Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland by Ed Moloney Read Free Book Online Page A

and when troops escorted the Orangemen into the estate, there was intense rioting that lasted several days.
    Eight weeks or so later, in June, Ballymurphy was caught up in the city-wide disturbances that had followed the ‘Siege of St Matthew’s’ and the Ardoyne gun battles. This time, however, the rioting in the estate lasted six months. Not once during that time, however, did the Ballymurphy IRA fire a shot. Instead there were long nights of fierce hand-to-hand fighting between locals and British riot squads whose cumulative effect was to radicalise the whole community and entice scores of young men and women into the ranks of the IRA. The decision to stop Brendan Hughes and his squad firing on the British military during the April riots was part of the thinking that would, by the end of 1970, make the IRA an integral, organic part of life in Ballymurphy and the IRA units among the strongest in the North. It was an early example of Gerry Adams’s strategic talents, a characteristic that eventually would make him the Provisional movement’s dominating figure.
    After a few months as a lowly Volunteer, Brendan Hughes began climbing the ranks of D Company. First he was made its Training Officer, or T/O, and by early 1971 he was promoted to Quarter Master, or QM, which meant he had to source weapons and explosives,provide them for operations and then locate hiding places for the weaponry when it was not in use. No issue was more divisive in the IRA than weapons, the lack of them especially – and that did not change after the split. Inadequate weaponry had created decisive tensions between Belfast IRA activists and the Dublin leadership forcing a nasty split to the surface and it was much the same afterwards. The belief that the Dublin leaders never properly understood the military needs of the Northern units, and of Belfast in particular, persisted inside the Provos and deepened as the fighting in the North intensified, a reflection of a deeper resentment of all things Southern that had its roots in the belief that the North had been forsaken in the years after partition. Eventually this sentiment produced what was effectively a Northern takeover of the IRA in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the Provisionals’ early days, this grudge against the Dublin leadership sent Brendan Hughes on two missions abroad to find the guns that the Belfast IRA wanted and that Dublin either couldn’t or wouldn’t supply; one was a miserable failure, the other a spectacular, transformative success.
    … it was very rare for someone like me, a QM, to travel abroad to engage in arms procurement, but what I think needs to be made clear here is that even in the early days, 1970, 1971, there was a sort of resentment towards the Dublin leadership … we believed that they could have been doing a whole lot more in procuring weapons and stuff for us. We were quite prepared and willing to carry out the operations but we were very, very badly armed. Anyway, one time I got a contact in Glasgow, a person who told me that they could get explosives. So I travelled to Glasgow, this was in 1971, and I met this little old man in a pub. He was a peterman, a safe blower. He was introduced to me as: ‘This wee man is the best peterman in Glasgow.’ I was there for three or four days waiting for this meeting that we arranged, and eventually word came back that it was set up, so I bought a car in Glasgow to transport the stuff. I got into the car with the peterman. I was driving, and we drove to this estate in Glasgow. I’d been given this address but I hadn’t told the peterman where we  were going. The other contact, one of the family members, brought me. And as soon as we got to the street, the peterman says, ‘Get the fuck out of here’; apparently we had been dealing with Loyalists. The peterman actually knew the house that we were going to, and he believed it was a set-up. I got the hell out of the place, got rid of the car and back to Belfast