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

… a few weeks later, the pub that I had met the peterman in was blown away .
     
    Using the contacts he had made as a merchant seaman, Hughes had also set up an arms-smuggling route from New York, using the Cunard Line’s famous luxury flagship, the Queen Elizabeth 2 , to ferry weapons from the United States. The QE2 had just begun service between Southampton in England and New York in May 1969, only seven months before the Provisionals came into being. The ship’s crew was over a thousand strong and, thanks to West Belfast’s links to the Merchant Navy, quite a few of them had strong ties to the IRA.
    We had people working on the QE2, and we had people in America. The Lower Falls is well known [as] a catchment area for seamen; a fair percentage of men from that area went to sea [and] I knew a good few of them. Some were actually in the IRA, one or two of them worked on the QE2. I went to Southampton, put together a wee squad, all Belfast men. They weren’t all members of the IRA but supporters. Belfast men practically controlled Southampton [docks] at the time. Gabriel Megahey * was one of the main people there at the time. He was later done for smuggling missiles from America. 18 We had a line of communication from New York to Southampton and Belfast via one phone. Phones were not common then in houses in the Falls; very few people had one and the particular phone that we used was Governor Ward’s; the family [was] a notoriously hard- fighting family. The messages were always in code, so, when we got word from America to the Guv’s house, that the stuff was on board, I would then go to Southampton and arrange for transport. I would drive into the docks, all pre-arranged through contacts in Southampton … and I would actually get onto the boat to take the weapons off. Normally the shipments would have been five, six, eight or ten weapons at the most, maybe a couple of hand grenades, that sort of stuff. You’re talking about seamen going ashore in New York, carrying the stuff on board, hiding it in their lockers, or on the boat somewhere, and then having it ready for us [to hide in] … the panels of cars. We would have hired cars out of McCauslands (a Belfast rental agency) … what’s important here as well is that D Company always had a special relationship with Belfast Brigade. You might wonder how was D Company getting away with all this? Well, D Company was the heart of things in Belfast; it was not on a solo run. No, it was all above board, because it had to be financed. But it was outside of the realm of GHQ [in Dublin]. Belfast was attempting to up the war and GHQ were lagging well behind .
     
    It was unusual for a section of the IRA such the Belfast Brigade to seek weapons in such an autonomous fashion. Opportunistic acquisition of weapons was one thing, but well-planned and resourced operations such as that set up in Southampton were a different matter. Acquiring and supplying the IRA with weapons and explosives was the responsibility of the Quarter Master General, a member of the IRA’s General Headquarters staff (GHQ), which was answerable to the organisation’s military commander, the Chief of Staff, who in turn reported to the policy-making, seven-man Army Council. The GHQ also consisted of other departments, such as Intelligence, Engineering, Operations and so on, each one of which co-ordinated activity in their speciality downwards to the grassroots. So, once the QMG had acquired weapons they would be distributed, via Brigade, Battalion and Company Quarter Masters such as Brendan Hughes, to the units on the ground and hiding places found for them. That is the way it was supposed to work and so the Southampton and Glasgowoperations represented a usurping of GHQ functions, effectively an act of defiance of the national leadership.
    That such bravado was, by the middle of 1971, part of the way the Belfast Brigade behaved was due in no small measure to the removal of Billy McKee as Belfast Commander