Continued from Weekend 1
into the IRA. Try telling him that the Church, was not on his side.
One of the local priests usually called to another house in that area where I and other IRA men often stayed. He took great delight in asking us to relate our latest escapades. He was also forever passing on information about local Protestants: usually members or ex members of the UDR or RUC. At least one of these was later murdered by the Provisional IRA.
This was, in reality, a war against Protestants. There was a deep, ugly hatred, centuries old, behind all of this. The Prods had the better, farms, the better jobs that belonged by right to the Catholics, and the Catholics wanted them. If I wanted to attack a British army patrol or barracks, the local Provos wanted to shoot a part time UDR or police reservist. They wanted - to murder their neighbours. They wanted to drive the Protestants off the land and reclaim what they believed was their birthright. Gradually the reality was getting through to me. This was no romantic struggle against British imperialism but a squalid sectarian war directed against the Protestant people of Northern Ireland.
In March or April of 1975, I was in a flat in Monaghan town. The flat was a base for IRA men from the East Tyrone Brigade. That evening there were perhaps eight people, all full time IRA activists, all on the run from Northern Ireland. I was making tea when a news item on the television about the death of an RUC woman in a bomb explosion was greeted with: "I hope she's pregnant and we get two for the price of one".
I felt utterly sickened and revolted. More so even when I realised who had spoken - a Tyrone man who was second in command of the Provisional IRA and a man I held in the highest regard; a man to whom I had thought seriously about addressing my doubts and fears. I went to another room where I just wanted to cry my eyes out. That man later became the chief of staff of the Provisional IRA. He was chief of staff when the present peace process began. Small wonder that I have serious doubts about the Provisional IRA's commitment to peace.
Shortly afterwards I went home to Tralee and resigned quietly from the IRA. I just cited personal reasons. People probably thought I was just tired and needed a break. I was not yet 21. Shortly after, I went to London where I started an office and industrial cleaning business and got married. I kept in touch with events in Ireland and wondered what to do, if anything, about what I had been involved in.
The hatred of informers is buried so deep in the Irish nationalist psyche to be almost incomprehensible to people not from that tradition. Informers had always betrayed the Irish. Whenever the Irish plotted a rebellion, the English had an informer to warn them. In my family the postman was regarded as a potential police informer. The fear, hatred and loathing is impossible to explain. Yet that is what I decided to become, and I am glad I did.
My wife and I moved to Ireland in 1979 and I quickly rejoined the IRA. As soon as I had done so I contacted a detective whom I knew to be efficient, tight mouthed and opposed politically and morally to the Provisional IRA. I worked with him for six years. It was a time of often frantic activity for me and there were few areas of Sinn Fein or IRA activity that I did not gain access to in those years.
We had many successes against the IRA in that period. Some I can mention now, others: have to wait for another day. My work brought me into contact with almost every IRA department and most republican leaders. We broke up and captured IRA training camps, foiled many IRA operations. One was a plot to kill the Prince and Princess of Wales at a charity concert in the Dominion Theatre in the West Ends of London during the British general election in 1983. It was also intended that I should plant 16 small bombs on beaches. This was based on a similar type of operation carried out by the Basque separatist group ETA on Spanish beaches.
The plot to murder the prince and princess was intended as retaliation for the deaths of the hunger strikers of 1981. I was to place a bomb containing roughly 20 pounds of frangex in the toilet at the rear of the royal box. I went into the theatre and knew the plan was feasible. Buried behind tiles and equipped with a 32 day delay timer it would have killed or injured anybody in the immediate area. The Garda officer that I worked with came secretly to Liverpool to see me. We devised a plan which we hoped would foil the attacks and allow me to avoid IRA suspicion and continue to work against them.
A couple of evenings later Scotland Yard called a late night news conference. Knowing that it was to take place I left England and went to France the day before. Commander William Hucklesby, then in charge of the anti terrorist squad, named me and said that I was part of an IRA team ready to kill a prominent politician in the run up to the election.
In such a manner the attack was averted and I was able to return to Ireland, reputation enhanced, having escaped the clutches of the enemy. There was so much activity in that period that I can only give a general account here. Another event should serve to give some idea of the damage done to the IRA in this period.
IN 1984 the Provisional IRA invested a lot of time and money in America. They conspired with a gang of drug smugglers, pimps and loan sharks from the Boston area to assemble a large quantity of weapons and smuggle them to Ireland. They spent about £2 million putting the shipment of some seven tons of arms, ammunition and explosives together. In September a trawler called the Valhalla sailed from the Boston area heading for Ireland. On board, along with some of the Boston gang, was a former US marine and now IRA volunteer.
Waiting for the Valhalla off the Kerry coast in an area known as the Porcupine Bank was a smaller Kerry based trawler called the Marita Ann. I kept the Garda informed of every detail about the operation. After the weapons were loaded on to the Marita Ann, an operation mostly overseen by an RAF Nimrod, it headed for the Kerry coast. It was ambushed by an Irish navy frigate with Garda officers on board. All the weapons were recovered, and the crew captured. On board was one of the most senior men in the IRA. Also there was the US marine, who had come with the Valhalla. Its crew were later arrested in America, along with other members of the gang who had conspired to gather the weapons.
I was particularly pleased to have played a major part in foiling such a dangerous IRA plot. Irish American romantic views of Ireland have contributed greatly to the Provisional IRA's capacity to murder. I was glad that this time their bloody and ill considered plans had come to nothing.
By 1985 I was responsible for the IRA in the south of Ireland. That meant that I was a member of the IRA's GHQ staff, the grouping that runs the IRA on a daily basis. This brought me into daily contact with many of the IRA leadership. I was familiar with most aspects of IRA activity - finance, engineering, training, and the England department in particular. I also met the chief of staff almost weekly. He was the man from Co Tyrone who had hoped the dead policewoman was pregnant.
I was also a member of the Sinn Fein national executive. That brought me into regular contact with people such as Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Pat Doherty. It is interesting now to recall my impressions of those national executive meetings and the personalities so prominent in the present peace process. Everybody knew nothing of any real importance would be decided at those meetings. Sinn Fein is not like normal democratic parties. The decisions that matter are taken elsewhere, by the IRA army council.
What struck me most of all was the degree of control exercised at those meetings by Adams and McGuinness. The level of political debate was very poor. Imagine a group of student Trots addicted to romantic nationalism and the whole thing glued together by the most awful elitism. I sometimes wondered what the reaction of Labour MPs and supporters in Britain who seemed to see the Provisionals as akin to the ANC would have been to the awful drivel that passed for political debate among the republican leadership behind closed doors.
Early in 1981, my wife and I separated. We remained good friends and divorced amicably in 1987. In late 1981 I met and fell in love with an English woman who lived in Kerry. Our daughter was born in June 1985, one week after I was elected as a Sinn Fein local councillor in Tralee. Later that year it became obvious that I was being viewed with a certain amount of suspicion by some local republicans. I took a backward step but realised that sooner rather than later I was going to have to answer some very difficult questions; my girlfriend also. Being English was not going to help her.
I decided that it was time to move. We left Ireland in November of that year and stayed in England over Christmas. I was introduced by the Metropolitan police to MI5 in London in January and moved at their request to Holland. My girlfriend and daughter joined me a couple, of weeks later. I met the MI5 for regular debriefing sessions until September 1986, and we returned to England in November of that year.
Two years later I walked into Tunbridge Wells police station in Kent and admitted my involvement in the two murders committed in Northern Ireland in 1974. Two RUC officers came to the station the next day and I returned to Northern Ireland with them that evening.
MY reasons for giving myself up were fairly straightforward. I wanted to give evidence against the IRA leadership both in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. I had no doubt that had I been allowed to I could have crippled the IRA's capacity to murder people. It quickly became apparent to me, if not to the RUC officers dealing with the case, that I was never going to be allowed to give evidence. I can only speculate as to the reasons.
In May 1990 I pleaded guilty at Belfast Crown Court to the two murders and 60 or so related terrorist attacks which I had carried out in Tyrone in 1974-75. I was sentenced to life imprisonment plus 500 or so years in total. I am now in Maghaberry prison in Northern Ireland where I am held in a special unit set aside for people at serious risk from paramilitary organisations. I am not allowed to write or speak publicly in any detail about this, or indeed about my time in prison in general. Were I to do so it is possible that I would not be allowed to write publicly again while in prison.
I now spend my time writing, which is what I have always wanted to do. While working against, the IRA it was not possible for me to say or write what I wanted to or read the books I wanted to read - that was a hard part of it, spending all, my time in the company of people I either disliked or loathed. I am working on some poetry, some short stories and a novel, which I hope will shed some light on the real nature of extreme Irish nationalism. I am also working on a book, about my time in the IRA.
FOR now, I am frightened about the peace process, about where it is taking us. I spend my time explaining to people prepared to listen just what it is that the Provisional IRA are up to. Provisionalism is nothing more than extreme nationalism, an ugly creation that will not be appeased. The real target is Irish nationalism, north and south of the border. I remember the days when the Provisional leadership seriously discussed killing John Hume, regarding him and the SDLP as the only thing stopping their domination of Northern nationalists.
They are a little more sophisticated now. They will kill him instead with kindness and soft words of ceasefire and compromises. They intend to poison Irish nationalism until no compromise with unionists is possible. They want to be the conscience of Irish nationalism, forcing nationalists to move further to the extreme to keep the nationalist consensus alive. People in Britain would do well to remember these words: far from being a democratic socialist organisation, the Provisionals are a collection of extreme nationalists, neo Stalinists and thinly disguised fascists. What holds them together is hatred of the British and unionists.
Gerry Adams's concept of a pan nationalist front is the most dangerous strategy ever devised by the Provisionals and has within it the potential for violence on a scale at least as bad as anything that has gone before. We are far from peace and far away from any solution to the problems of Northern Ireland.
Instead of moving forward we are moving back into tribalism. The Provisionals have no intention of compromising with unionists. They see the problem as the unionist problem. They want to use a nationalist alliance to force the British government to abandon unionists. Then they can be dealt with. I wish I could be confident about the future, but I have sat behind too many closed doors with too many of the present leadership to be fooled by the smooth presentation.
I would like to finish by paying tribute to Conor Cruise O'Brien. When I found myself questioning my deeply held beliefs in the mid 1970s, I did not have the intellectual capacity to formulate my thoughts clearly. His speeches and his writings were giving form to my questions. Without his unknowing help I could never have pulled myself away from the fundamentalist slime. He is also surely the bravest intellectual in the history of the Irish Republic. Agree or disagree with him, his courage can surely not be questioned.
Today I am neither nationalist nor unionist. They are essentially tribal terms and I want no part of tribalism. I am concerned that people should be allowed to make their choices free from fear and aggression. Therefore I am for peace and against pan nationalism.