my mother’s house. But they were telling them what to do and going about our house as if they owned it, searching it, and looking at personal things and private things.
I began to hate them. Yes, I had a great dislike for them not just because of what they were doing to my family but what they were doing to friends of mine. There was a woman across the street, Sheila McCree. At the time of internment they were taking her husband out and I could see her fighting and screaming. I was just a nipper and she would have been fighting and punching the soldiers’ backs as her young kids stood behind her in their bare feet screaming their heads off. The soldiers just ignored everything and walked away with her husband, their father.
I can remember soldiers in open-air Land-Rovers going to arrest people and local people were standing there with bin lids, showing their hatred by throwing sticks, bottles and spitting at them. You just got involved because you were caught up in it.
Dermot and Martin were soon taking part in the new boyhood games of the Troubles. ‘When we were kids we played IRA men and British soldiers. The soldiers had sticks and sometimes they would beat the shit out of you if they organized snatch squads. We were the rioters and usually the IRA won. Everyone wants to be a cowboy.’
The game quickly progressed to stone-throwing at passing British Army patrols, and rioting. ‘We lived in a cul-de-sac that overlooked a main road. If there was a riot in the area it was always in our cul-de-sac because you could safely throw stones at the soldiers and then run back into the cul-de-sac. If they drove in after you it was easy to escape up the entries [alleyways] and the Saracens [Army heavy personnel carriers] couldn’t follow you. It was a safe place to throw and if you missed, the stone would land on a bit of waste ground on the other side of the road,’ said Dermot.
One day there was a riot going on and one of the Saracens drove into the cul-de-sac. Our John grabbed a pole and was ready to throw it at the Saracen. I knew he was on the run but he just stood there waiting for it. He was really being a big eejit [idiot] – the pole was not going to do any damage to the armoured vehicle – but at the time I thought: ‘That is my hero.’ Just standing there waiting on them coming.
* * *
Internment, detention of suspected IRA members without trial, was introduced in Northern Ireland on 10 August 1971. Internment of suspected rebels was a traditional weapon and had been repeatedly used by both Unionist governments in Northern Ireland and anti-IRA Nationalist governments in the Irish Republic to quell the Troubles’ periodic outbreaks. But in 1971 internment was a security disaster that brought Northern Ireland to the edge of civil war. The IRA’s support-base in the Catholic community was already too wide to be jeopardized by the summary arrests of key individuals. The British Army bungled the initial arrest operation and later blamed the RUC for supplying faulty intelligence that resulted in hundreds of wrongful arrests. Far from isolating and containing the IRA, the partisan nature of the operation – only Catholic paramilitaries were targeted – intensified support for the Provisionals and their violent struggle to overthrow the Northern Irish state.
The war heated up and the Finucanes were again in the front-line. John was picked up and detained. Dermot related:
I remember my Ma crying when he got arrested along with my sister’s husband at the time. My sister’s husband was an ex-British soldier who she met in an ice-cream shop in the Falls Road. That was the time when soldiers were still welcome. He left the Army, became republicanized and started to help the local Republicans to organize, which is why when he got arrested he was given a savage beating. My sister, Rosie, said that was it, and when he got out they left Ireland. John was also badly beaten but was then taken to Crumlin Road jail, interned, moved to the prison ship HMS Maidstone and then transferred to Long Kesh.
The annual death toll tripled following the introduction of internment and political pressure from constitutional Catholic politicians forced the British Government to release some of the internees in batches. John Finucane returned home to a hero’s welcome in June 1972. ‘We were at the house and someone came to the door and I remember my mother screaming and then the whole house was up,’ said Dermot, who was twelve in 1972. ‘Everything was chaotic. John had been interned for eight months. Martin and me headed down to John’s flat to celebrate and there was a bit of a party going on and I remember my Ma saying: “Well son, is it worth it?” And John said: “Yeh, I might not see the day but he will” and he pointed at me. Those words have always stuck in my head.’
Not everyone in the family was pleased with his release. ‘When I found out,’ said Martin, ‘I was really disappointed. I had really wanted to go to Long Kesh to see the soldiers and see what the inside of a prison was like. I was due to go up to the prison with his wife on the next visit but before that he was released.’
Two weeks later John Finucane was dead. Martin remembered:
I was thirteen. I had two days left at secondary school before the summer break and I remember waking up and Seamus was sitting on the edge of the bed crying and I said: ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘John’s dead.’
‘What?’
‘John’s dead.’
‘Dead on, you must be joking.’
I did not take it fully in but it hit me when I went down the stairs and saw all the other people who were in the house. My mother and father had obviously known all about it since the early hours of the morning. I was really cut up about it. I think what I was really cut up about was that I had lost this brother at an early age and I did not really get to know him.
After his release John Finucane had reported back to his IRA superiors. On the night of his death, 28 June 1972, he was travelling in a car with another IRA Volunteer, Tony Jordan. Both men, the IRA said, were on active service. The car crashed and both were killed. The exact circumstances of the accident are hazy but they were given heroes’ funerals. John Finucane was the forty-fifth Belfast Brigade member to die and the twenty-seventh killed in 1972. Said Seamus:
It was the first time death ever came to our own doorstep. It was my first experience of it. It was traumatic. John had just been married, his son was only six weeks old, and he was only out of prison two weeks when he was killed. If he’d known he was going to die he would probably have wanted to die operating against the Brits. But that was not to be. At that time I thought John was old, twenty-one. I was fifteen. When I reached that age myself I realized that he was just a kid and he had his whole life in front of him. His son has never known his father, his wife has remarried, and I regret all that loss. It was only when I got out of prison when I was twenty-nine that I was able to formulate the type of family relationship that Pat knew and John might have known if he had lived. A family helps put things in perspective and that is why there is such a strong bond between myself, Martin and Dermot. We really appreciate being with each other, the value of it.
Like his brother Pat, Seamus is a tall man not given to unnecessary chatter. He has spent many years in prison, many of them as a teenager, and his face is chipped and battered. Seamus looks hard, drawn in, as if expecting the very worst to happen. In common with many ex-prisoners, his movements are slow, purposeful and surprisingly graceful. Every gesture seemed to be measured and calculated, even in the simple act of making tea – his body was still keeping step with prison time in his own home.
Seamus was the last Finucane brother to live in Belfast and did so under constant threat of assassination. When you knocked on his West Belfast front door you could hear him answer but then had to wait for two minutes for the bars and bolts to be removed. When the RUC came with sledge-hammers to arrest Seamus, they failed to break this barrier and in frustration threw their heavy hammers through the front window. The week before we met, Seamus had been arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for the umpteenth time, held for several days and questioned about IRA operations. ‘They consider me as a very active Republican and as a result you are threatened day in and day out. Last week I was threatened with the UFF.’
The Troubles are Seamus’s life. He was thirty-seven in 1994, unemployed and unable to work for security reasons. Prison and the loss of family and lovers made Seamus more cautious, more reflective and perhaps the wisest Finucane brother. But the years had not softened his militancy nor dissolved the strands of bitterness, only increased his determination to resist. He said, waving out beyond the repaired window:
Where else in Europe do you see this kind of military hardware, troops in combat gear with machine-guns on the streets? It has become part of the environment. They try to use the civilian population as shields, only patrolling when people are going to Mass or kids to school. Every day of my life is cat and mouse, every time I leave the house I am looking over my shoulder seeing who is following me, who is taking photographs. You can become paranoid, you can even go bonkers. You do not have to be a Republican or even a nationalist to be murdered. There is no such thing as impartiality of law and order in this area. In order to live here you have to adapt to it or bail out. Subconsciously we become immune to it, it becomes part of our culture.
In contrast to Seamus’s self-possession, Martin was more fragile, vulnerable and dependent on his older brother. Even after a decade of grieving, Martin appeared emotionally broken by John’s death.
John did not have an open coffin; he was badly mutilated in the crash and we never got to say our last farewells or touch or hug him. That has really hurt. I know Pat is dead, I know he died a horrible death and we never got to say our last farewells to him either, but I spent as much time near the coffin as if I could touch him and hug him and hug him. But with John it was completely different, all you could grasp on to was the last moments, the last talk you had with him, and that was it. I was very proud of my brother because he had given up so much of his life not only to protect me but to protect his community. He spent many nights patrolling the estate with a rifle in case anything happened say from a Loyalist attack. He manned checkpoints and foot patrols in his own community and I respected that. He was defending the community against the British Army. I still reflect even now on the few weeks I did have with him, the last talk, the last smile. I still try and keep that image of his face within my memory.
For Dermot, the bolder, more aggressive brother, the abiding memory was not of John but his funeral:
The local IRA companies openly marched down the street, sixty men all in formation, and they were called in Irish to stop outside our door and then in single file they marched in to pay their respects. It was very military looking and organized. My older brothers told me that it was the biggest funeral up until that time to leave Andersonstown. I remember being very proud that John was getting a military funeral. I remember people on the sidelines were giving the coffin a military salute; I was told that a few British soldiers saluted it as a mark of respect. The crowds were massive. Some people went there because he was an IRA man, others because they knew our family and we were a respectable family, and others came because at that time in the IRA you had ranks and officers and our John was a lieutenant.
John’s death on active service only intensified the family’s commitment to the IRA and the authorities’ interest in the remaining Finucane brothers. Seamus, already active in the IRA, was soon arrested and interned without trial; he was fifteen years old. ‘They were very forceful about the manner in which they arrested you. They did not break the door down but I was taken to Fort Monagh, a Brit Army camp, and they told me: “You are going to the Kesh and that is it.”
Seamus was one of four schoolboy internees imprisoned in the Second-World-War-style prison. The detainees, who at their peak numbered 924, were housed in Nissen huts set inside a barbed-wire compound, the ‘cage’. The perimeter of the prison was patrolled by British troops. Under a special regime the prisoners were accorded de facto prisoner-of-war status: no one was forced to do prison work and the detainees, within the confines of the cages, were able to establish a military command structure and use their time as they wished. Later attempts by the British authorities to remove these concessions led to a bitter prison protest campaign that culminated in the 1981 Hunger Strikes.
Being so young the older prisoners looked after us until we understood the daily routine. After three or four weeks you began to realize that internment was not a holiday camp. Life was confined to three or four huts and a small area of your cage and that was it. It was a maturing process. I can say that the two times I have been in jail I have had a better education in terms of life than I would have had in school. But internment was not a bed of roses. Every month, every six weeks, you had British Army raids in the cages. It was frightening, they had the dogs in and big batons and if you moved when you were not supposed to they just clipped you with them. There were escape attempts. I was there for the Kesh being burnt and all the subsequent rioting and Hugh Cooney being shot whilst trying to escape.3
Seamus was interned for over a year and then released. He rose in the ranks of the IRA and became head of his own active service unit in the Lenadoon area of Belfast. In October 1976 he planned an IRA operation with a fellow ex-internee who was later to become the most famous IRA Volunteer of the recent Troubles, Bobby Sands. Sands led the 1981 Hunger Strike and from his prison cell was elected as a Member of Parliament to the British House of Commons; his death-fast made headlines around the world.
The plan formulated by Seamus and Sands was simple: to use petrol-bomb incendiaries to destroy the Balmoral Furniture Company showroom near the staunchly Catholic Twinbrook Estate on the outskirts of Belfast. A nine-strong IRA unit drove to the showroom, held up the security guard at gunpoint and marched him into the store. All the staff and customers were then herded into the basement whilst four bombs were planted upstairs.
The showroom was destroyed but the IRA men were spotted by staff in an adjoining building and one staff member defiantly used his car to block their getaway. The police were called and by the time the IRA men emerged they were surrounded; a brief fire-fight ensued and two Volunteers were shot and wounded. Seamus and Sands and two others, including another hunger-striker, Joe McDonnell, attempted to bluff their way to freedom by hopping into a parked car and claiming to be visiting the area in search of work. The four remained silent in police custody and were thus able to evade explosive charges but were convicted of possession of a pistol found in the car and sentenced to fourteen years in September 1977.
The IRA were ready to make our [sic] exit and the RUC came upon us. They just got out of the jeep, shouted at us to halt and then we came under sustained fire. I was allowed to cross-examine one of the RUC men at the trial. One IRA man had been hit in the leg and would have bled to death but for emergency medical aid. This policeman said he saw a gunman and he fired at him and he saw the gunman fall. He also said no one went near the gunman between the time he was shot and them reaching him, and I asked him where did the gun go and he was just dumbfounded. He couldn’t answer. The whole thing exposed the farcical nature of the Diplock court.
The official position of the IRA was that the Northern Irish courts were a tool of the Crown and therefore illegitimate and their judgements void. But Seamus felt he needed to score points against a system his ideology should have told him was inherently unjust. It sounded as if he was not entirely convinced by the IRA’s own arguments.
The IRA’s commercial bombing campaign hurt, and sometimes killed, members of their own community. Catholics, like Protestants, lost their jobs when the factories were burnt down and everyone suffered from the loss of services when shops disappeared. Many Republicans justified the campaign by claiming that ‘no one in West Belfast has a job anyway’ so blowing away a furniture salesgirl’s position was not going to hurt their community. But the subject was an uneasy one. It was difficult to take seriously calls by Republican leaders like Gerry Adams, the former West Belfast MP, for greater British Government economic investment in Catholic areas when the military wing of his organization was investing its time in blowing businesses up. As part of Sinn Fein’s propaganda efforts to justify the commercial bombing campaign, their publicity department once produced a ‘Before and After’ poster. The poster consisted of two pictures and a caption. The first picture was of a horribly burnt-out shop building; the interior had been gutted and the roof rafters were falling down into the street. The second picture was of two Scottish soldiers from the early Troubles searching a man in the street as his wife and child stared on. The soldiers are holding rifles but they look bored and the search appears as routine as that we have come to expect at airports – an everyday ritual without sense of threat. The insistent caption stretched above both pictures declared: ‘THIS [the burnt-out shop] is necessary to prevent THIS [the street search].’ The apparent disparity in the level of violence was lost on the poster’s creators.
For Seamus, like the poster-makers, it seemed that bombing factories and shops was a justifiable act of war and there was no sense of remorse. ‘It was part of the strategic overall bombing campaign. The city centre during the day was very heavily patrolled and fortified. By attacking other targets it stretched the Crown forces and made it a lot harder for them to patrol our areas and harass our people.’
Not all IRA propaganda was so unequivocal about the economic bombing campaign. In Joe McDonnell’s obituary after his hunger strike, his role in blowing up the Balmoral Furniture Company along with Seamus and Sands was justified on the grounds that the store had been selected as a target only after the IRA had noted the ‘extravagantly priced furniture it sold’.4 Would the factory have been spared had there been a sale on?
* * *
Irish Republicanism has sustained itself through centuries of military defeats by reclassifying its failures as mythic victories. Defeated in the Irish Civil War of 1922–23, the anti-Treaty IRA faction simply adopted denial as a political philosophy. The first great denial was that of the 1922 partition of Ireland into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. Other denials flowed from this; the IRA denied that the Dublin or Stormont parliaments were legitimate; they denied that British laws and British courts and certain Irish laws and certain Irish courts were legitimate. IRA Volunteers on trial in the British courts were expected to maintain this tradition and deny the legitimacy of the courts despite the personal costs to themselves. Any IRA Volunteer who hired legal counsel, like Pat Finucane, to fight the charges – thereby implying recognition of the court – ran the risk of being ignominiously expelled from the movement and declared a traitor. In the late seventies the IRA leadership, under pressure from individual Volunteers, dropped this philosophical objection. IRA prisoners employed legal counsel, paid for by the British taxpayer as part of a legal aid scheme, who tenaciously fought every aspect of the prosecution case.
In 1977 when Seamus was tried the old IRA policy was still in force and he refused to recognize the court. It seemed a doubly strange decision for the brother of a lawyer knowingly to deny himself the right to a legal defence when facing a possible twenty-year prison term. ‘At the time that was the policy. Pat or anyone could offer me advice but I did not have to take it and at the end of the day that is what happened. Pat never made any decision for me or me for him.’
Seamus’s answer shocked me and it seemed impossible to bridge the gap in our understanding. Like most outsiders, I found the thought of being in prison for a long time terrifying. I would feel my life would be destroyed, wasted. I would try hard to resist and would use any opportunity to fight the charges. But in Seamus’s world it was normal to be stopped and arrested as you walked down the street by any passing policeman, it was normal to be in the IRA, it was normal to fear the assassin’s bullet, and it was normal to get twenty-five years. Any analysis of Seamus’s decisions based on life-values beyond the Troubles was doomed to failure; Seamus had already forsaken pragmatic self-interest when he defined himself as a rebel and joined the IRA. Refusing to recognize a British court of law and knowing you would therefore automatically receive a long sentence was no great step.
I asked Seamus what he felt like after he had been sentenced to fourteen years when he was twenty years old. ‘Quite relieved because I was expecting to do twenty to twenty-five years,’ he said flatly. ‘Conviction was a virtual certainty with our arrest. We all refused to recognize the court and I was expecting to be convicted of the bombings. The thing that saved us was that none of us made statements.’
With Seamus back in prison the security forces began to focus on Martin.
I became the brunt of heavy security forces harassment and that was pretty scary for me. I was never involved with the IRA but that did not make any difference. I would have gone out with mates for a drink or knocked around street corners but that was all. It was the same for everyone whose brother or sister was directly involved, you were always being stopped. Once they found out who you were, they would introduce you to all the other soldiers. After that you were stopped all the time; I was kicked and threatened and beaten. I was also arrested three times. When I was arrested they did their damndest to force me into becoming an informer. On one particular occasion I was taken to Fort Monagh in Belfast and a soldier produced a wad of notes. It was a hell of a lot of money, there were twenty-pound notes and ten-pound notes. He asked me to look at my conscience and said I should work for them reporting anything of a suspicious nature. At one stage they said: ‘Don’t be worried, we will sort you out, if you need a plane ticket then we will get you a plane ticket.’ They then actually produced a plane ticket and were about to hand it over when the door burst open and there was a photographic flash. This soldier had actually taken a photograph and they said: ‘Well we have got you now so if you do not work for us we will do this and do that and tell people you are a tout.’
Martin was never jailed but he, more than Dermot or Seamus, seemed an emotional prisoner of the Troubles. His mind was overfilled with the rich remembrance of the past. I found it difficult to bear his raw pedantic recitation for long and I was always eager to turn the tape-recorder off. Perhaps it was this apparent streak of vulnerability that marked him out to British troops as potential informer material. ‘At that time the paratroopers were in and I was frightened, especially being stopped by them at night because of their reputation in Derry and Bloody Sunday. I left the country and went to work in Holland in 1978. The brunt of the harassment immediately then fell on Dermot. They used to ask him: “Where is that fucker Martin?”’
Martin lived in the bleak Bogside district of Derry, a republican stronghold. Like Seamus, Martin was unemployed and had been so for ten years. He had never been a member of the IRA but was once active in Sinn Fein. He left for ‘personal reasons’ and now campaigns for a small Derry pro-republican political pressure group that wants to reopen the files on the Bloody Sunday killings of thirteen civil rights demonstrators by British paratroopers in 1972. Martin was also instrumental in helping establish a civil rights office in Derry, the Patrick Finucane Centre, in memory of his brother, to help investigate potential miscarriages of justice. He shares his life with Julie whose previous partner, Daniel Docherty, an IRA man, was killed by the SAS in 1984.5 They have a son.
Just before Martin fled overseas, Dermot was arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for the first time.
The soldiers would raid the house for Martin to put pressure on him. It became a bit of a joke. I would get up and say: ‘Here they come again’; I was too young to be arrested. And then one day as I was saying, ‘They are here again for you’, the soldiers turned to me and said: ‘Put your shoes on Dermot.’ ‘What for?’ I went into total shock. I was scared stiff. I was seventeen at the time and Mason was in charge.6 Everyone knew that they were beating up wee kids in Castlereagh and getting them to sign confessions. I put on this tough guy act but inside I was shit scared. I was questioned by two old fellas who acted like they were father figures. It was a standard tactic, good fella, bad fella. I got a bit of a beating off one of them and after that I just collapsed. I would have told them anything, signed anything. But luckily I did not know anything.
The day after Dermot was released, Pat Finucane senior died of a heart attack. The family believed his premature death was brought on by the long strain of the Troubles, the raids, the arrests, the prisons, the protests and the beating handed out to Dermot in Castlereagh. Martin was always the emotional one and the loss of his father amidst the strain of his brother’s imprisonment and his mother’s involvement in the outside protests about Seamus’s prison conditions hit him hard. ‘It was just a room full of tears, we were all talking and hugging each other and he was away from all. I was angry that my father missed out on all my nieces and nephews growing up; John’s son Patrick missed out on having his first pint with my father, the first adult human contact with my father. He was sixty-three when he died.’ Seamus was given compassionate leave from prison to attend the funeral.
Dermot once estimated that his family home had been raided one hundred times. I asked Dermot if he could remember the names or faces of any of the soldiers who had raided his parents’ house or arrested his brothers. He stopped, puzzled, and then after a long pause replied: ‘You would think that if someone came into your house without your authority you would remember their faces but I can honestly say even thinking about it very strongly I cannot remember any of their faces.’
Unlike the soldiers, Dermot was not faceless and anonymous, and he was regularly stopped and questioned by Army patrols on the streets.
The soldiers would stop me and ask ‘What is your name?’ and then ‘Where is that brother of yours, Martin?’ Martin was away but I would lie and tell them he was up in the house, and then they would go up and raid the house. Next time they saw me it would be: ‘You lying wee shit! Where is he?’
‘He must have just left. He is probably in the Suffolk Inn now.’
I would never give them a straight answer. In the end they found out where he was so they started to harass me. I was not involved, it was just straight harassment. One night they stopped me in the street, gave me a hiding, and charged me with riotous behaviour. They trailed me into the Land-Rover and started beating me. I was found guilty.
Dermot seemed to be genuinely aggrieved at this old but minor charge. On paper both he and Seamus were the offspring of Attila the Hun; over the years they had been accused of murder, attempted murder, possession of firearms with intent, grievous bodily harm, wounding with intent, and causing explosions. But Dermot was always eager to stress that the Finucanes were a ‘respectable family’; in the psychology of West Belfast his crimes were political offences rather than the product of lawlessness.
In contrast to Seamus, Dermot was more easygoing. The war, the years of defeat in prison or as a fugitive, had washed over him. His face retained its boyish charm even though the man within had inflicted mortal harm on others and had others attempt to inflict mortal harm on him. He was a wonderful raconteur and a brilliant mimic who would play every part in his account of police interrogations to perfection, including his own terrified self. He was boastful, a little vain, but never dogmatic or dull. Beneath the surface gaiety I sometimes glimpsed the man who hijacked cars, forced his way into other people’s houses and attempted to kill British soldiers. Dermot never sought to justify those actions, he just stated the facts – if Dermot’s IRA unit wanted your house, then they were going to take it. There was no hesitation, no doubt; personal emotions played no part in the equation. I was afraid of that Dermot.
Dermot joined the IRA when he was eighteen.
It was the time when the IRA was changing from companies to a cell structure in September/October 1978. I decided to join but I did not know who to approach. Seamus was in jail and so were the other guys who I knew were in the IRA. None of the rest of my brothers were involved. Seamus was also on the blanket protest and he only got one visit a month.7 You did not necessarily get to be on that visit. I was with a guy one night when he made a sarcastic remark about doing more for the movement. I said: ‘Well what the hell are you doing?’
‘Well, what the hell are you doing?’
‘I would if I knew who to approach.’
‘Leave it to me.’
I never suspected he was in the IRA. It turned out that there was a waiting list at that time, a period when they had to check your background. I thought with me there would be no checking, it would be straightforward – after all I was a good upstanding member of the community. But it took a couple of weeks and I actually pestered him – going down to his house saying, ‘What’s happening, what’s happening.’ After three weeks I said to this guy: ‘Am I in or out?’ I was then sent for and there was this other guy who was apparently also a recruit. We were taken to a house and we swore an oath of allegiance to the republican movement. There were a couple of other men in the room and we held a piece of the tricolour in our left hand and we held our right hand up. We swore an oath but I do not remember the exact words, something like I so-and-so do solemnly swear to uphold and obey the constitution of the republican movement and obey my superior officers. I was nervous. I was thinking: ‘This is IT! You are with the big boys now.’ I had been a member of the Fianna but we had not really done anything apart from march.8 But now with the oath you had joined the republican movement and I was joining an active service unit. If they had put me somewhere policing the area I would have said here: ‘Come on, I did not join to do this – I joined to fight.’ I was adamant, I was young. I thought: ‘In three years time I will be dead so I am going to do my damnedest to hurt those who have hurt my family, my community.’
The next stage of Dermot’s induction into the IRA was a basic weapons training course where new Volunteers learned to identify and field-strip weapons. The recruits were instructed to use false names even amongst themselves but it was inevitable in the narrow world of Belfast’s Catholic communities that their identities would become known. One of Dermot’s fellow recruits, James Kennedy, later turned informer and divulged the details of IRA activities including Dermot’s membership. Kennedy was subsequently executed by the IRA.
I had to make excuses to my mother because I was away for three to four days. I also had to smuggle out a rough pair of clothes with me. I remember at the camp seeing the guns for the first time and feeling my breathing going heavy, I could feel the nerves in my stomach. We were way up a mountain miles away from anyone. It wasn’t that we were afraid of being caught, it was just the adrenalin pumping away. You would describe a weapon from the muzzle to the butt and there was four recruits there and two training officers. We got a big buzz out of the arms training. I came back with my chest sticking our – ‘Big man!’ I should have had a sticker printed on my forehead – ‘TOP MAN NOW!’ It gave you a lift and a sense of achievement.
Dermot was soon waging war in his native city.
My first attack was a failure. We opened up on the Brits and missed. The Brits were walking through the area and we were attempting to take over a house. We failed because the people were not in. But the next thing we saw was a patrol crossing in front of the safe house, so we jumped in the car, got the weapon together and drove two blocks away and waited at a gap between the houses. When the foot patrol passed we opened up on them. It was quite spontaneous, the run-back [escape route] was not prepared properly. It was stupid. The most dangerous time was in the immediate aftermath of an attack because you have alerted them that you were there. You had fired on them and the Brits’ response time was usually two minutes to seal the area. In those two or three minutes you had to be away. Most of us would be regarded as republican and that would be known to the Brits. It wasn’t as if you could move freely once you were round the block. You had to change your clothes, give them a wash, get rid of the forensics. You also had to dump your weapons away from where you were and then dump your car some place else and then get away from the two of them. Everything in the end went okay. We got away, we got the weapon away. A couple of weeks later I got arrested and was questioned but I gave an excuse and got away. Being on active service was exciting but afterwards it was also a bit of an anticlimax. There was a sort of a slow realization that you were now getting into much deeper things.
For this interview with Dermot we borrowed the boardroom of the ramshackle Sinn Fein Headquarters in Dublin. Old campaign posters, half-torn, hung from the walls, an aged upright piano stood in the corner. The room was strewn with old pamphlets, the natural disorder of campaigning politics. Dermot sat at the head of the table gently rocking back and forth on the chair. Behind him two windows framed a vivid Dublin evening sky. Somewhere over the rooftops, an unseen Crown agent was spying on the building. I wanted to know if Dermot had ever seen the faces of the soldiers he had shot at.
You are firing at their uniforms. You do not see faces, just uniforms, you just aim for the uniform. You know that when they are arresting you they are trying to do you harm, they are trying to put you away. This was another type of battle, only you were armed and they were armed. They were your enemy, they were trying to kill you, you were trying to kill them. It scared me, I was afraid to admit it even to myself. I did not want to get caught or go to jail and I did not want to die.
The first few attempts were failures. Success was when you attacked them and got away – the IRA did regard that as a success. I personally regarded them as failures because of the failure to inflict casualties. The more casualties we inflicted then the harder it would be for the Brits to maintain their grip on the North. We had to create instability, we had to destabilize the North, and you could do that by attacks on the British and their garrisons. But the unsuccessful operations did become successful operations; I was being drawn deeper into the movement.
I remember one occasion when I opened fire on a target and I wounded him. It was a Loyalist area and I don’t know what happened but I was almost going to fire at civilians in the street, they were the enemy and available. I stopped myself but the feeling totally shocked me. When we went back to base, the person who was in charge, who was monitoring the radios, was jumping for joy because his ‘wee team’ had successfully engaged the enemy. We had wounded one and we had come back. But when I told him what I had felt he went ape-shit. ‘Jesus Christ, do not ever get into that.’ I told him I didn’t but the feeling had frightened me. I was overcome with hitting the target, bang, bang. And then there was this other sensation of: ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ I am glad that I have never been involved in an incident where civilians have been injured or killed. I am lucky and glad.
West Belfast was one of the most intensely patrolled military sectors of the world. The air vibrated with the sound of British Army surveillance helicopters. A network of bases and observation posts, equipped with numerous electronic spying devices, bisected and ringed the boundaries of Catholic districts. Armoured Land-Rover patrols, capable of withstanding rocket attack, cruised housing estates. Sixteen-member squads of professional soldiers from one of the world’s better armies, equipped with SA80 assault rifles, general purpose machine-guns and sophisticated radios, patrolled the streets. The soldiers were backed up by Western Europe’s most powerful and heavily armed police force, equipped with the latest anti-terrorist weaponry. In addition, this police force had, over twenty-five years of secret intelligence-gathering, recruited and conscripted a network of informers within the Catholic community. Common sense dictated that fighting the Crown under such conditions was a near-suicidal activity. Listening to Dermot I could think of only one question: ‘Did you think you would be killed?’
I used to have this recurring scene in my head that I would be killed running a road block. But I wanted to be fully committed and I wanted to inflict casualties. You are told when you join that in all likelihood you will end up in prison or shot. It’s obvious then that the more active you are, the shorter the run unless you are lucky. I remember seeing Dominic McGlinchey and Ian Millen and Francis Hughes ‘Wanted’9 posters when they were on the run as the most wanted men in Ulster, and I remember mentally saying: ‘That is what you want, you want to inflict so much damage on the enemy they want you badly.’ There is no point in doing it Mickey Mouse style; I was always putting myself on the frontline. Looking back I now remember people holding back, shying away. I was maybe naive but I wanted the honour of doing it. I very quickly made contact with a small group of good fighters. We regarded ourselves as the best. I used to have a reputation at being good at my work, other units sent for me. I was an excellent driver even if it was a dodgy job. Militarily and politically, I have inflicted damage and I am glad. I am glad I have been a thorn in their side. I did set out to fight them and I fought them.
‘How much damage?’ I asked.
‘Dunno.’
‘Tens? Dozens?’ I ventured.
Dermot paused. I was not sure if his memories blurred into one or if he was deciding on the right choice of words. ‘Let’s just say it is in double figures. I was involved in lots of fire-fights in 1979, 1980 and 1981. It was a very quiet period for us but our unit was very active. I have never fought as much as I did during the hunger strike. I have done everything that needs to be done in the movement.’
‘Shooting and bombing?’
The question created a long silence. I looked at Dermot and then out past him at the Dublin rooftops. Dermot looked back at me with his strong stare and nodded his assent.
‘Shooting and bombing,’ I repeated to fill the silence.
Compromised by information revealed by an informer and his own profile, Dermot was forced to go on the run, staying in safe houses, abandoning his job as a labourer and never leaving the IRA strongholds of West Belfast. There were close escapes.
One time the Brits came to the door. I dived out the back window and ran along the back entries. I knew if I hit the entry they would shoot me dead so I just jumped all the fences until the end and jumped into the entry for five seconds. All I heard was: ‘Stop or I’ll shoot.’ I jumped out the way and burst into this house. The girl inside started screaming, thinking she was going to be raped. I calmed her down and told her not to open the door to anyone. She didn’t but the soldiers knocked – one of them must have seen me go in. The soldiers started shouting, saying someone has run in here, and she said no and they threatened her with the RUC and she said ‘Get them’ and slammed the door. I climbed into the attic and hid behind the chimney-breast. I heard the door being kicked in and I thought to myself: ‘Oh mother of God get me out of here. I’ll never do it again. I’ll go to Mass every Sunday. I’ll give money to the plate.’
I could hear the soldiers tramping through the house and coming towards the attic. I heard the attic lid opening a tiny amount and the guy says, ‘There’s no one here.’
And then this other voice shouted: ‘Have a proper look.’
‘He’s not here.’
And the man shouted: ‘Get in and have a look.’
He came right in and was shining the torch all round and I was thinking: ‘What will I do if he ducks around. What will I say about being in here in the dark.’ Just at that moment the man of the house came in drunk and started screaming: ‘What the fuck are youse bastards doing in my house?’ He started giving them all this abuse and the guy in the attic dropped down.
Dermot was a threat that the authorities wanted to neutralize.
At one stage their interest in me grew ridiculous. We would get a weapon, test it, and they would raid my house. It was incredible; they have not even been attacked and they are raiding my house. So then we thought of this idea that we would attack them and then attack them again when they raided my house. We set up two ambush positions; I kept saying to the other team: ‘My mother lives in that house, be sure she is not standing in the door.’ In the end the second part of the operation was unsuccessful.
Dermot’s growing reputation as an IRA gunman placed great strain on his personal life and his relationship with his long-term girlfriend Ailish. She said:
It was an unsaid thing between us. I never asked him and he never said ‘I am involved’, but it just became known between us. When he went on the run he was eighteen. We had known each other since we were fourteen. My parents were very concerned, they did not want their daughter going out with someone who was going to end up in prison. My granny would have been very anti-IRA. She had seen Dermot’s mother on parades about prison conditions when Seamus was on the blanket protest. Dermot’s mother wore blankets as a symbol of what her son was going through and my granny did not like that. My friends thought I was totally mad once it became common knowledge that he was involved. They thought I needed my head examined. What future is there really? If our daughter came to me and said she was going out with an IRA man I would certainly attempt to get her away from him. I would point out the heartache that there is in it for a start, the loneliness, how hard it is. You have to stand up to everybody else in a lot of ways. When you work in a place that is mixed religiously, if there was anything in the news about Dermot I would have got a hard time. People stopped speaking to me or would slam doors in my face. Finucane is not a very common name so I got hassle all the time. It was two extremes; Protestants would not speak to me because of what he did and Catholics were afraid to speak to me because of the fear of being tainted.
Perversely, because Ailish and her family were not Republicans, Dermot was able to date her without risking arrest. Said Ailish:
We did not socialize in republican circles and that helped a lot. No informers could ever finger us. The Brits would be hunting for Dermot all over Belfast but they never came near our family. Republicans would say, ‘They hit Charlie’s house looking for you, they hit Joe’s house, so-and-so has broken in the barracks and he has named you,’ but Dermot could visit my aunt’s or my granny’s at will and the Brits would never ever go there.
We even arranged the wedding with Dermot on the run, it was amazing. Dermot got fitted for his suit the day before. It was very chaotic.
On the way to the reception the wedding party ran into a British Army roadblock. ‘Pat was my best man and had just got to Andersonstown Barracks and the Brits stopped the car,’ recalled Dermot. ‘I said to our Martin: “You are Dermot.” “Oh God, all right.” They stopped the traffic near the hotel but all the limousines were let through. It was a bit scary.’
Dermot was promoted to leadership of his own active service unit. ‘When I was appointed I was still the child, everyone else was nine years older, but the man who appointed me trusted me because he knew I was level-headed and that I was learning far quicker. I was frightened of the responsibility but he was saying you will be okay. And things started going all right.’
The logistics behind even the simplest IRA ambush were complex and often dangerous. The weapon had to be retrieved from a dump or safe hiding place, transported to the ambush site and assembled. IRA Volunteers frequently commandeered a local house against the owner’s will to secure a safe vantage point for the ambush. Cars were stolen or hijacked to transport weapons and Volunteers to and from the ambush position. To avoid leaving forensic tracks, hijacked cars were often deliberately burnt out. Civilians suffered regardless of whether or not the IRA unit abandoned their attack. Dermot did not flinch from that responsibility.
There was a case where I had to put local people through hardship. I had to commandeer their car and their house. You had to be forceful. Once you got into a house, that was it, you had it no matter how much screaming and fighting. Once they calmed down you could set about your business but you had the house and no amount of aggravation would change that.
I felt that we were putting them out and that this was a necessary wrong. I always tried to explain that to them. In ninety or ninety-nine per cent of the time people accepted it. I remember one occasion we went into this woman’s house unmasked – you could not walk in the street masked – but as soon as we were in there we pulled the masks on. The woman thought she was going to be raped and started screaming. I calmed her down, told her we were the Irish Republican Army.
‘Thank Christ for that!’
‘We are taking over the house.’
‘Oh Jesus, no, no, no.’
The house was in darkness so we told her that we were going to switch the lights on but put our masks on as well. She said, ‘Those masks will terrify me’, but she ended up sitting up all night talking to us because we were not planning to do the attack until the next day. I was going to be lookout all of the next day so I fell asleep and let the other fella do the talking. The husband came the next day, he had been on night shift, and he was angry, rightly so, that his privacy had been invaded. And his wife came in and said: ‘Don’t be listening to him, youse do what you have to do.’ We were going to attack the Brits from her windows. She was going to get an awful lot of grief afterwards from the British and she was aware of that. She had no control of the situation, she just had to make the best of it.
‘Did the attack go ahead?’
‘No they did not turn up.’
‘How often did they turn up?’
‘It depends. You could plan three or four ops and every one was successful and you could plan three or four and they were all unsuccessful.’
‘What happens in the aftermath of an operation like that?’
‘The whole priority was getting away, getting cleaned up. In one instance I headed back home and the Brits had already been there and had already searched it. I went into the house and my mother nearly had a heart attack and she shouted: ‘They are just away, get out of this house.’ But I think I had this feeling of invulnerability so I just stayed.’
Dermot was gung-ho for action against the Brits.
I was once described as erratic. You can be too careful, sometimes people put obstacles up because they are afraid. Sometimes I would say: ‘Fuck it, let’s do it anyway.’ The other members of the team were older, more cautious. I was saying: ‘Give it to me, I’ll do it.’ At one stage we had this plan to drive right into an RUC barracks, shoot everybody and leave bombs behind. I said okay. We trusted the leader. He was going with us and we thought if he says it’s okay then we’ll do it. We will lose men but hopefully it’s not going to be me. Now I was going to be the driver on this one. It was a van. We were going to drive straight into the base’s gate area, jump out and when the cops came over to the van it was going to be just whack, whack and then start shooting. It was going to be chaos. The plan was that when I hit the gates the other Volunteers would jump out and I would be sitting there in the road. Everyone else had rifles and grenades and I said: ‘Here, come here a wee sec. I do not have a weapon.’
The leader said: ‘But you are not going in.’
‘But do policemen not drive up and down the road?’
They gave me a wee handgun just to appease me. In the end the operation was cancelled. One man said: ‘We’ve got the weapons, we’ve got the hand grenades, but what about the Ned Kelly suits?’10
‘Ned Kelly suits?’
‘Yeh, because I’m not going in without one.’
We probably would have got away with it.
On other operations the risks of being shot did not all come from the forces of the Crown.
We were setting up British soldiers at this spot. We were setting a pattern and they were setting up roadblocks and we were weaving in and out, whack, whack, whack. We were the flea; we were biting and biting and it was sending them crackers. We had done it a few times and were getting away through this little lane, and then the car in front of us slowed – a roadblock. ‘Ah, merciful fuck.’ And the guy sitting beside me next to the driver’s seat pulled out a Browning, jerked it into my stomach and said: ‘Drive on.’
‘What?’
There was a car in front of me.
‘Drive on!’
It was physically impossible. You couldn’t do a U-turn, there was a car behind us in the road. The next thing was that we arrived at the roadblock and he dropped the gun down between his legs. I remember our attitude towards the Brits was: ‘We are not being taken alive.’ But I was shitting myself because I was driving and this guy had the gun at my waist threatening to shoot me. So the Brit turned round and said, ‘Pull in.’ I nodded, ‘Thanks very much, officer’, and drove on pretending that I thought he had just waved us on. The Brit went ‘Hey!’ But I just drove on casually and he shouted something like ‘You stupid Paddy bastard’. But he let us go.
Round the corner there was another roadblock to stop the traffic coming down in the opposite direction and the soldiers had a machine-gun positioned to fire straight into any car coming round the bend. If we had broke through the first block the soldiers on the second one would have wiped us out. We would have been killed before we had a chance to fire a shot. We went back to base and the first thing your man said to me was, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, you did everything right. If I had been driving I would have done the same as you, blah, blah, blah.’ It is now a private joke between us but they were life and death situations and you really bonded to each other.
Every significant IRA operation was condemned by both the local and national media but nothing that was said in the press influenced Dermot and his comrades. ‘I always took it that the media was part and parcel of the British establishment propaganda effort. And anyway I knew that a lot of people would be glad that the IRA were fighting back, hitting back and being successful. Of course some people in the community would be critical.’
Like any organization, the IRA makes mistakes; an active service unit goes to the wrong house, a bomb goes off prematurely, civilians get in the way. The IRA leadership, whilst attempting to shift the blame for its atrocities on to the actions of the security forces, usually issues an apology to the victims, but few are consoled. Unlike other organizations, the IRA’s mistakes are almost always fatal; children are killed, Australian tourists are shot in the back of the head and a bride’s legs are blown off. One of the worst atrocities was the November 1987 Enniskillen Remembrance Day bomb, which killed eleven civilians who had gathered close to the market town’s war memorial to watch the proceedings commemorating the war dead. The bomb exploded without warning and brought a two-storey building down on the waiting spectators.
Dermot condemned the Enniskillen bombing but admitted that no single IRA operation, no matter how disastrous, would shake his belief in the justness of the IRA’s cause and their methods.
I do not know who did the Enniskillen bombing, I know from my own experience that those people would have been devastated. I was once on an operation where the guy I was with believed he had shot a civilian. He was shattered, he was saying, ‘Oh God, Oh God.’ He hadn’t killed a civilian but he was wrecked. I know that if I had such a thing on my conscience it wouldn’t stop me being a Republican but I would be very, very sorry. I would be so full of remorse. After Enniskillen, when we were in jail, two comrades said we cannot criticize those on the outside. But I told them, ‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous. Are you saying that we, the IRA, are infallible, that we cannot be criticized, because that’s crap.’ It was complete incompetence and I believe that it was not deliberate. I know that the people who did that must be completely devastated. I have seen suffering, I know families whose kids have been shot away with plastic bullets. My own family has suffered, I know other families who have suffered, I would dearly like to see it ended but not at any price because I know it would only start again. I am not so foolish to say that if we stop, everyone will stop and we will all live happily ever after. It won’t work like that because it will start again until there is justice.
* * *
Whilst Dermot was fighting the Brits on the streets, in prison Seamus was on the front-line of the battle for political status for IRA prisoners. At the time of Seamus’s arrest in 1976 the British Government had withdrawn the de facto prisoner-of-war status accorded to those interned or imprisoned in Long Kesh’s cages. From March 1976 IRA prisoners were treated as common criminals, forced to wear prison uniform and forced to do prison work. To implement the criminal regime, the authorities built a new prison officially called HM Prison Maze (Cellular) next to the old cages of Long Kesh; Republicans continued to call the new prison Long Kesh to remind everyone of its origins as a makeshift internment camp housing illegally detained republican suspects. The new prison was also known as the ‘H-blocks’ because of the distinctive ‘H’ shape of the jail’s eight units from the air.
The first IRA prisoners to be convicted after March 1976 refused to accept what they saw as an attempt to criminalize their political struggle and began a blanket protest, refusing to wear prison uniforms and instead clothing themselves in their prison blankets. The blanket protesters were punished under prison rules and locked in their cells for twenty-four hours a day. ‘We knew that we were going to be banged away after our arrest,’ said Seamus. ‘We also knew that once we were convicted it was straight on to the blanket.’
In April 1978 the dispute escalated into the ‘no-wash’ protest over the authorities’ alleged refusal to allow the prisoners a second towel to wash themselves when they went to the bathroom. The ‘no-wash’ then escalated into the ‘dirty protest’ where IRA prisoners refused to leave their cells, and urinated and defecated in them. Seamus was ‘on the blanket’ for four years. He recalled as we sat in his kitchen sipping tea:
It was rough. I would not like to go through it again. On the blanket you had nothing; you had a blanket, a mattress, a piss pot, a gallon of water and a bible. You were alone in your cell, naked, for twenty-four hours a day. The smell was sickening. We used to put the excrement on the walls and the ceiling to dry it with the sponge from our mattress. I am not saying our hands did not get dirty but we washed them with the water. Sometimes we got sick, the food was horrible. The deprivation and the torture that went on in that place cannot be overestimated. There was physical torture, scalding hot water was thrown over prisoners, scalding hot tea.
The hatred between us and the screws was unbelievable. They enforced a policy of brutalization to break our spirits and to break us up in the blanket blocks. A lot of the screws were there for the money but there was also a lot of them who enjoyed what they were doing; they would piss under our doors at night. The IRA executed numerous screws; in some cases they were killed as symbols of the uniform but some of them deserved it, like the Red Rat or the Horse as he was known, Brian Armour [killed on 4 October 1988].
‘Did he get shot?’ I asked.
Seamus’s response was casual and matter of fact, as if we were discussing dry technicalities.
No, an under-car bomb blew him up. He was head of the Prison Officers’ Association and was involved. He was a Reinhard Heydrich sort of character or Doctor Mengele, an animal. He loved it, he really revelled in it. I am sure a lot of people were glad to see him getting his just deserts. We would get our tea on Sunday afternoon, just a salad at 4.30 pm. At 6.30 pm you would get a cup of tea or bun. If he was on he came round, gave you your salad, wet the arse of your cup with tea and was then back with your supper in five minutes. They would put glass in your food or human excreta or give one prisoner a big dinner and the other prisoner a small dinner, hoping the two of you would fight over it. At one stage in 1978 I could never envisage myself walking round the yard. I thought I would have to do the whole fourteen years like that, but I was prepared to carry on.
Brian Armour might have been a sadistic British prison officer but he was not a Heydrich or a Mengele.11 Language was another victim of the Troubles. The metaphors and vocabulary of global warfare and the Holocaust were conscripted in the service of Ulster’s episodic affliction; sectarian riots were termed pogroms; the IRA were depicted as waging a campaign of genocide/ethnic cleansing against the Protestants along the border; poor working-class communities were described as ghettos. The choice of words was deliberate, designed to emphasize the political points of the speaker, but over time exaggeration falsified the reality of the Troubles. These descriptions, however real they may have appeared to the participants, were false. Maybe the hatred between the prisoners and their guards on the H-blocks made the Armour–Heydrich comparison real for Seamus.
If the prisoners hated their guards, the bonds of their mutual suffering and deprivation drew them together.
There were some happy days on the blanket in terms of unity and comradeship. We communicated with other comrades through holes in the wall or out the windows. I learnt my Irish. I don’t move in Irish circles now so it’s gone. The camaraderie was brilliant at times, we really improvised. We had classes going in French, mathematics, Irish history. Some people became quite acclaimed story-tellers from the books they had read, others from what they made up. There were sing-songs, some people memorized two hundred songs.
In October 1980 seven republican prisoners began a hunger strike to finally resolve the prisoners’ demands for a return to the previous special category status. The fast ended in confused circumstances in December 1980 with the prisoners claiming they had been promised major concessions by the authorities. When the alleged concessions failed to materialize, Bobby Sands, the IRA prisoners’ leader and the first of ten new hunger-strikers, began another hunger strike on 1 March 1981. Sands died sixty-six days later on 5 May; his death and that of the other nine hunger-strikers had a huge impact on the blanket men.
The Hunger Strike period is very difficult to talk about. It was a very emotional period, very frustrating and very demoralizing. I met Bobby the week before he went on hunger strike and it was like talking to a dead man. He had personally decided that he was going to die, he at least was going to have to make that sacrifice. When Bobby was elected it was fantastic; being an MP we thought would probably save his life and when he died we were stunned. It taught us something about the Brits that the Free Staters [a term for the Dublin Government] always forget – the Brits don’t give easy. They played brinkmanship with people’s lives, they gave the illusion of movement but ten men died.
The British Government under Prime Minister Thatcher refused to give in to the hunger-strikers’ demands and after the tenth man, Mickey Devine, died, the families of remaining fasting prisoners intervened as they lapsed into comas. The IRA leadership bowed to the inevitable and called off the protest. The IRA were defeated over the issue of prison conditions but the publicity and the street protests dramatically increased their political support in Northern Ireland’s Catholic communities. Many of the prisoners’ demands – the right to wear their own clothing, the right not to work – were conceded by the prison authorities on political or security grounds. Said Seamus:
After it was over there was sadness and regret because of the people we lost during the Hunger Strike. But there was also a sigh of relief that you were out in the fresh air and could leave your cell to go on a normal family visit. The blanket protest was a political tactic at the end of the day. I thought I was fighting the system, passive resistance. It was a sign of our determination not to be beaten by the Brits. Maggie Thatcher said the Hunger Strike was our last card. Well, the IRA is still here, the republican movement is still here. Thatcher was wrong.
* * *
After the pressure to be recruited as an informer passed, Martin returned from Holland. But there could be no return to an ordinary everyday life. The family were now actors or victims in the Troubles; the possibility of a nine-to-five existence was gone for ever. In the course of the Troubles, many Catholics have been intimidated out of their workplace by more numerous Protestant workmates. The threats have ranged from verbal warnings to notes or bullets being placed in lunch-boxes. With the exception of Pat, none of the Finucane brothers had ever been in sustained employment. I never picked up any sense of regret or dismay at that situation from any brother; a regular job was something outside their world.
Said Martin:
I left school in 1975 when I was sixteen. I had a job set up for me but it only lasted for two years. From 1975 to 1977 I worked in Lisburn, a Protestant area, and looking back I was a fool. There were many Protestants working up there and the name Finucane is very, very rare. I can count myself very lucky that I was not harmed in any way. I had another job around the time of the Hunger Strikes but there were disruptions in transport and I ended up losing it. Even if we had jobs now, none of us would work outside our own area for our own security reasons – many Catholics were killed because of their religion. It’s the same with Seamus. He worked for a time in Mackie’s engineering factory but the majority of workers were Protestant and he was forced to leave. Dermot worked as a labourer doing joinery but he was also forced to leave his job.
What was not alien to the Finucane family was protest. Their mother Kathleen Finucane was active in the wave of demonstrations that accompanied the blanket protest. Martin said:
The relationship that my mother had with her sons was so involved and so immense. She was involved in all the street protests, walking in the marches with just a blanket round her, going on a twenty-four-hour solidarity fast. My mother was a Republican; she was the rock of our support. She was the one who organized for us to slip out of the house and then slip back in without the knowledge of our father, who would have been saying the rosary or going up to bed praying or reading. She was fully supportive of what her sons were doing.
* * *
In February 1981 Dermot was arrested and charged with the murder of a policeman. The original incident was reported in the Irish News on 7 February 1981 under the headline ‘Policeman Shot Dead in Ambush’:
A 38-year-old police Reservist shot dead in Belfast yesterday regularly called at the newsagent’s shop on Balmoral Avenue which was the scene of the attack.
Constable Charles Lewis, a married man with two children, who lived in the Finaghy area, died in a hail of bullets fired at close range by two gunmen as he and a colleague came out of the Classic newsagency.
The colleague, also a full-time Reservist, was still in a serious condition in hospital last night. The victims, who were travelling by car to work at the police playing fields of Newforge Lane, stopped as usual at the newsagency shortly before 8 am to collect their papers.
The gunmen were lying in wait in a golden-beige Fiat Mirafiori parked opposite the newsagents. They opened fire as the policemen were returning to their privately owned Allegro parked in the forecourt of the shop before escaping into the morning rush-hour traffic.
The getaway car was later found burned out at the corner of Corrib Avenue and Lenadoon Avenue.
Police said yesterday that the attack was obviously a ‘well-planned ambush’. They believe that at least two gunmen were involved, with possibly a third man to drive away the car. Both policemen were wearing sports jackets over their uniforms.
Children arriving for classes at the Malone Primary School adjacent to the newsagents narrowly missed the ambush and were escorted through a police barrier. Alliance security spokeman Alderman John Cousins last night condemned the shooting as ‘disgraceful’.
He said: ‘All law-abiding people from whatever section of the community must come together behind the police to stamp out this menace and not be fooled into supporting sectarian retaliation groups.’
The murdered policeman, who had a 10-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old son, joined the RUC Reserve as a part-time member in December 1977 and switched to the full-time Reserve force in January 1979. Following the shooting the President of the Methodist Church in Ireland visited Lisburn RUC station to which the two men were attached and later travelled to the men’s homes.
Dermot related:
They had me for five months from February to May 1981 and during the time I was in prison four hunger-strikers died, Sands on the fifth of May, Francie Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, then Patsy O’Hara. When I got out, West Belfast was like a scene from Beirut, every single street was barricaded and there were nightly riots, burning vehicles. The charges failed. I just went to court one day and the Crown lawyers said we are not pursuing it. An eyewitness was supposed to have seen me running away from the scene of the shooting and getting into the car, implying I was the person who shot the policeman. I was charged with murder. I don’t know who the policemen were. Someone said they were the bodyguards of Reverend Bradford MP, who was assassinated by the IRA. But they must have been popular because the day I arrived in jail several prison guards threatened my life. In one incident twelve of us were being taken out for a bail hearing and we were standing in a group being handcuffed. The cops were pointing over. There were several senior Republicans there and I stopped beside one and told him they were pointing over at him, but he said it was me. We got handcuffed and we were just entering the building when one of the RUC men put his rifle right into the middle of my throat and said: ‘I ought to blow your head off ye Fenian bastard ye.’
I just stood there and stared at him, and we walked on and the senior Republican said: ‘Jesus Christ, I’m not going to get handcuffed to you.’ I made a complaint to my solicitor, our Pat, but he said there is not really a lot you can do. I was really frightened because if someone did that in fun or seriously, as in this case, and the gun goes off, you are dead. Ailish had a bad time at work about it.
Dermot had been charged on the basis of eyewitness evidence but the Crown’s case was weak.
They asked me to go on an identification parade and I said I would if I had my lawyer in. Pat advised me not to go on it but the cops can put you on an informal one, they can force you on. I was taken to a small room where everyone else in the room was thirty to forty years old and dressed in suits. I was twenty and I wasn’t wearing a suit – they had taken my entire wardrobe away with them and left me in working clothes and jeans. Because they had been questioning me for several days my hair was dirty, unkempt. This detective sat beside me and crossed his arms when I crossed mine. I thought the whole thing was a set-up. A person, dressed in brown clothes and in a motorcycle helmet with no visor and red paint on their skin, came into the room – the cops were trying to disguise the identity and even the sex of the person, but I was sure I saw the outline of breasts. They asked her if the person she had seen was here and the helmet wobbled and she came over and tapped my shoulder. I knew it would not stand up in court but I knew I was going to be charged.
In May 1981 Dermot was released; three months later he was back in prison for good after being trapped in the aftermath of an IRA ambush on a security patrol in which a sergeant of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers was hit four times in the legs. Dermot’s run was over. He was twenty-one years old.
The Irish News of 21 August 1981 carried a report of the incident that led to his arrest:
Hijacking and burning of vehicles in West Belfast, Derry and Newry, as well as a series of suspect car bombs in Belfast city centre, followed yesterday morning’s death of hunger-striker Michael Devine. Three men were arrested and two rifles were seized by the RUC in West Belfast following a sniper attack and a high-speed car chase through the area. The incident happened shortly after 11 am when gunmen on Rosnareen Flats in Shaw’s Road fired at an Army patrol near a club on the Shaw’s Road, injuring a soldier in both legs. The wounded man was later described by an RUC spokesman as ‘not serious’. Following the shooting, an RUC patrol in the area spotted a car at Koran Ring and rammed into the rear of the vehicle. The car made off, chased by two Land-Rovers, and speeded into Kennedy Way, stopping in the forefront of a garage. Three men, one with a rifle, jumped out of the vehicle and tried to escape through the back of the garage, but they were quickly surrounded by police and taken away in the back of Land-Rovers. A second rifle was found when the car was searched. The three men were later being interviewed at Castlereagh interrogation centre, and forensic experts are carrying out ballistic tests on two Armalite rifles found at the scene.
Dermot commented:
The day I got caught they rammed the car and subbed [sub-machine-gunned] it but I still got away. We had planned to ambush a patrol on the Shaw’s Road. The leader said, ‘How are you getting away?’, and he suggested a few changes, and comically on account of those few changes we came in contact with the RUC. If we had done it my way we probably would have been free for at least another day; we probably would have been killed or caught on the next one. That is the way it goes.
There was a patrol in the Shaw’s Road that had been ambushed and we were driving away. We hit a roundabout half a mile away and we saw two RUC Land-Rovers coming towards us from the opposite direction. Just after the ambush there was a helicopter in the air so it could have said ‘Stop that car’ or it could have seen the car; the patrol that had been attacked would not physically have been able to see the car and we believed it was a reasonably clean car. I was concentrating on my gloves so that the cops could not see them. What I was not aware of was that the RUC took the roundabout the wrong way so that they were coming head on to us. Trying to keep calm I gave them the right of way but the guy with me realized that something was up. I shouted ‘It’s all right!’ but he was shouting ‘Move!’ The first Land-Rover drove in behind me so there was no reverse and the second pulled in front. I just froze and the guy beside me screamed: ‘Get me the fuck out of here!’ The front passenger shocked me out of my frozen state and I mounted the pavement. The RUC Land-Rover then rammed us right into the wall. They jumped out and started firing into the car but I just put the boot to the board and managed to scrape through and drive on.
Being a good driver is knowing when to drive fast and knowing when not to drive fast, knowing how to park the car so that you can get away quickly, knowing how not to attract attention and knowing how to get the hell out of there – we were getting the hell out of there. When the cops were firing, the other people hunkered down and I kept screaming, ‘I’m all right, I’m all right, I’m all right…’ so as soon as I was hit they would know to steer the car. I wanted to let them know that I was okay. I was doing my job. It wasn’t thought out but it was like telling them to leave me alone until I’m hit.
We got away but ran smack-bang into a line of Saracens coming at us. At roughly seventy miles an hour I did a handbrake turn and shot off in another direction. More Land-Rovers came so we were caught between the two groups and we decided to ditch the car and run for it. Just off Kennedy Way there was a garage and behind it a nationalist housing estate. The guy in front said: ‘Pull in.’ I’m shouting: ‘There’s railings.’ I was sure there was six-foot-high railings at the back.
‘No, there’s not.’
‘You can’t get out of the fucking garage!’
‘No, you’re wrong, there’s no railings. Pull in.’
‘There fucking better not be.’
I jammed on the brakes and jumped out and ran in round the back – there were these big ten-foot-high railings! As we ran we threw everything off, coats, rifles, there was no ammo left, the lot. That was it. They were on us and we were trapped.
‘Stop or I’ll fire.’
I was down on the ground and there was a cop with a gun to my head and I was saying: ‘I don’t know mister, I don’t know what you are talking about.’ I felt stupid calling him mister. I didn’t want to call him ‘sir’ either. My thoughts were: ‘I’m dead, I’m gone and that is it.’ I just had my eyes closed waiting for the darkness to descend, the curtain to come down. I thought that was how I was going to die.
Someone started shouting. ‘We have found the gun, found the gun.’
‘Put the handcuffs on the bastards!’
They put our hands behind our backs, we were lying on the ground, and then the brave men that they were, as soon as they had the handcuffs on, they started beating us, kicking us round the courtyard. One cop, according to one of my comrades, went berserk and two other cops had to disarm him. There was a lot of feet kicking at us but we were so high on adrenalin that I could not feel the blows. They were punching each other to punch us and I was using my shoulders to protect my face. There were six or seven men but only one or two were really hitting you. When they eventually pulled us up there was a female cop there and she was saying: ‘Is that the bastards? Kill them! Kill them!’
Their hatred towards us was phenomenal. A Brit soldier was shot four times. I thought we would all get life. We were charged with attempted murder and possession of two rifles and a quantity of ammunition with intent. We beat the attempted murder charge because they could not actually prove that we had pulled the trigger. Normally the Brits had a response time of two to three minutes. After that they hit an area with roadblocks, an influx of troops and helicopters. From the scene of the shooting to the first confrontation with the RUC there was a gap of a mile and half, two minutes. In that gap the actual gunmen could have got out of the way, we could have been transporters.
Like every major IRA suspect, Dermot was shipped to the RUC’s main interrogation centre at Castlereagh where crack police interrogators worked on him for seven days and seven nights. In theory the procedures, albeit elongated, would be familiar to any ordinary British bank robber but in practice seven nights in Castlereagh is a world apart from a night in the cells with an English bobby. The IRA tell their Volunteers to say nothing whilst under interrogation, but seven days is a long time to stay silent in the intimate space of a police interrogation room. Dermot said nothing.
Your interrogators never introduce themselves. It’s not like that. The first time I knew the name of the cop in charge of my case was when he appeared at an extradition hearing in Dublin seven years later. You have to give your name and address – that is compulsory – so you give it.
‘What can you tell us about such and such?’
And you say: ‘I am not answering any questions.’ And you try to say it as friendly and as hospitable as possible because you do not want a slap across the face. I don’t want a hiding, I don’t want a beating. ‘I’m just letting you know that I am not answering any questions. If you want to ask me questions, ask me in front of a solicitor.’
‘None of that crack. You’ll answer our questions.’
And then right away you can feel the atmosphere changing just like that. There is this right build-up of terror in the room. Being in Castlereagh is a bit like being in a warm comfortable room when suddenly the door is banged open. Lots of guys in uniforms appear and you’re pulled out into the freezing cold and driven off. You’re shivering with fear and cold – that’s Castlereagh. Keeping silent is monotonous, tiresome, frightening. Sometimes you are sitting in Castlereagh listening to them and you are saying: ‘Fuck you.’ Other times you are in a dream world; you block them out or stare at the wall and then they slap you or bang something next to you. It’s hard, it’s all mind over matter.
My interrogators were shrewd. They were good at their job but they were stupid too. The cops destroyed a lot of potential evidence when they battered us around the garage floor. The dirt contaminated everything. They took everything away from me for forensic testing but they missed the top layer of clothing. I was later able to get rid of it. They were wee things but they all added up.
The interrogators named the wrong person as the driver. The person they named was a good friend of mine. During IRA briefings we used to slag each other off, swopping fatalistic jokes. We’d point to his balls and go ‘Phewww!!!’ and pretend they were the size of grapefruit. The joke was that his balls were going to be that swollen from the hammering he was going to get when the RUC caught up with him. He would laugh but he would also be very nervous. When they did catch him with the rest of us he did not get a beating but they mistakenly assumed he was the driver. They asked when he had picked up that ‘wee murdering bastard Finucane to do the hit’. It was obvious that the cops didn’t know anything.
The case went to trial eleven months later. The two other defendants – Bobby Storey, twenty-six, and twenty-year-old Bernard Shannon – and Dermot were all convicted.
We got eighteen years and we were glad. Afterwards we burst out laughing – ‘Brilliant, brilliant, magic, magic.’ A lot of that was to keep your own strength up, but it was also a sense of relief. Eighteen years meant you would do nine, but of course there was protest on, which meant you would lose remission.12 I had a brother who had been on the blanket protest for four years. I was twenty-one, thirty to me was an old man. I might have been thirty-nine before I was released, if you add three years for bad behaviour. I met one guy who had been in since 1977 and he said to me: ‘What do you think you will do?’ I thought it was such a naive question. ‘I hope to do nine but I expect to do twelve.’ He said: ‘I never thought we would be in this long.’ He was mad. It wasn’t 1972 when the IRA thought the Brits were on the verge of pulling out and everyone would be released in an amnesty.
An estimated sixteen thousand Republicans have passed through the Northern Ireland prison system since the Troubles were renewed. Over twenty-five years the IRA’s active corps at any one time has never exceeded a thousand fighters, so statistics dictate that virtually every IRA member from the Chief of Staff to the lowliest Volunteer has spent some time behind bars. In 1994 there were just under seven hundred IRA prisoners, but previously the prisoner total has been well over the thousand mark. More IRA Volunteers are currently in prison in Northern Ireland, and scattered handfuls in prisons in England, on the Continent and in the United States, than were on active service prior to the 1994 ceasefire. Most Volunteers began their long sentences in their twenties, some serve decades. Prisons and prison conditions are always high on the IRA’s political agenda.
The 1981 Hunger Strike escalated into an international propaganda battle but it began as a protest over prison conditions. The IRA’s fight against criminalization was both a political and a pragmatic campaign. Had a criminal prison regime been successfully imposed, it would have broken their internal command structure and led to a worsening of conditions for individual prisoners. In prison, Republicans elected an officer commanding, an OC, to maintain discipline and to liaise with and pressurize the authorities for better treatment. The prisoners’ sense of unity and comradeship softened but did not obliterate the loss of the most fruitful and potentially dynamic years of their young lives. Each individual Volunteer, man or woman, had to endure their own burden of imprisonment. Dermot said:
You can do jail well or you can do it badly. If you do it badly, then no one will help you. We can put our arms around each other but it does not take away the pain, the loneliness, the hardship. I think I did it well. The Hunger Strike had ended; we had to do prison work, mix with Loyalists, but it was okay, we got to wear our own clothes. We were determined to get segregation, so there were fights with Loyalists; there were fire-bombs, Catholics got battered with hammers, Loyalists got stabbed and scalded with hot water. In one instance a Loyalist attacked me and luckily I knocked him out. He made the noises ‘Ya Fenian bastard’ before he came at me so I had a bit of a warning.
The Republicans had the tactical advantage of a two-to-one majority and a clearer ideology. Dermot did not rate his paramilitary opponents highly.
We exploited the fears they had of the blanket men – the blanket men were sickos. They could not imagine how men could live like that for five and a half years, shit all over the place. In general I would say Republicans know what they are fighting for, Loyalists don’t. They came across as street boys, thugs with tattoos, who would attack when they were drunk. They were not brave men, just uneducated, working-class yobs. None of them could articulate why they were in jail. They became more efficient at killing Catholics but that was because of collusion – someone was helping them to co-ordinate their attacks.
In the jail the Loyalists knew what you were in for and you knew what they were in for. On one of the wings there was a child molester who was in need of psychiatric care. Two Loyalists got themselves transferred to give him a hiding. They were in for raping three nurses because they believed the nurses were Catholic – that was their claim to political status in the Ulster Volunteer Force. We battered them before they battered the man. How can anyone turn round and say they were political prisoners? Unfortunately, when this war ends a lot of these prisoners who were involved in actions which you and I might find distasteful will have to be pardoned. They have been caught up in this extraordinary environment. I have never gone out to harm someone because of their religion but I also recognize that a lot of these people would never be in prison apart from the abnormal society that we were living in.
Irish Republicanism has a repetitious history of penal incarceration, transportation and execution. In Dublin, the city’s old prison, Kilmainham Jail, has been turned into a national shrine in memory of the generations of rebels caged and executed within its walls. It was from the grey stone walls of Kilmainham that the United Irishman Robert Emmet – revered by the Provisionals as a republican forefather – was led to the gallows in 1803 for his part in the United Irishmen Rising. Within Kilmainham’s walls the great Irish Parliamentarian Charles Parnell was imprisoned in 1881 as a result of his political agitation. In 1883 five Fenian political assassins were hanged in Kilmainham after being convicted of slashing to death the Chief Secretary of State for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish. The prison work area known as Stonebreakers’ Yard was chosen as the site for the execution by firing squad of the fourteen Easter Rising leaders in 1916.
Kilmainham’s history of incarcerating Irishmen violently committed to overthrowing British rule rested uneasily with the Dublin Government’s disavowal of the Provisional IRA and its methods. The prison’s historical role was uncomfortably close to that of its contemporary equivalent – the Dublin Government’s own high-security jail in Portlaoise and Long Kesh in Northern Ireland – both full of Irish men violently committed to the exact same purpose. Funding of Kilmainham Jail Museum was never a high priority for the Irish Office of Public Works.
Republicans attempted to obliterate the defeat of imprisonment by creating a counter-history of glorious prison escapes. The founder of the mid-nineteenth-century Fenian movement, James Stephens, broke out of a Dublin prison in 1865. In 1867 Irish bombers first came to London in an abortive bid to rescue two Fenian leaders, Richard O’Sullivan Burke and Thomas Casey. A few die-hard IRA men escaped from the Free State’s Curragh internment camp in the 1920s. In 1943 twenty-one IRA prisoners, who had been involved in a doomed Second World War terrorist bombing campaign, tunnelled their way out of Derry Jail and fled across the border in a truck that was quickly captured by Irish Free State troops. The renewal of the Troubles added new episodes; in 1972 seven IRA prisoners broke out of the prison ship HMS Maidstone and swam ashore; in 1973 three IRA leaders were airlifted out of Dublin’s Mountjoy Jail in a hijacked helicopter; in 1981 eight IRA men shot their way out of Belfast’s Crumlin Road Prison; in 1991 two IRA men broke out of London’s Brixton Prison using a gun that had been smuggled to them in the base of a training shoe.
Many of the IRA escapees, like those in the Derry Jail break in 1943 or the Brixton escapees, were recaptured in the immediate aftermath or within a few months. There was no safe home country for the Irish rebel to escape to. Ireland was too small a country, its paramilitary networks penetrated by too many informers, for high-profile fugitives to disappear. If an escapee returned to active service, recapture was only a matter of time. But to the rebels, the inevitability of recapture never diminished the glory of an escape attempt. A successful escape was another act of physical defiance, a rallying point for republican supporters, and concrete proof of the ingenuity and daring of IRA Volunteers. An escape attempt, even if it only made it to the front gate, was symbolic of the indomitable will of rebels to be free.
Dermot began his eighteen-year sentence in Long Kesh, unique amongst the world’s maximum security prisons. Designed to end for ever the republican track record on escapes, it was constructed of eight separate blocks, known as H-blocks because of their ‘H’ shape. Each block housed 160 prisoners and was surrounded by its own thirty-foot barbed-wire-topped fence before a twenty-foot-high, anti-scale perimeter wall. Each block had its own electronic air-lock entrance and all movements between blocks were controlled by means of daily passwords, identity tags, double air-lock gates, guards and Alsatian dogs, and the usual electronic security camera hardware. The prison perimeter was surrounded by another thirty-foot-high fence and a twenty-foot-high perimeter wall, and was guarded by British troops in watchtowers armed with rifles and machine-guns. All staff and visitors were required to undergo searches before entering the prison.
On the blocks the prisoners were housed in the four wings that comprise the arms of the ‘H’. Access to each wing was controlled through electronic air-lock gates; in order to pass from one wing to another a prisoner would have to pass through one electronic gate, which would close behind him, before the next electronic gate would open in front of him. The guard operating the gate was housed behind thick steel bars. An individual wing could be sealed off at the flick of a button. Each wing was a mini-prison in a block that was a separate prison in itself.
In the central bar of the ‘H’, an area known as ‘the circle’, were the block’s administrative offices and an ultra-secure sealed communications room. The circle, like the rest of the block, was dotted with panic buttons designed to raise the alarm in the event of a riot or an attempted escape.
Long Kesh’s walls are thick, the foundations deep, and everything was made of reinforced concrete packed with steel rods. The sheer distance of the individual blocks from the perimeter wall, between half a mile and a mile, made an escape tunnel an impossibility. But it was not the security procedures that made Long Kesh special; it was, according to a report by her Majesty’s former Inspector of Prisons, Sir James Hennessy, the prisoners: ‘They were quite unlike the population of any prison in England or Wales in their dangerousness, their allegiance to a paramilitary organization, their cohesiveness, their common determination to escape and their resistance to the efforts of the prison authorities to treat them as ordinary criminals.’
Long Kesh’s architecture and the elaborate security systems did not diminish the constant prison chatter about breaking out. Dermot recalled:
It would really start off with a ‘what-if’ joke between ourselves.
‘What if a helicopter landed just now, what would you do?’
‘Landed where?’
‘Just over there. Visualize it as being right there on the football pitch.’
‘Right there?’
‘Yeh. Now what if the OC said you can’t go?’
‘CAN’T GO!’
‘Yeh…’
‘I’M GOING. NO ONE’S STOPPING ME!’
One guy got so worked up he was ready to tear everyone else apart to get on that imaginary helicopter.
Most of the talk was just the gate fever of men with too much time on their hands and too little to entertain them. But the prison’s IRA leadership concentrated in one block, H7, had not given up hope of a real escape attempt.
Dermot was in H1 when he got a communiqué, an illicit prison message written on cigarette paper, telling him to go back to H7, where Seamus was incarcerated.
The message was simple – ‘Get back here!’ I did not know why I should transfer but I went to the H1-block governor and told him there was a problem with my family and I wanted to sort it out with Seamus. He asked what it was. I said, ‘It’s personal!’ He was the most unhelpful wee shite you could imagine and he turned and said: ‘I do not care where you go just as long as you stay in jail.’ At first there was a problem. They, the screws, did not want me in H7. I had not been involved in anything, I was just an ordinary prisoner, but the H7-block governor was against it on numbers. The H7 OC said we’ll make the room and so the block governor capitulated; we controlled the block and I got transferred up.
In the block this person I trusted said: ‘Would you be interested in an escape?’
‘I dunno. I would need to know a bit about it first.’
‘Look Dermot, you are nobody special. There is a move on here and that is all you are getting told for security reasons. You cannot be told until the move. I do not want your answer now but think about it.’
He got his answer a few months later.
Dermot had been picked out because of his skills, record and his personal connections – the leader of the escape attempt was Bobby Storey, his comrade-in-arms who had been convicted with Dermot for the Shaw’s Road shooting.
Outside, I’d dealt with lots of stuff. I was a good driver. I used to be in the quarter-master’s department. I used to fix guns, clean guns. I was a jack of all trades. One day we were walking in the prison yard and this prisoner turns round to me and says: ‘Do you know them pistols point two-fives?’
‘Yeh.’
‘Do you know much about them?’
‘A bit.’
‘If they were broke would you know how to fix them?’
‘I could have a good go at it.’
And he pulled one out and said, ‘Try and fix that.’
‘Jesus Fucking CHRISTS!!!!’
He burst out laughing. If a screw had walked by, you were doomed. There was nowhere to hide, no run-back. Because they needed my help with the guns they brought me more and more into the escape. I also practised for the role of driver of the escape lorry. We had a drawing of the cab and the gear stick – no one wanted to put the whole bus into reverse when you wanted to go forward. I was asked questions about that too.
‘If you were stuck near Andytown Barracks in a bus and they were coming after you, could you handle it?’
‘I would make it fly, I would drive it.’
The IRA prisoner leadership, led by the overall prison OC Brendan McFarlane and escape leader Bobby Storey, had concocted an elaborate and ingenious plan to overwhelm the physical security of Long Kesh and break out en masse. The initial groundwork for the escape had begun two years earlier in the aftermath of the 1981 Hunger Strike. The IRA leadership deliberately provoked fights with Loyalists to force the prison authorities to segregate prisoners and make H7 an all-republican block. The prisoners also exploited political divisions between the Northern Ireland Office and the prison administration. In a bid to defuse the prison issue, the Northern Ireland Office pressurized prison staff to find every prisoner work, thereby to recover remission lost through the years of the blanket protest. The IRA prisoner command happily volunteered its closest and most dangerous adherents for the menial jobs of block orderlies, thus allowing its men a wider range of movement around the block under the legitimate guise of cleaning duties. Once the prisoners had achieved physical domination of H7 through segregation, they began a long process of conditioning H7’s prison warders to accept their presence as block orderlies close to or in each of the block’s eleven electronic gate security segments. It was a tedious, incremental process but vital to the IRA escape plan. If the plan was to work the entire block and the twenty-six officers on duty had to be captured within seconds without the alarm being raised.
The take-over plan relied on total surprise. But there was one other key element – six small handguns. These had been smuggled into the prison in pieces in the vaginas of female visitors, then past metal detectors and anal mirror searches into H7 in the anuses of prisoners returning from visits. By 25 September 1983, the day after the prisoners had watched Escape from Alcatraz on television, the IRA were ready.
No one broke security, no one told their mate or ever discussed it with their cellmate. Some guys had spent years and years looking at escapes and it had never happened and so they were fed up with it. But you knew that when it happened they would be there helping to do whatever had to be done. Everyone’s role was lettered and I remember reading the plans. I was shitting myself because they were so detailed and someone said, ‘Are you looking for loopholes?’, and I said, ‘No, I am looking for me.’
The escape plan went into operation just after the normal 2 pm head-count on Sunday afternoon when the prison was expected to be quiet. The eighteen IRA prisoners on the initial escape team began to shadow their assigned prison officers waiting for the correct signal. Dermot was shadowing one of the officers on C-wing so his task was relatively easy, but other prisoners had to manoeuvre their way into the senior prison officers’ office, stand close to the communications room to prevent any attempt to raise the alarm, whilst others waited to simultaneously enter the two electronic gates between the wings and the circle, and overpower the guards at the precise moment the escape operation began. At 2.35 pm an IRA block orderly began calling for a ‘bumper’, indicating he wanted the floor polisher from another wing. The message of ‘bumper, bumper’ was shouted down the wings and the Great IRA Escape of 1983 began.
On that signal IRA prisoners produced guns and stolen workshop chisels and overwhelmed their guards. There were brief fights; Senior Officer George Smylie managed to wrestle the gun out of the hand of his IRA opponent before being overpowered by Bobby Storey. In the confusion Communication Officer John Adams in the secure control room tried to raise the alarm. An infamous IRA prisoner, Gerard Kelly, part of a team that bombed London’s Old Bailey Courthouse in 1973, shot him in the head. The officer was not seriously wounded but the sound of the gunshot marked the end of the officers’ resistance and H7 was successfully taken by its inmates. The prison OC Bik McFarlane used the Lobby Officer’s keys to let himself out of the block and asked the Block’s Gate Lodge Officer if he could brush the double-gated searching area that guarded the entrance to the H7. Against instructions, the officer allowed McFarlane into the segment, from where the IRA prisoner produced a gun and marched the hapless prison guard into the block to join the rest of his trussed-up colleagues. The entrance guard was replaced by a prisoner dressed in prison officer’s uniform.
Inside the block the escapees were already stripping prison officers of their uniforms, demanding their car keys and the registration numbers of cars parked in the officers’ car park, and blindfolding them with pillow-cases. Once blindfolded, the prison warders were passed to the control of a rearguard – a squad of selected prisoners who stayed behind to prevent a premature alarm being raised. Stage one of the IRA operation had been successful; stage two would begin with the arrival of the high metal-sided prison food lorry which was due to deliver the prisoners’ Sunday meal.
The IRA operation was a combination of deadly seriousness and schoolboy revolutionary farce, as prewritten IRA documents recovered on the cell-block floor by the authorities revealed:
TO ALL PRISON STAFF WHO HAVE BEEN ARRESTED BY REPUBLICAN POWS ON SUN 25TH SEPT
What has taken place here today was a carefully planned exercise to cause the release of a substantial number of POWs. The block is now under our control. If anyone has been assaulted or injured it has been a result of his refusal to co-operate with us. It is not our intention to settle old scores, ill-treat nor degrade any of you regardless of your past. Though should anyone try to underestimate us or wish to challenge our position, he or they will be severely dealt with … Should any member of the prison administration ill-treat, victimize or commit any acts of perjury against Rep POWs in any follow-up inquiries, judicial or otherwise, they will forfeit their lives for what we will see as a further act of repression against the nationalist people. To conclude, we give you our word as Republicans that none of you will come to harm providing you co-operate fully with us. Anyone who refuses to do so will suffer the ultimate consequences – death! Allow common sense to prevail, do not be used as cannon fodder by the prison administration nor the faceless bureaucrats at Stormont or Whitehall.
— CAMP STAFF REP POWS13
I doubt if the helpless prison officers needed the additional emphasis of the exclamation mark to persuade them of the escapees’ sense of purpose. McFarlane was serving five life sentences for a sectarian bomb attack on a bar which killed five Protestants; Storey and Dermot were just beginning their eighteen-year prison sentences. Like most IRA prisoners on the escape they had very little to lose.
The second document recovered showed that the IRA leadership’s tone was no lighter or less obdurate when it came to its own men:
TO ALL POWS CHOSEN BY CAMP STAFF TO GO ON ESCAPE
Very few of you are aware of what is now taking place. This is due to security and the possible refusal of some of you to go on this escape. Since it is the duty of all POWs to escape I now instruct you to go to this yard to board the food lorry. Regardless of your feelings we are taking you with us, we have no time for arguments. Just do as instructed. Any refusals will be met with force.
— OPERATIONAL OC
When the food lorry arrived it was let through the block’s Gate Lodge and the driver was quickly overpowered. The frightened officer was informed of the IRA’s plan to drive the food lorry to the prison’s main front gate. To ensure his compliance with their instructions the prisoners tied the man’s foot to the clutch pedal of his lorry and told him he was sitting on top of a bomb. For good measure, Kelly, dressed in prison officer’s uniform, crouched on the floor of the lorry and kept a gun pressed against the driver’s stomach. Kelly, the man was told, was already serving a minimum of thirty years and had nothing to lose by killing a prison guard. Thirty-seven IRA men, half of them dressed in commandeered prison officers’ uniforms, piled into the back of the truck and pulled the back door down.
The prisoners were still a long way from freedom. It was half a mile from H7 to the prison gate, the Tally Lodge. The prison food van had to pass through two separate security gates, including the air-lock segment gate that divided the H-blocks from the rest of the prison. In the event of discovery the IRA escapees planned to overpower the guards in the control booths of each security gate and sacrifice an individual prisoner, leaving him behind to guard the prison officer and stop the alarm being raised. But the closed van, in defiance of procedures, passed unchecked through the security barriers and drove on to the Tally Lodge, the sole prison entrance, where prison officers entered and left the prison for their daily shifts.
Dermot related:
There were two stages to the escape, there was taking the block and then taking the Tally Lodge. The prisoners taking the Tally Lodge were a group that had been assigned to stay behind to sacrifice themselves in order that the others could get away. After everyone got away they were to commandeer screws’ cars and then try and get away themselves. But their primary role was to let the others away. Now some of those people were lifers, some of them had tens of years to do, but they all said yes; that escape was something special.
Dermot had been chosen as the driver of the van but his role would only begin after the van had made it through the last barrier, the main hydraulic-operated prison gate which was controlled by the Tally Lodge guards. Along with the other prisoners, he hid inside the food lorry and played no part in the Tally Lodge take-over. But it was soon obvious to all of the escapees that something was very wrong.
Eight or ten prisoners dressed as screws had gone into the Tally Lodge and all you could hear was banging and shouting. Everyone was looking at me for reaction and I said to myself, ‘Do not show any reaction’, because I did not want to demoralize them. I also knew that if we were caught we were going to get the biggest hiding of our lives. I heard someone shout ‘The balloon has burst’ and ‘Aw, come on to fuck!’ There were too many screws. There were supposed to be four but we were late in getting out of the block and by the time we arrived at the Tally Lodge it was in the midst of the shift change; screws were coming on and coming off duty. As more of them arrived they started to act with more bravado. The screws were ratty, they were like Alsatians, teeth snarled, saliva coming down. They were riled and lashing out. Someone shouted ‘Everybody out!’ and we jumped out. No one wanted to be the last one out, somewhere in the middle would be safe enough, and I remember someone saying, ‘It’s only fucking screws! The Brits are not here yet.’
Someone said ‘Advance’, so we advanced, the screws backed off and when they did that we saw a fence chest-high and then fields, green fields. Freedom! One screw had blocked the lorry in so we abandoned it. Someone shouted ‘Run’ and we ran and there was sporadic fighting. I got straight to the barbed wire and then jumped over it. Other people like Skeet Hamilton [serving a twenty-five-year minimum recommended term on five murder counts] fell straight into it and other people ran across his back. Skeet was a bit nasty at the best of times. If you said ‘Good morning’ he would have said ‘What the fuck is good about it!’, but he was a nice fella and everyone was using him to climb the wire and he was shouting ‘Get off my back ya fucking bastards!’
The IRA escape operation had come within seconds of failure. The delay in the arrival of the food lorry meant that instead of facing four guards in the Tally Lodge, the prisoner take-over squad were soon confronting fourteen. The prisoners were not able to coerce the prison officers into operating the gate, and the sheer number of captured prison officers meant the IRA guards were unable to prevent two officers pressing emergency alarm buttons – alerting the prison’s Control Room to an escape attempt. The escape leader Bobby Storey, one of the Tally Lodge team, was in the process of surrendering when another prisoner, in an act of desperation, hit the right button and the main gate began to open. At almost the same moment the official alarm was raised, alerting the whole prison, the RUC, the Army and the Northern Ireland Office.
A massive security operation swung into action. Helicopters, Army and police units converged on the prison, throwing up ring after ring of concentric roadblocks to prevent the prisoners breaking through predetermined security cordons. The first helicopter reached the prison within ten minutes; within another ten minutes the British Army’s General Officer Commanding in Northern Ireland and the RUC’s Chief Constable, Sir Jack Hermon, were in their command bunkers. News of the escape was flashed through to Prime Minister Thatcher, then on an official tour in Canada. Every prisoner was now in a desperate race to get away from the prison before the area was sealed.
As the prisoners streamed through the gate they were still officially within the prison grounds; the public highway was half a mile away. Most of the prisoners jumped over the barbed-wire fence that marked the external boundary of the prison and ran over fields. There were running fights between the fleeing prisoners, dressed in prison officer uniforms, and real prison officers. A British Army sentry in a guard tower was forced to hold his fire because he could not distinguish between the two groups. Later, he was able to identify a clear target and shot one prisoner in the leg. In the chaos and confusion it was every man for himself.
When I was running, Gerry Kelly was in front of me. I was saying to myself: ‘Kelly has tried to escape two or three times. He is more experienced. I am willing to let him take the lead here.’ We hit this house, there was a Mercedes there, eight got into the Merc and drove away. Twelve or thirteen of us got into a Hillman Hunter, a saloon-type car. Someone wound down the back window and I dived in with my legs in the air as the car sped off. At the same time the others were screaming: ‘What about the others?’
The driver did not want to go. He wanted to take as many as possible. He was screaming: ‘What do I do!’
‘Drive on! Drive on!’
‘What about…’
‘There’s no room.’
One prisoner was hanging on to the driver’s door and as I was pulling him in, me and Gerry Kelly looked at each other and we gave eye contact and it was ‘me and you together’. We had never spoken to each other before but there was this gut feeling. He was mentally saying ‘I’m going with him because he is a good driver’ and I was saying ‘I’m with him because he has tried to escape before.’ We knew we needed to break up. We also knew that if the cops fired into the car they would kill everyone. We were driving along and we met a guy showing off his car to his girl. We stopped and said, ‘Does that car work?’ ‘Of course.’ We pushed him out of the way and drove away. We drove another half-mile and the car just collapsed on us. Me and Kelly then said: ‘Let’s go, everyone behind the hedge.’
Everyone did what they were told. We were not in charge but we just assumed control. The two of us backtracked down the road hoping to get to a farmhouse but as we were going down I was thinking to myself: ‘Farmers, shotguns, farmers have shotguns, make sure they don’t shoot. If we burst in – Bam, you’re dead!’ Just then I heard a car coming; I lay down on the road pretending to be dead. Kelly, again without speaking, knew exactly what I was doing. Kelly was in a prison officer’s uniform and he flagged it down and he started crying: ‘There has been an accident, etc…’ I had one eye on the car but they were fifty yards away and I could see the driver, a big fat heavy woman, putting it into reverse and the male passenger, a heavy man, getting out. The male passenger was saying, ‘Come on, come on, we will get an ambulance.’ As Kelly was approaching him, Kelly was going ‘My friend! My friend!’ It was a two-door car. Kelly got into the car, they lifted the seat up and Kelly jumped the woman. I got up and ran like fuck down. The man had frozen and the woman had frozen and I grabbed the driver’s door, trailed her out and that was it, we were away. We got to the hedge, beeped the horn and the whole hedge came alive and everyone jumped in.
But it was obvious that there was still too many of us and we’d have to break up. We drove into this garage, a couple of guys were still in uniform, and we said: ‘Take that car, yer man has just filled it up with petrol.’ They ran out and they said: ‘We need your car.’ And of course the man would not give it to them, he started fighting and struggling. A couple of the lads came back and said: ‘What will we do, he won’t give it to us?’ I had never heard of this, no one says to you: ‘You are not getting it.’ Or if they do, you still get it. I was saying ‘Use your batons’ [requisitioned prison officer’s batons]. And the next thing was that they had pulled the batons out and attacked yer man and started beating the hell out of him. But it was hopeless, the driver had thrown his keys over a hedge or something. I told them, ‘We’re wasting time here, get in the car’, and we drove away.
Just ahead of us at a roundabout there were two pensioners having a picnic by the side of the car and we went right up their arse so they couldn’t reverse. The boys jumped out and took the car. The old man was shouting, ‘My wife’s sick, my wife’s sick.’ One of the boys shouted back, ‘Not half as sick as we are.’ We now had two cars and we headed away. Straight away we took the wrong road and started heading back to the Kesh. We turned round and then saw the other car behind us and we told them: ‘Do not follow us, we do not know where we are going.’ We headed off.
We knew they would be throwing up roadblocks – there was a five-mile circle that you had to be out of. I think we were about ten miles out but we were expecting a roadblock any second. At one stage we had stopped to ask directions and two UDR Land-Rovers came flashing towards us. I thought that was it but they were flashing – ‘Get out of the road!’ As we drove alone, Kieran Fleming, who was in the car with us and supposedly had good eyesight, kept shouting: ‘Roadblock!’ I would slam on the brakes and it would be nothing. Everyone shat themselves. Everyone wanted to go to their own area, their own wee niche. Padraig McKearney knew Tyrone, which was on the other side of Lough Neagh from the prison, and he said: ‘Look, we should swim Lough Neagh.’ Lough Neagh is the biggest lough in Britain, it must be fifteen miles wide! I can do two lengths of the local swimming pool. Fuck! But I did not want to be the one to hold us back and then Kieran Fleming, who did later drown on active service, said: ‘I can’t swim but I’ll try.’ And I turned round and said: ‘It’s all right Kieran, we are not going that way.’ Eventually we decided to go to a nationalist area surrounded by Loyalist areas.
When we got to the area, we went into this shop. Padraig McKearney, who was later killed in the SAS ambush at Loughgall, went in and said in Irish: ‘Do you speak Irish?’ But in his nervousness he must have shouted out what sounded like gibberish to the girl: ‘Ahmalcucal.’ The girl probably thought he was a Loyalist so she did not respond. Padraig ran back into the car. We drove on and then saw these four or five kids and so we said to them: ‘Do you know where Mr X lives?’ Mr X was the name of the Republican in the area who had been interned, but the kid goes: ‘No.’ People are wary when there are shifty-looking men in a car. So I said: ‘Tell them who we are.’ And the rest of them just looked at me and Padraig turned to the nine-year-old kid and said: ‘We’ve just escaped from the Maze, fucking help us ’cos we have got to see such-and-such a fella.’ The kid jumped off his bike, hopped into the car and took us to the house.
When Gerry walks into the house the guy goes: ‘Fuck Gerry, what are you doing here?’
‘I have just escaped.’
‘You are supposed to be in the Kesh.’
‘Well, I’m not.’
This Republican brought us to a safe house. When we got there we found that the others, in the other car, were there too. They had gone to the exact same shop and their guy had said ‘Do you speak Irish?’ to the same girl and she said ‘Yes’ and had taken them straight to the house.
The eight IRA men were moved to another safe house and hidden under the floorboards, between the floor joists and the foundations.
Beyond the safe house, Northern Ireland turned into a prison camp as the largest manhunt in British history, code-named Operation Vesper, was mounted. All police leave was cancelled and every one of Ulster’s thirty thousand policemen, soldiers and part-time reservists were deployed to man the roadblocks. Thousands of vehicles were searched, thousands of people were stopped and questioned, hundreds of acres and farmhouses and sheds were combed by troops. The Army’s helicopters flew from dawn until dusk.
A number of prisoners never made it beyond the barbed-wire fence and were quickly recaptured. Five, including Bobby Storey, were seized hours later as they hid under water in the nearby Lagan river breathing through reeds. One was picked up after the taxi he hired was stopped at a roadblock. Four more were arrested the following day at roadblocks or after commandeering houses. A total of nineteen prisoners were returned to Long Kesh’s punishment blocks but by the following Wednesday it was clear that the other nineteen, including almost all the senior members of the IRA’s planning team, had made their escape.
On the day of the escape, the IRA rearguard squad, using pillow-cases as masks, held H7 for an hour after the food lorry left and then retreated to their cells, locking themselves in. The disguises and the blindfolds were effective and none of the prison officers was able to identify any of the rearguard from amongst the remaining eighty-three H7 prisoners, most of whom knew nothing about the escape. In addition to the shooting of Officer Adams in the block’s Communication Room, six prison officers had been injured during running fights at the main gate. One officer, James Ferris, had been stabbed in the chest and collapsed and died. A post-mortem later revealed that the knife wound was superficial and that the cause of death was a heart attack, but on the day of the escape every prison officer in the Maze believed the IRA had murdered a brother officer after callously shooting another guard in the head. Seamus could only wait in his cell for the prison administration to retake H7 and the inevitable wrath of the screws:
We all got a hammering. They moved us from H7 to H8. We had to run a gauntlet of screws shouting at us and beating us. They set dogs on us and denied us clothing, food and medical attention. I thought they were going to kill someone. You could hear the screams and squeals of someone in the cells along the row as the screws opened the door, hauled them out and beat them up. They strip-searched me, threw back half of my clothing, put me in handcuffs, threw me against walls, against gates. One screw grabbed me by the handcuffs and tried to pull me into the dogs. They beat me about the face. I’m six foot one but big blokes can be hurt too. I swerved and dodged to avoid being thrown in to the dogs.
All of the remaining eighty-three H7 prisoners were later awarded sums of between £1,500 and £3,000 compensation in the Northern Ireland High Court for the injuries they received as a result of the warders’ rampage. In the course of the 1988 test case, brought by a H7 prisoner who was not involved in the escape, twenty prison officers denied that any assaults on prisoners had ever taken place or that prisoners were refused medical treatment. Documentary evidence from the prison’s doctors directly contradicted the officers’ testimony and at the last moment the Crown conceded the prisoners’ case. But no prison officer was ever disciplined or reprimanded for the assaults. The beatings, and the failure to discipline prison officers, was, however, to have long-term implications for extradition proceedings involving the escapees.
* * *
In the safe house Dermot and seven other IRA men lay beneath the floorboards.
We were lying in the foundations of the house, it was like a coffin. We had to clear the rubble to get somewhere to stretch out. Gerard Kelly was number one and I was his second-in-command. We deliberately made the decision not to take solids so that the need to go for a crap would be kept to a minimum, and we had a coffee jar for piss; I have great bowel control and I did not go for a fortnight. All the negotiations were done through the trapdoor and people could only smoke when the food was being handed down to us. At first the local OC told us that we would be there for a couple of days but it stretched out to two weeks. We did not trust the IRA because of the supergrasses and we did not trust the local unit because all the experience in the world was under the floorboards. We kept saying: ‘Give us a gun and we will look after ourselves.’ And they kept saying, quite rightly: ‘No way!’
Underneath the floorboards we were divided into two groups of four by the foundations. We found out that Kieran Fleming had broken his arm before the escape but he did not tell anyone in case he was taken off. Four of the boys, including Kieran and Padraig, were from the country and they shared one section. Kelly and I shared our section with the other two lads, including Goose Russell [Robert Russell, doing twenty years for the attempted murder of an RUC Superintendent] who annoyed everyone but who kept morale up. The woman we were staying with was pregnant and Goose kept saying: ‘You tell her husband that when she goes into labour she is not to use any anaesthetic. She is to have that child without drugs. I do not want her talking.’ It was funny, very comical. We even enjoyed laughing at ourselves on the wanted posters printed in the newspapers. I had finally got myself on a wanted poster even if there were thirty-seven other faces there as well.
It was depressing to see so many of our guys being picked and so we actually planned for our arrest. We swopped stories about the layout of Castlereagh and Gough barracks. We knew how many guards would be on; once we got one guard and stole his gun we were all dead anyway so it didn’t matter. We were going to take Castlereagh, break out, and then we would live like a flying column, stay outside. We would get like hardened guerrillas, live off the fat of the land. We would be the team that would be sent in to hit a barracks, do or die. We said we would do it once we got into the South, but we were scared almost thinking about it.
* * *
The Maze break-out was a security catastrophe for the British authorities. One of the world’s most secure prisons had failed to contain the IRA. Republican moral soared; Martin Finucane was ecstatic.
When the news broke I just knew that Dermot was on it and then when it was confirmed I just felt great. I was really glad that he was out. I knew he had not escaped to full freedom because he was not over the border yet, but it was still great news. The security thrown up was unbelievable. The very next day our house was raided at five-thirty in the morning by the RUC and British soldiers. My Ma started to cry and I said: ‘What are you crying for? He is away from these people. If you are crying, cry for joy.’
At the same time I was worried for him. I understood why Dermot got involved. Dermot got his politics from the streets and even now I don’t think that the Brits realize how much harm they did to people, whether it’s through a house raid or being stopped in the street, and how that could coerce someone into joining the IRA.
I was devastated for Dermot when he was sentenced to eighteen years. He was married and he had a young child. He was missing out on his freedom and what he had enjoyed outside. It was sad but you had to live with that. It was not going to grind us down. Being in prison is better than being dead. I could still go up and visit him, shake his hand and write letters. A lot of the families that got burnt out with us lived near us and a lot of their sons got involved in the IRA and their sons were caught as well. We understood that Dermot knew them risks and we knew them risks. It’s inevitable that at some stage you may be caught, you may be shot dead. That has to be accepted. My brothers could have been shot dead. I know I would have been devastated. But you have to live your life, you have to go forward.
Dermot’s wife Ailish’s emotions about his escape were more complex; at first she was angry at him for disrupting her life.
News of the escape came on the 5.30 pm news and the cops came round the next morning looking for him, so I knew then that Dermot must be one of the escapees. Things got very hostile at work again and no one would speak to me, but people also found the whole thing exciting – they kept rushing out to buy the paper or listen to the next news. I had visions of him being drowned. When I got back to my own house that night I got under the table and started to cry. Our daughter came over to me and said: ‘Don’t worry Mummy, it’ll be all right.’ I spent my time worrying about how to get both of them over the depression that would occur if he was caught. After four weeks someone gave me a letter and I knew he was safe. I was upset that he had escaped because I had my life mapped out for me. ‘Dermot’s in prison now and he will be out in 1990.’ You get yourself settled into that way of thinking and then something disrupts it and you think – ‘Where do we go now?’
Being an IRA prisoner’s widow had hardened Ailish and given her a strong sense of her own political identity, separate from Dermot. Ailish describes herself as a pacifist and it was clear she did not share Dermot’s belief in the IRA’s armed struggle. But she supported her husband’s commitment.
I did not see Dermot as a Republican. I saw him as a person. He was dedicated to his family and obviously believed in the sacrifices that his family had to make. I would not want Dermot to stop. I feel he has given too much of his life to give up. If he did give up it would be a waste of all these years. Me saying ‘Would you not give up now?’ would be a purely selfish act. I did not want him to get hurt but that was the risks he had to take. The alternative was like wanting your own wee family to be fine but ignoring what was going on round the corner. At the end of the day our daughter has to go out into the outside world. What Dermot was doing was making it a better place for her to live in.
After two weeks Dermot and the other IRA men were driven south over the border into the Republic.
We came up from under the floorboards and washed and shaved. Gerard gave the woman a poem he had written. All I had was a Catholic cross and chain and I gave it to the woman. The man said: ‘My wife would like you to name the baby.’ And then we wrote a list of boys’ names down and a list of girls’ names and voted on them. We left soon after.
We wanted to be armed but the IRA refused. We said: ‘Look, if the UDR were at the house now and we were armed, a Browning apiece, we would open the door to them and just whack, whack, and start coming at them, whacking them.’ That was the mentality we were in – we thought we would escape in the panic. If two of them came to the door – that is two of them dead. It made sense to us because the kids who were looking after us did not have arms training. But the OC of the area said: ‘Fuck off. Youse are going to keep our guns and you’re not going to give them back.’ It was true we would not have given them back.
The IRA fugitives had a clear run to the border and were soon in the South, but the Irish Republic was no sanctuary. The IRA had no country, apart from a few enclaves along the border, and held no territory. In the Republic, IRA men were grudgingly tolerated and periodically suppressed. Wanted IRA men might not have been sent back across the border to Northern Ireland but they would be imprisoned pending protracted extradition hearings. In the rural communities of Southern Ireland, strangers and strange accents were noticed and because republicanism was often a family tradition, IRA sympathizers were well known to the local police, the Gardai. None of the escapees could expect to live in the open. Dermot’s run began again.
For the next four years Dermot’s life was a bewildering round of short stays in republican safe houses all over Ireland. He was continually on the move, hiding away in a top bedroom in case the neighbours visited, constantly in the company of someone’s wife whilst the man of the house worked, endlessly bored in the lost hours of a rainy afternoon, and always waiting for the knock on the door from the Garda. He had no life beyond the run. After the triumph of the escape, it was a dispiriting anticlimax.
You get really depressed being on the run. You say to yourself: ‘Will I have to go through this for the rest of my life, will I be on the run for the rest of my life?’ When I was caught it was: ‘Phew, it’s over.’ I did everything not to get caught, I was very security conscious. I only ever saw my family every three months. One of the Crumlin Road boys was free for eight years and I thought as long as he was free I wanted to be one of the last of our lot.
Dermot was eventually captured along with fellow escapee Paul Kane in the attic of the home of a republican sympathizer in County Longford in late 1987. Both men were picked up in a nationwide security sweep in the Republic following the IRA’s disastrous Enniskillen Remembrance Day bomb and the seizure of IRA weapons aboard the Eksund trawler.14
There was a big nationwide sweep on, fifty thousand houses were searched, and we had just arrived the night before and moved to a house half a mile away. We were trying to get some sort of transport organized and the woman failed to notice the Branch [the Irish Special Branch, the intelligence arm of the Garda that monitors ‘subversives’] car until it was upon us and she shouted: ‘Oh my God, it’s the Branch.’ We went into the attic, there was nowhere else, and we thought hopefully that they would just check under the beds. There was no time to hide. We were sitting next to the trapdoor like kids with our eyes closed thinking he can’t see me and your man climbed in but did not look around. We were three feet away and he was saying to his mates, ‘Pass me up the torch’, and when he got it he just screamed ‘Oh my Jesus!’ He jumped down and we heard the cocking of rifles. We gave ourselves up.
Both Dermot and Kane initially refused to identify themselves to the Garda but relented after demanding and receiving a steak-and-potatoes meal from a local hotel. Both men were remanded in custody pending the inevitable extradition battle with the British authorities in the Irish courts over their return to Long Kesh. Dermot was back in a prison cell.
* * *
By the time Dermot was recaptured Seamus had completed his fourteen-year sentence and had been released. He served a total of ten years, spending every year of his twenties in jail. Soon after he was freed Seamus became romantically involved with a female volunteer, Mairead Farrell, who had in turn recently been released after serving ten years for a bombing offence.
Farrell was a rarity in the IRA. Her parents were shop-keepers, middle class by West Belfast standards, and she was a bright convent school-girl who joined the IRA at eighteen out of revolutionary zeal. Later, Farrell, who was just over five foot tall, became a republican star with the glamour of a sixties revolutionary. She was charismatic, articulate, and able to bridge the gap between the Provisionals’ version of power politics and feminism. She was written up as a hero in the London-based women’s liberation magazine Spare Rib, a journal not noted for sympathizing with the patriarchal politics of Irish republicanism.
Farrell had been jailed for bombing Belfast’s Conway Hotel when she was nineteen. The hotel was partially destroyed but the operation had been a disaster for the IRA unit. One of the Volunteers on the bombing mission, twenty-year-old Sean McDermott, was shot in the stomach at point-blank range and killed after he attempted to commandeer the car of an armed off-duty policeman during the run-back. Farrell was captured and another Volunteer, Kieran Docherty, who later joined the 1981 Hunger Strike and died in the H-blocks, was arrested months later and convicted.
In prison, Farrell became OC of the twenty-odd female republican prisoners in Armagh Jail. She studied for an Open University degree and dominated her fellow prisoners and warders by the force of her will and intellect. Farrell was one of the leaders of the 1980 Armagh ‘dirty protest’ when women prisoners emulated their male counterparts on the blanket in the H-blocks and smeared their own excrement and menstrual blood on the cells’ walls in a year-long protest over prison conditions. In December 1980 Farrell also led three Armagh women prisoners who joined their male IRA colleagues on a nineteen-day hunger strike. In interviews at that time Farrell appears full of passion for the cause. ‘I am a Volunteer in the Irish Republican Army and I am a political prisoner in Armagh Jail. I am prepared to fight to the death if necessary to win recognition that I am a political prisoner and not a criminal.’15 After her release she enrolled as a social science undergraduate at Belfast’s Queen’s University, stood for election as republican candidate in Cork in the Republic and toured Ireland giving talks on the necessity of the armed struggle in the North. Farrell also returned to the IRA as a Volunteer attached to one of its most secretive departments, GHQ, General Headquarters, which carries out all overseas IRA operations.
On Sunday afternoon, 6 March 1988, eighteen months after her release, Farrell and two other Volunteers, Daniel McCann and Sean Savage, were shot dead by British soldiers on the streets of Gibraltar. Farrell and the others had been planning to plant a powerful car bomb close to the Governor’s residence in the British colony on the southern tip of Spain and blow up members of the Royal Anglian regiment, which had just finished a tour of duty in Northern Ireland. Had they succeeded, many soldiers, and possibly a number of civilians, would have died. But somewhere between Belfast and Spain, Farrell and McCann, who also had a high profile within the IRA, were spotted and the entire IRA operation compromised. The IRA Volunteers were put under intensive surveillance in Spain by both Spanish and British intelligence services and lured into a trap in Gibraltar.
All three were shot dead by SAS soldiers, who claimed they had no choice but to open fire after the terrorists made ‘suspicious movements’. Farrell and McCann were shot in the face and back four or five times from a distance of three feet. Savage was hit sixteen times and finished off with bullets in the head as he lay on the ground. None of the IRA Volunteers was armed and no explosives or weapons were recovered in Gibraltar. It was, by the Troubles’ standard, a great hit. Farrell and her comrades had planned to murder British soldiers but had instead been whacked in a precise preemptive ambush.
Farrell knew the risks of being an IRA Volunteer active overseas. ‘You have to be realistic. You realize that ultimately you’re either going to be dead or end up in jail. It’s either one or the other. You’re not going to run for ever,’ she said in an interview shortly before her death.16
Seamus’s life had moved on after the death of Mairead and he had a new partner, children, and the family relationships he had missed so much in prison. But a picture of Mairead Farrell had pride of place on top of the television set in his neat living room, whilst an elaborate photographic tribute to Mairead and the IRA Guard of Honour which fired shots at her commemoration ceremony adorned the mantelpiece wall. Following her violent death, Farrell achieved martyr status in the republican movement, but she was still Seamus’s ex-girlfriend. It was not the sort of daily reminder I imagined Seamus’s new partner would appreciate, but perhaps I failed to understand how deeply Mairead’s killing and the distorted chronicle of her death at the subsequent Gibraltar inquest were burned into Seamus.
I was in love with her. We had been involved for eighteen months, living together for five. We set up together the first home for either of us – we’d both spent our twenties in prison. She was very, very special and we spent a lot of that time together. It was a very, very precious time. Mairead was very independent, very determined, a strong woman. She wanted children, she was like any other girl, she liked socializing, dancing, music, fashion, and loved meeting people. We talked about the possibility of both of us going to prison and the effect that would have on kids.
I knew she was away but I did not know where she was. She was murdered without a shadow of a doubt, irrespective of what she was there to do. There were no weapons or explosives in Gibraltar. Obviously they were under surveillance; if the Brits had wanted to arrest them it would have been easy – there is only one way in and one way out of Gibraltar. Instead they killed them and claimed it was because of ‘suspicious movements’. By the same token the cops here could have shot me when they threw the sledge-hammers through the front window – one false movement which they would call a ‘suspicious movement’ and you are dead. Who is there to argue on your behalf? I think it was done as a lesson for people operating on the Continent and in England, plus Dan McCann and Mairead were two high-up Republicans in Belfast and so they sent a message to Republicans.
Mairead and I talked about fatalism. If you work out the law of averages and if you were active, the odds were that sooner or later something was going to happen to you. The older you were, then the more you realized that next time it could be your turn to go to jail. You took precautions, you were always wary, but the risk was there. The risk was also there even if you were walking down the street and a soldier lined his sight on you. He could be a wanker, they have killed themselves in their barracks; he could have done the same to you.
At the Gibraltar inquest, the SAS gunmen appeared behind screens and were identified just by letter: Soldier A, Soldier B. The precision of the Crown’s intelligence and the ruthlessness of the Gibraltar killings reinforced the SAS’s Rambo-like image. As we sat in Seamus’s front room, across from the picture of Mairead Farrell, I asked him how good, how competent an enemy, in his opinion, were the killers of Mairead.
‘They were both good and bad. If you take me on a one-to-one basis, it’s a fair cop. But if there are five of you and one of me, then you are going to overcome me. They have everything at their disposal and yet they can’t beat us. We are still here, they cannot eradicate the republican struggle.’
Seamus had no regrets about the IRA bombing mission to Gibraltar and its potential for the taking of life.
Everything that happened abroad put the IRA on the agenda and the Irish struggle. If there were no civilians killed and if the IRA were selective and the targets were of high quality, then I think it was a good thing. If you cannot justify to yourself that it is right to bear arms to defend your country or your position, then you have no right to do so. You do not bear arms not to take life. It’s the same for all the parties here whether it’s the Brits or us. That morality must equally come to bear on the RUC, the British Army and the British Government. It’s not just a one-way morality.
Seamus turned to Dermot for comfort in his grief over the death of his lover, but Dermot’s prison walls came between them.
I remember being in Portlaoise Prison and Seamus came on a visit after she had been killed. He cried, that man my brother cried on a visit with me, and I could not put my arms round him. I physically could not. There was nothing to stop me but I did not know what to do. I felt so ashamed afterwards because I did not put my arms round my own brother. He cried saying: ‘I will never get over her, never get over her.’ I couldn’t comfort him the way I wanted to. I remember when I got caught after being on the run and I was outside the courtroom and the cops said: ‘You have got a big reception committee waiting, Dermot.’ I was not sure if the crowd would be hostile or supportive, Longford was a sleepy town. As I was being brought in I spotted Seamus, there was a moment’s silence and then he clapped his hands and there was a big shout. Seamus shouted ‘Come on’ and the whole crowd erupted. He was always there for me and he had done the right things. And then when his fiancée was killed I could not comfort him. There was a prison guard there and if I had put my arms around him I would have probably started crying too. I was trying to keep my strength up.
Gibraltar is not a country, just an enclave of thirty thousand people crammed into an area of two and a quarter square miles and dominated by its history as a military garrison of the British armed forces. Farrell, Savage and McCann came to plant a bomb that would have killed British soldiers and murdered Gibraltarian civilians. No reasonable person could expect any relative of these people to be treated with sympathy. And so it was with Seamus, when he went to Gibraltar with Mairead’s brother and Sean Savage’s sister and their lawyer Paddy McGrory to question the Crown soldiers on their actions at the inquest. It was a difficult experience exacerbated by the antics of the British tabloid and broadsheet press, competing to out-do each other in the patriotic fervour of their ‘Why the Dogs Had to Die’ headlines. ‘We were followed everywhere we went by surveillance people. We even came close to assaulting some photographer over the things they were saying and photographs they were taking. They kept trying to imply we were on holiday.’
The harassment from MI5 and the British press was petty in comparison to the chilling drama of the courtroom as Seamus listened to the SAS men’s voices from behind the screen describing how they shot Mairead.
They were so cold and clinical about it that it was strange. It was as if he was describing having a cup of tea. Of course you were angry. We inadvertently saw the photographs of the death they gave Mariead and Dan; they just peppered their bodies. If they were that close to be able to shoot them like that, then they were close enough to arrest them. The officers [who controlled the operation by radio from a command point] were cold, disciplined, cynical, but their evidence was full of apparent contradictions. If you saw the size of the place and the resources that these people had at their disposal it would not have mattered if there had been a dozen IRA Volunteers, they still should have been arrested. Had they been armed you could have said maybe there was a chance of ‘suspicious movements’ but the only people armed were the Brits. It was murder, pure and simple.
In the course of his last interrogation, just a week before we talked, Seamus had remained silent during five days detention. His frustrated RUC interlocutors, in a bid to entice him into conversation, had asked if Seamus thought that the twenty-five years of IRA violence had achieved anything. They asked what he had got out of it; what personal satisfaction had being an IRA Volunteer brought him? Seamus had kept his silence – but they were good questions. I wondered if Seamus ever questioned the value of his involvement in the IRA.
‘Certainly, everyone has to reassess their position within the struggle at certain times, when grief comes to your own door or mistakes are being made or things are not going well. You have to sit back, think of things, and reassess your position. It’s an individual decision to partake in an act of republicanism, military or political.’
But the prison years and the murder of Mairead had not shaken Seamus’s faith. Like Pat before him Seamus was still viewed as a serious enough enemy of the British state to merit a personal mention of the House of Commons. In the spring of 1994 under the cloak of parliamentary immunity, Unionist MP David Trimble, using information presumably provided by the British security forces for whatever reason, identified Seasmus as being the Intelligence Officer of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade.
* * *
Five months after the Gibraltar inquest, Pat was killed. Lawyers had been indirectly threatened by police interrogators almost from the start of the Troubles but in the year prior to his murder the death threats intensified. Pat’s republican clients were warned by their RUC interrogators in Castlereagh detention centre that ‘Finucane is an IRA. He’s a dead man’; ‘Fucking Finucane’s getting took out, tell his brother [Seamus] that he’s nothing but scum and that he’s going to be taken out too’; ‘We’ll give Pat Finucane the same as Mairead Farrell got, we’ll just drop Pat’s name to the UDA.’17
Pat Finucane should have been under no illusions about the hatred felt towards him by the RUC. In 1984 the Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester Police, John Stalker, was sent to Northern Ireland to investigate six disputed killings of suspected IRA men by an SAS-trained RUC unit. The men’s families claimed their sons had been shot outright and that no attempt was made to arrest them. Stalker was tasked with examining whether or not the specialist RUC unit was operating an official but covert shoot-to-kill policy. He was removed from his own inquiry in 1986 in controversial circumstances and subsequently retired early. In 1988 he published an account of the investigation where he recalled a brief conversation with Pat Finucane in the main foyer of Crumlin Road Courthouse within sight of a group of uniformed RUC officers. Afterwards an RUC sergeant walked up to Stalker and denounced him for speaking to Finucane. ‘The solicitor is an IRA man – any man who represents IRA men is worse than an IRA man. His brother is an IRA man and I have to say that I believe a senior policeman of your rank should not be seen speaking to the likes of either of them. My colleagues have asked me to tell you that you have embarrassed all of us in doing that. I will be reporting this conversation and what you have done to my superiors,’ wrote Stalker, recalling the RUC man’s words and noting that he had never encountered such open hatred between police and a lawyer in his twenty-six years as a British police officer.18
Seamus knew about the threats through his IRA contacts and had long been concerned about Pat’s vulnerability in north Belfast, a predominantly Protestant area.
Long before they threatened Pat directly, Dermot and I had been on to him about moving out of north Belfast. There had been a lot of sectarian killings there, but Pat liked it and he would not move. We even discussed him getting a gun, carrying a licensed firearm, but Pat would not have a firearm in his house to protect himself. His refusal to do that explodes the whole myth that Pat was an IRA man. People on the outside may have seen us as one just because he represented IRA men and I was an IRA man but that would never have been the case.
Pat was thirty-nine when he was killed. He was a father figure to all of us, someone to look up to. He was probably too overbearing and domineering at times, although he was always like that even from schooldays. We would argue over things, he did not necessarily agree with what was happening. Pat had republican beliefs, nationalistic tendencies, but not enough for him to take up arms and kill people for it. Pat’s full-time life was the law, he loved it so he did. He formed a good team, barristers and solicitors, that was winning cases, making inroads into oppressive laws that were designed to put Republicans and activists away. And that was why they killed him.
Douglas Hogg did not get up in the House of Commons and make that speech without it being cleared by senior officials. I have no love for him, I have no love for the people who planned, orchestrated and executed Pat.
The first call Seamus made after ordering the RUC off the phone on the night of Pat’s death was to Martin.
I was in a neighbour’s house when someone rang and said Seamus was looking for me and it was urgent. I knew something was wrong. I went into panic and I was just shaking. I couldn’t put the phone down. I rang Pat’s and Seamus answered the phone and he told me Pat was dead. I was crying, it just screamed out of me, and I thumped the wall. He tried to tell me to control myself and said: ‘Where’s Ma? Where’s Ma?’ I said she is down at Mrs Gillen. ‘Get down there right away.’ When I walked into the house she saw the look on my face and just started screaming. I had nightmares about the way I would have reacted in the house if I had been there, if I had been shot. What would I have done if I heard the doors being smashed in? Would I have jumped through the window or out the back door? Who gives them the goddamn right to do that? What gives them the right to make threats? Pat had to be shot dead because he was too successful in exposing their violations, their abuses.
Dermot heard the news on the radio in the Republic’s high-security Portlaoise Prison where he was being held pending his extradition.
It was on the 9 pm news. I wasn’t really listening and then I heard the words ‘leading solicitor’ and ‘Finucane’. I had my own sad wee tears. When the comrades seen me do that they were all putting their arms around me. I know what it is like to cry and be really hurt and I also know that I have inflicted that pain on others. I do not want to go through that again. I also know that when I have talked about operations my eyes have lit up with excitement but that is because of the company, comrades talking of when we fought the enemy, like men talking of World War One or Two battles that they have been in. But I do not want any more death.
* * *
I met Geraldine Finucane in the Crown Bar in Belfast and over a few glasses of Guinness we discussed Pat. Geraldine, a handsome woman in her early forties, was still adjusting to her widowhood, still finding a place for herself in the world in the absence of her murdered husband, still coping with the awkwardness of lone dinner party invitations from reluctant hosts. It was clear that she still missed Pat, missed his energy, his anarchic obsession with the law, his clients and his soccer. Pat’s work had given them both a place in the world and all of that was lost at his death. Geraldine had been very strong at Pat’s funeral and she was no less strong now.
At the time of the funeral it was very hard for me to get a sense of what was happening because of my injuries. But before I left the house I called the children together and told them not to cry in public. ‘Outside there will be TV cameras, photographers, hundreds of people. I do not want those who did this to see how they have wrecked our lives. I don’t want you crying.’ Other people do cry on camera but I could not do that. It would seem wrong – maybe that is a weakness.
I asked Geraldine about the night she witnessed Pat’s murder. She said something quite strange and wonderful about the love that can exist between two people. ‘I was glad, not glad that it happened but glad that if it happened, it happened in front of me and not someone coming to my door saying Pat had been killed in some arsehole in the middle of nowhere. I was glad that I was with him.’
Dermot was denied compassionate leave to grieve with his family. For the following year he fought a lengthy extradition battle in the Irish Republic’s courts to avoid being returned to Long Kesh. Dermot’s defence team, originally led by Pat, argued that he faced a real risk of being beaten or tortured by prison guards for his part in the escape. The central pillar of his defence rested on transcripts of the 1988 test case for compensation brought in the Northern Irish courts by his brother on behalf of an H7 prisoner for injuries received as a result of prison officer beatings during the transfer of prisoners from H7 to H8. The Irish Supreme Court concluded that they could not accept the assurances of the Northern Irish prison system that Dermot Finucane would not be similarly abused and his fundamental human right not to be tortured violated. The Northern Irish Prison Service’s failure to discipline its own officers for the H7 beatings ultimately destroyed the Crown’s extradition case. Dermot was freed in March 1991.
He lives openly in Dublin and is a full-time worker at Sinn Fein’s Headquarters and in his own words is ‘an active member of the republican movement’. He is still wanted by the British authorities and cannot visit any British jurisdiction without risking arrest and imprisonment.
* * *
Partition has created two Irelands, however much the IRA wish to deny it, and two Irish souls. The southern soul is less concerned with the certainties of time and place, or ambition. It is harder to hold southerners to an appointment, or a deal, or determine what they think. Ironically, the northern soul is more British, harder, and seeks to classify the world in more precise terms; the IRA are good or the IRA are bad. Dublin is a world apart from the familiar streets of Belfast and Dermot freely admits he is often homesick. He is an exile in the capital city of the country he is fighting to unite. But Dermot is unrepentant about his life as an IRA Volunteer.
I did set out to fight them and I fought them. Even the political damage of the escape was tremendous; extradition had the two governments at loggerheads, militarily and politically, for months.
My family never started this, we never wanted this. It was the Brits who started harassing our John, put him in prison; John got out, died. They started harassing our Seamus, put him in prison, then they moved on to Martin. They wanted our Martin to work for them as an informer; he was never involved in anything so he fled to Europe. And then they started on me, put me in prison; I got out. And then they murdered our Pat.
But what was once the politics of family was now, in Dermot’s mind, the politics of nationalism.
It is unjust that someone else governs us. I think the Brits have made a bit of a mess of it from their involvement. I think our worst could only be as good as their best. I think as intelligent people, Catholics and Protestants, we are capable of doing it. I am just ordinary Joe Soap. But what I said to myself about the people I was up against was, ‘I am as good as you.’ That is how I approached it. And when I was being interrogated I looked them over and said, ‘I am better than you and you won’t bring me down.’ And I have no problem with our ability to partake in the rebuilding of our country. I see a lot of competent people around me, I also see a lot of incompetent people. Maybe we can do the job a lot better than the Brits are doing.
Britain is finished in Ireland. It’s over. It’s all a question of when, when do they decide to pull out. Why not sit down now and create the conditions where you can demilitarize the situation and set about bringing their departure so that no more people have to suffer and die? It is not as if we in Sinn Fein are going to create a coup d’état, take over in the North or take over in Ireland. That is a ridiculous idea. The British can very easily create the conditions where they can hand over power to the Free State Government in Ireland. In a new Ireland there would be a realignment of political forces and you would probably find Fine Gael and the Unionists finding common cause, the SDLP and Fianna Fail would join up, and you would probably find Sinn Fein on their own. It makes sense to have good neighbourly relations. The Troubles cost a billion a year. There is everything in it for the Brits to leave. The last two big bombs in London cost them hundreds of millions of pounds, the Baltic Exchange alone cost something like £635 million.19 That one bomb was the equivalent of what they had paid out in compensation in Northern Ireland for the last twenty years.
I do not recognize the Brit legitimacy in my country. I do not give a sweet fuck what the Brits in a sense impose. If it is against my will then I will rebel against it and so will an awful lot of people. The Brits have no right to be in our country. They have no more right to be there than they have a right to be in Australia or America or anywhere else.
* * *
Pat Finucane’s killers abandoned their hijacked taxi back on the fringes of the Loyalist Shankill Road; their journey of murder which began so long before in Percy Street had at last been completed and the Fenian enemy extirpated. Nothing remains of Number 78; the area has been redeveloped and the old street pattern broken, although the site of the once temporary barricades is marked in concrete and steel by the Peace Line that now severs the Falls from the Shankill like a prison wall. The red, white and blue kerbstones and the murals of masked UFF gunmen on every gable-end with their slogans – ‘There is no such thing as a nationalist area of Ulster, just areas of Ulster temporarily occupied by nationalists’ – proclaim Percy Street to be once more safely within the domain of Protestant Ulster.
But the other journey, the greater journey of the Finucane family from being on their knees in Percy Street to being at the heart of the IRA’s rebellion in the disputed province of Ulster, is far from over. At the end of my final interview with Dermot in the ramshackle room in Sinn Fein’s Dublin Headquarters, I stood up, made my goodbyes and walked towards the door of the room. As I was leaving I turned and caught a glimpse of Dermot framed, still, against the evening sky. There was the slight trace of a smile on the lips and his eyes were open, bright and sparkling. The murders, the killings, the pain, the prisons and the loss had somehow not diminished him. This IRA soldier, this inflictor of harm, this gunman and brother, was quietly and confidently waiting for the next onslaught. He still stood the ground, a rebel heart, and a very dangerous enemy of the Crown in Ireland.