The stories we must never forget

Peadar Whelan rediscovered his reading bug this year and, with the countdown to Christmas well started, he makes recommendations for a range of books that could just be the stocking filler for the aspiring republican historian in your life.

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Once when talking to Gerry Kelly about his book ‘Escape’, the West Belfast man said, “There’s a book in everyone” and I know that Kelly, as well as writing fairly prolifically, always encourages others to “tell their story”.

And if there is a book in everybody and everyone should tell their story, it’s important that we make sure that there is an audience willing to read them. It is important that we read books and stories from a republican perspective that tell stories that won’t make it into the mainstream.

Recently, I have taken to reading with an enthusiasm that had waned over the years. I remember back to when the Blanket Protest ended and receiving books, denied to us while on protest, and people read voraciously as if we had to read every book ever printed.

It was like being back at school and remembering the thrill of learning new words, discovering that wee bit of knowledge that revealed more of the world we inhabited.

It’s probably no coincidence then that a number of the books I have picked up are the memoirs of former prisoners, most of whom spent many years in the H-Blocks and indeed in Laurence McKeown’s case 70 days on hunger strike.

So rather than review the books I’ve read, I hope to give people a flavour of what I found interesting and informative; because in all cases, the books I’ve read informed me in some way or another.

Some of the books lay on the shelf for a while as “I hadn’t the time” to read them but, in the case of ‘Burnt Out’ by Michael McCann, published to mark the 50th anniversary of the pogroms in Belfast, the narrative is still important in the context of the present polemic/furore ignited (no pun intended), by Michelle O’Neill’s comment earlier in the year when she stated that there was “no alternative” to the armed struggle.

McCann’s ‘Burnt Out’ and Brian McKee’s ‘Ardoyne ’69: Stories of Struggle and Hope’ chronicle those days in August 1969 when the RUC, in unison with loyalist gangs and I include the B-Specials in that description of loyalist gangs, laid waste to large swathes of nationalist Belfast.

Whereas McCann draws heavily on ‘official’ British government reports such as the Scarman and Cameron Reports that investigated the pogroms, McKee’s book is a collection of interviews with people who not only witnessed but were directly involved and affected by the onslaught against Ardoyne that left two residents, Samuel McLarnon and Micheal Lynch, dead.

Among the interviewees are Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane, the leader of the IRA prisoners in Long Kesh during the 1981 Hunger Strike, and Brian McCargo, who went on to join the RUC, who both wore the colours of Ardoyne Kickhams! Former President Mary McAleese also recounts her memories of the period.

I also re-read Ciarán de Bároid’s ‘Ballymurphy and the Irish War’. The way the author dovetails the political events of the late 1960s through the 70s and 80s giving the reader the very real sense of how the war came to the nationalist people of the North through the actions of the Orange State and its forces, legal and extra-judicial. 

Following on from Gerry Kelly’s advice, everyone has a book in them, a plethora of books penned by former republican prisoners came onto my radar. Kelly’s own ‘Playing My Part’ describes in graphic detail how he and other republican captives including Marion and Dolours Price were force fed while on hunger strike in England.

Likewise, Laurence McKeown’s account of his republican life that led to his incarceration in the H-Blocks and hunger strike ordeal, spending 70 days without food before his mother authorised the medical intervention that would save his life, is so revealing and informative.

Jim ‘Jaz’ McCann’s ‘6,000 Days’, a record of time spent on protest, his participation in the Great Escape of 1983 is important because it is, on one level, his story but also that of hundreds of other Blanket protesters.

On the other hand, Eoghan ‘Gino’ Mac Cormaic, who is in my view a wordsmith extraordinaire combines the cynical humour of the Blanketmen with the raw determination of the POWs in his ‘On the Blanket … An A to Z of Prison Resistance’.

The story of his sister visiting him in hospital, recounted on page 130, captures the humour and pathos of it all!

‘The Armagh Women: The Story of Protests in Armagh Women’s Prison’ is the account of resistance by republican women POWs down through the decades. 

Written by Gerry Adams and Richard McAuley, the book exposes a brutal regime of bigoted screws while describing the various, violent strategies deployed by the British to break the women through all phases of the struggle from the days of interment in the 70s to the no wash protest and hunger strike.

Criminalisation was the battleground. When Armagh was mothballed and the new Maghaberry opened with its new regime of brutality - the strip search - the physical, psychological, and sexual assaults on the women intensified. A CD of Christy Moore singing his classic protest song ‘On the Bridge’ accompanies the publication.

Síle Darragh’s ‘John Lennon’s Dead’ is as good an eyewitness account of the times as any given that Síle replaced Mairead Farrell as OC of the POWs when Mairead joined the 1980 hunger strike alongside Mary Doyle and Mairead Nugent.

Reading Paddy McMenamin’s story in ‘From Armed Struggle to Academia’ was a really enlightening read for me as it is a book written by someone whose life traversed so many aspects of the conflict from growing up in Turf Lodge in West Belfast to academic achievement and life in Galway. It is a story of a person who went through so many hoops, politically and personal.

Unsurprisingly, the issue of legacy isn’t far from the surface these days, also unsurprisingly the actions of unionist state forces isn’t far behind it. A really good addition to the genre of legacy/collusion is Oliver McMullan’s 'State Murder in the Glens'.

As with so much of the nationalist experience, the killings of five men by British state forces in the Glens of Antrim in 1922 is written out of history. That all five were IRA Volunteers should not dominate the narrative as all five were gunned down while unarmed and posing no threat to the Crown Forces.

A really informative part of the book is the chronology that the author provides as it fills in quite a lot of blanks about the period leading up to and through Partition.

Jumping forward to the present and Michael Smith’s ‘UDR Declassified’ exposes the reality that the British army’s locally recruited UDR was never anything other than a ‘legalised’ loyalist militia. Read it alongside Margaret Urwin’s ‘A State in Denial’. Both indict the British government over its collusion with loyalism with the UDR being its most prized death squad.

In recent times, my interest in Liam Mellows has been reignited and while I haven’t made the time to re-read C. Desmond Greaves’s masterful ‘Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution’, I am thankful to Brian Hanley for his ‘None of the Literary Type’ about Mellows leading role in the Rising in Galway and Fionntán Ó Súilleabháin’s ‘Liam Mellows and the Unfinished Revolution’.

Both should remind us that socialism was very much at the heart of the republican project of the revolutionary period, and before, as evidenced by the writings and experience of people such as Michael Davitt (a visit to the Michael Davitt Museum in Straide, County Mayo is a must).

Whilst knowing a fair amount about the life of Winifred Carney, who served with Connolly in the GPO, and her husband George McBride, it was good to read the short booklet, written by Ruth Taillon, about two people who, despite coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum nonetheless found common cause in the struggle to advance socialism and workers’ rights. A story worth following.

The last word however must go to Danny Morrison’s rewritten and re-titled ‘Free Statism and The Good Old IRA’. The rewrite contains a lengthy analysis, or should I say gives a good old thrashing, to those in the Free State political establishment who acclaim the actions of those who waged war on the British (before turning their guns – borrowed from the British – on fellow Irish people) during the revolutionary period between 1916 to 1923.

Somehow ‘their war’ was a nice moral war whereas the ‘evil Provos’ had no business waging armed struggle against the British.

Morrison confronts the political class and its mouthpieces in the establishment media over their hypocrisy as they hide behind their distorted presentation of history to defend their own self-interests.

Peadar Whelan is a republican ex-prisoner