If you ever meet Denis Bradley, he will comes over as plain-speaking and somewhat war-weary. This timely book explains why.
Bradley was a Catholic priest in Derry until 1981, witnessing the emergence of the Provisional IRA and the worst years of the Troubles. While he recognises that his priesthood was central to the trust he inspired in government representatives and paramilitaries, Bradley is critical of the church’s frequent failure to engage politically and thinks it has not yet presented “a theological and spiritual response appropriate and challenging to a society in conflict”.
He ministered to the dead and dying of Bloody Sunday in 1972 and still despairs about how the media swept in, blunt and insensitive. In its effort at neutrality, the BBC based half the programme in Derry, the other on the Shankill Road in Belfast, “pitting a loyalist community who had little knowledge of Derry” against “a nationalist/republican community who were still in shock and still grieving”. It was a political decision, he thinks, and notes the embarrassment he saw in the producer’s eyes.
His priestly position also provided access for security force members caught up in the post-Bloody Sunday mayhem. He tells of the distraught young army captain, recently posted, who called to unburden himself. Most revealing is his own friendship with Frank Lagan, local RUC superintendent and one of the few Catholics in the force. Lagan understood Irish history and the context of the Troubles and Bradley credits him with the idea of a “backchannel” between government and IRA, the 30-year process which eventually brought peace.
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At times this book is quite the page-turner, nowhere more than the account of the author’s long relationship with Martin McGuinness, whose wedding he conducted and whose family he had known since childhood. We hear also the inside story of the secret talks with MI6 officer Michael Oatley, the “Mountain Climber”. Oatley is portrayed here as an unusual British diplomat who really loved Northern Ireland and returned for McGuinness’s funeral in 2017.
Bradley takes us through the secret negotiations producing the short-lived IRA ceasefire of 1975 and how the younger northern IRA leaders replaced the older, who he depicts as akin to spoilt mafia godfathers. The breakdown of that ceasefire ushered in those soul-destroying decades of the Troubles, with “spiralling violence ... political vacuum ... also a maelstrom of moral confusion for many people, me included”, the author admits. It would take 16 years for another ceasefire to emerge. By then the climate had changed, not least in IRA thinking.
As Bradley recalls, McGuinness had been hostile to the 1975 ceasefire and uninterested in politics. But in a conversation between the two in the early 1990s McGuinness said they had to become peacemakers and move away from violence. I was part of the Opsahl Commission at the same time and I came away with the same conclusion.
Bradley returned to the backchannel and tells the inside story of the famous “the war is over” letter, penned, he relates, by those in the backchannel rather than the IRA. It helped unlock movement on the British side and again there is riveting detail here on the high-octane risks of those involved, not least by John Major and John Hume.
Hume had been Bradley’s history teacher at St Columb’s and an inspiring one by his account. Hume was now one of the “big hitters” needed to move peace negotiations forward. Here we learn of Hume’s incredible vulnerability, taking personal risks to meet the IRA, his own party “restless”, the “Southern Irish media” negative and hostile, often abandoned in public denials by republicans and government alike, who could “luxuriate in having a secret liaison while maintaining an opposite public position”.
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Bradley would go on to participate in post-Patten policing reforms and the still relevant, though shelved, Eames-Bradley report on dealing with the past. So his conclusions on “legacy” are pertinent at a time when the current British Government’s Legacy Act has cynically pulled down the shutters on dealing with the past. But when historians can properly deal with the legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles, without such political controls, Bradley’s memoir will show how there were good people throughout, who tried and often succeeded in making a difference.
If I have any criticism, it is of the publisher for not giving us an index or maps to help those of us less familiar with Derry. Even so, the no-frills account presented here is masterly and deeply moving.
