I WAS born in 1954 in Tralee, County Kerry, in the Irish Republic. It was and still is an area with a strong republican tradition. After the treaty and the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922 the IRA and the new Free State Army fought a bitter civil war. That war was conducted with great savagery in Kerry. Less than three miles from my parents' house, eight IRA prisoners were blown to pieces by government forces in an official, sanctioned reprisal for the earlier IRA murder of a Free State Army officer.
Civil war bitterness was still very much alive in parts of Kerry in the 1950s. My father's side of the family was steeped in that tradition. He and his brother, active IRA men, were interned without trial in the Curragh military camp in the early 1940s. My father, several aunts and other family members have remained lifelong activists and supporters of the republican movement. That was the tradition and the family background into which I was born.
We were an ordinary working class family. We stood out in no regard other than that my father was a member of a small, essentially secret organisation which still harboured dreams of a 32 county republic. They believed that such a republic would only come about by armed force. Occasionally I came across guns, and once explosives, hidden in the house. Sometimes there were meetings in the house or in my grandmother's. We were always sent somewhere else when anything of that nature was taking place but we had at least a vague idea that something exciting or dangerous was happening. We knew that nothing of this was ever to be repeated to our friends.
Like the great mass of Irish people I was educated in my early years at school by nuns and Christian Brothers. The Brothers had a fierce nationalist ethos. "They saw themselves as the moral guardians of nationalist Ireland. It was a world of Gaelic games, the Irish language and endless songs and stories about noble Irish patriots and treacherous English. The treachery of the English was at the root of all of Ireland's ills.
The 1916 rebellion was celebrated With great gusto in 1966, when I was 12 years old. RTE television indulged in an orgy of adulation. Schools had special screenings of films on the rising. We played mock games of Irish versus the British. I always wanted to be James Connolly, the republican socialist executed by the British after the surrender of the rebels.
Less than two years after these celebrations the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland burst on to our television screens. In reality we understood little about the issues but our sympathies were firmly with the Catholics in Northern Ireland. When sectarian violence broke out in Belfast in 1969 there was a huge outpouring of emotion in the Republic. Soon Catholic refugees were being billeted in local houses, church property and the army barracks.
The IRA split and the Provisional IRA was formed an event which I now regard as the greatest tragedy in modern Irish history. That was not how I felt at the time, of course. I was 15 years old in 1970 and could not wait to enlist. My political views were certainly to the left of the leadership of the Provisional movement. Some of the overt militarism, bordering on fascism, did worry me. I saw the Provisionals as rather like a popular front which would sweep away partition and the British presence. We would then have a realignment of the left in Irish politics. After that it was full steam down the road to the socialist republic.
There you have the sum total of the political literacy of a 15 year old would be Irish revolutionary.
Like most others of my age in the Republic I knew nothing of Protestants or unionists other than that they were known as the Ascendancy. They stole the land from the Catholics and persecuted them. The Protestant working class in Northern Ireland were simply dupes of the unionist ruling classes and the British government.
Our naivety and ignorance were incredible. We would throw the British out and then the poor stupid Prods would see the error of their ways and join us in a new utopian Ireland. In truth we gave little or no consideration to the question of what to do with Protestants. We were ready to fight a war against the British just like our forefathers had. This time we would finish the business. British rule in Ireland would end for all time.
I joined the IRA in Tralee. My family background was such that I had little difficulty in joining it was positively expected. It was not long before young IRA recruits in Northern Ireland were coming to Kerry for training in the use of weapons and explosives. Even though I was very young I found myself actively involved in this part of IRA activity. Needless to say school appeared pretty boring by comparison and I soon lost interest in it.
The IRA recruits from Northern Ireland were, in the main, ordinary young men such as you would find in any city, town, or rural area. They wore the same clothes, listened to the same music and followed the same soccer clubs. They were more likely to spend their time arguing about the merits of Manchester United or Liverpool than politics. That came later, after exposure to the Provisional ideologues in Long Kesh and other prisons.
They saw their duty as protecting their areas Catholic ghettos in Belfast and Derry from attack by Protestants. The Provisional IRA was forged out of inter communal sectarian warfare. The vast majority of the recruits had no coherent political outlook. They mainly despised politics. Youthful fascination with guns and bombs and a desire to get even with Prods that was their motivation. Ill educated, ill equipped, they were easy meat for the simple answer. The hard leadership of the Provisional IRA, mainly older men who had waited all their lives for the opportunity, gave them the guns and told them the Brits and unionists were to blame for all their problems.
The IRA gave these young men a sense of belonging, status in their community, and a purpose, a cause to believe in and to fight and die for. These were young men without much hope of employment, who had seen their communities devastated in sectarian attacks. Now they were hitting back their pride and dignity were restored. It would be utterly wrong to see these young men universally as lurid, evil psychopaths. That they carried out the most awful acts of violence is beyond question. But the real blame lies with their leadership; the old republican/nationalists who instilled discipline, obedience and a reverence for republican structures and traditions that allowed young men to kill even former friends for minor transgressions of the republican code.
ON April 20th 1972 I was preparing bomb equipment for a training camp due to begin within days. In the shed where I had been working seconds before, there was a major explosion. I escaped from the blast with just a few cuts and minor bruises but I was arrested and charged with possession of explosives. While I was on remand in Limerick prison the Dublin government introduced the non jury Special Criminal Court, which sentenced me to six months. That was the sort of sentence IRA prisoners could expect in those days: there was still a lot of sympathy in the Republic. The British Embassy had been burned down in Dublin following Bloody Sunday.
When I was released I settled back into the same routine. One IRA meeting in Kerry in that period stick in my mind. It was attended by a Dominican pries who came from Northern Ireland here were perhaps 39 people present. The priest told us that British soldiers were raping Catholic women in Belfast. I did not really believe him, reasoning that if such activity was common the huge media circus then covering Northern Ireland could not miss it. Such pep talks hyped up the hate and allowed people to excuse the most awful atrocities committed by their own side.
In June 1973 I was sent to Donegal to work in an IRA bomb factory. The idea was for me to get experience and then train others so that more such factories could be set up further south. Like most IRA schemes, in those days it never quite came to full fruition. I was soon back in Kerry but this time I was working for IRA General Headquarters Staff, running a training camp. Many IRA men who later became well known figures passed through that camp. Some are dead, others are in jail, others, I suppose, have long since left the IRA.
In May 1974 I was sent to the Mid Ulster Brigade of the IRA. On May 2nd, along with up to 40 IRA men from the East Tyrone Brigade, I took part in an attack on an army/UDR base at the Deanery in Clogher, Co Tyrone. There was a heavy gun battle which lasted up to 20 minutes before we withdrew. We made our way to safe houses over the border in Monaghan. It was not until we listened to the early morning radio news that we heard that a UDR Greenfinch named Eva Martin had been killed. It would be wrong to say that any of us were disappointed at the news.
I stayed in Tyrone until about the August of 1975. During that period I took part in about 70 attacks, mainly against members of the security forces. In one of those attacks I, along with two others, murdered a detective inspector in the RUC special branch called Peter Flanagan. We shot him dead in a public house in Omagh, Co Tyrone. The two people who carried out this murder with me were both younger than me. Both were from Belfast. The driver was little more than a young girl. The other was 17 years old and had escaped from youth custody in Belfast while charged with murdering a soldier. He was later arrested in 1975 and charged with attempted murder.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment and is still in custody today. He was transferred to Northern Ireland and will probably be released in the next year or so. He has never been charged with the murder which he committed with me.
BY the time that I murdered Flanagan, doubts were already forming in my mind about the real nature of the Provisional IRA. IRA volunteers in Tyrone were on the whole far more sectarian than I was or ever could be. Their Catholicism was of a virulent and hate filled brand. It is, in retrospect, hard to see how it could have been otherwise. Militant Irish nationalism and Irish Catholicism have a deep and complex relationship, nowhere more so than in rural areas of Northern Ireland like Tyrone, Fermanagh and Armagh.
During this period I was involved in recruiting new IRA volunteers. One of our main safe houses was a parochial house outside Omagh. Sometimes we used that house to initiate new members. Imagine the effect on a young, uneducated country lad brought to his parochial house under cover of darkness to be inducted
To Weekend 11