If stupidity is defined by the inability to connect an oft-repeated policy with the failure that it always produces, then Irish republicanism is easily the stupidest political movement in Europe. The claim of Irish republicanism is that it unites Catholic, Protestant and dissenter under the common title, Irishman. This is mountebank bluster. In fact, Irish republicanism usually unites people under the common title, corpse.
Brendan Hughes truly personified this bloodthirsty idiocy. He was a major player in the IRA campaign from 1970-1996, and his is the most important voice heard in Voices from the Grave, in which the journalist Ed Moloney has sewn together the tapes of interviews recorded with Hughes and with the loyalist terrorist leader David Irvine. It was a mistake to bring the two narratives together. There is too much in Hughes’ account which requires detailed deconstruction, while loyalism’s paramilitary tradition is too shallow and reactive to reward much examination.
Hughes’s recollections confirm the involvement of Gerry Adams MP in some of the most heinous events of the Troubles. The interviews took place before the revelations that Adams’s father and brother were child-rapists, and that Adams had covered up for them both. Not even Ian Paisley’s most lurid fantasies about Irish republicanism could have invented such depravity: yet such is the elasticity of the conscience of Irish republicanism, and the slavishness of its votaries, that Adams remains the Hero of West Belfast.
Now, I rather suspect that I introduced Ed Moloney to journalism, when he was a lecturer at Belfast Technical College. Either way, I have known him a long time, so what follows doesn’t in the least please me, because he has done some vital analyses of the IRA. But I have to pull rank here. He has accepted some assertions from Hughes about events before his time that are simply wrong. They have thus merely joined the larder of republican mythology, whose shelves are endlessly being restocked with false memory and imaginative fabrication.
We get a glimpse of this demented pantry with Hughes’s adoring references to the ‘famous’ Raglan Street Ambush in Belfast back in, well, yes, 1921. This actually consisted of a gun-attack on a Crossley Tender and the murder of a single police officer, (Thomas Conlon, a southern Irish Catholic, as it happens). Protestant extremist reprisals on Catholic areas then led to 20 deaths. The lesson should surely be: do not kill members of the security forces within such a bitterly divided community. Instead, republicans invariably settle down to a decade or so of whingeing, balladic victimhood, before starting more of the same.
Presumably misled by Hughes, Moloney unintentionally refers to the pogrom as two separate events, one (wrongly) in 1920, and (correctly) in l921. How perfect. For doubling the victimhood, without accepting any responsibility, is the quintessence of the republican mentality. And to the lays of ancient Belfast, Hughes’ own narrative has added some more modern mythic victories. Space considerations do not allow me to ridicule in detail the much vaunted ‘coup’ against British military intelligence, in what is known as The Four Square Laundry affair. One soldier was killed, as the Army admits. That’s it: no more. I know. As a young journalist hot on the trail of a story, I broke into the abandoned flat in Antrim Road which had allegedly been the scene of an IRA massacre of British operatives: to my immense distress, I found no blood, no bullet-holes, no disturbance, just shiny MoD toilet paper in the loo, and tins of MoD beans in the kitchen.
Hughes triumphantly speaks of the IRA ‘execution’ of two unnamed SAS captives: let me name them now — Captain Dent and Sergeant Davies. Fantasy again. Both men escaped and are, so far as I know, alive today. The greatest hallucination of Hughes’ recollections was the non-existent conspiracy which led to the actual murder of eight ‘British agents’ (the Heatherington ‘gang’) by republican and loyalist terrorists, working together, in an ecumenical project more homicidally ludicrous than I can describe here. One of the IRA interrogators told me later: ‘We kept torturing them till they told us what we wanted to hear. And it was all shite. But then we nutted [shot] them anyway.’
Quite so. As the deservedly melancholic Hughes ruefully reflects upon the pagan epoch of 1970-96, ‘as everything has turned out, not one single death was worth it’. Well, what a surprise. Yet in 2016 the Irish government in Dublin will once again be doing a voodoo dance to celebrate the centenary of the birth of all this moral and intellectual gibberish: the 1916 Rising. And this is one reason why the IRA still exists — the seeds of its continual revival lie are endlessly re-sown by the vain- glorious rodomontade of Irish constitutional politics.
Kevin Myers’s Watching the Door: Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast is published by Atlantic at £8.99.