Blood-Dark Track (34 page)

Like my father, Jim and Brendan said they joined the IRA of their own accord, without their father’s prompting or knowledge, even. ‘But after we joined,’ Brendan said, ‘Father never discouraged us. He would drive us out to the training camps, where we would have theory and practical classes in warfare: dismantling weapons, bombs, unarmed combat, and so on. The poaching gave us good fieldwork experience. It was a very serious thing to do with your life at that age,’ Brendan said. ‘You were liable to be sent off at any moment.’

This was true. Moreover, the success of the Armagh raid was exceptional. In 1953, three volunteers received eight-year prison sentences after being caught in possession of a cache of weapons stolen from Felsted School in Essex; and in October 1954, a month or so after Jim and Brendan joined the IRA, a failed raid on a British army barracks in Omagh, Co. Tyrone, resulted in the capture of eight young volunteers. They were sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. Among them was Seán O’Callaghan, whose sister, Rosalie, Brendan would later marry.

The republican cause received a great boost in May 1955, when Sinn Féin, since 1950 effectively the civilian wing of the IRA,
polled over 150,000 votes in elections in Northern Ireland and won two seats in the Westminster Parliament. This was followed, in June, by a good showing at local elections in the South. Republican exhilaration spread across Ireland, and Kevin O’Neill briefly joined his two older brothers in the IRA.

As for the boys’ father, he was (in Brendan’s words) one of the most reliable unofficial men the IRA had in Cork, someone who could be trusted to dump arms, transport people, raise funds, and quietly put his experience and contacts at the disposal of the movement. Brendan said that Tadhg Lynch, who had also denounced the leadership and placed himself at the periphery of the movement, was likewise able to do much valuable unofficial work.

In 1956, the IRA Army Council decided that the IRA was strong enough to embark on its first major military initiative since the 1939 English campaign. It was resolved that flying columns would penetrate the Six Counties and engage in a guerrilla war. The objective was to disrupt the occupying power’s centres of administration by cutting all its lines of communication – telephone, rail, road – and thereby force British withdrawal from the border regions of Tyrone, Fermanagh and South Derry. The designated enemy was the British army; the overwhelmingly Protestant Irish members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the B-Specials (a civilian militia) were not targets and were only to be shot as a last resort of self-defence.

On Friday 7 December 1956, Jim and his brother Brendan received notification that IRA men were to present themselves immediately at a place in Mayfield, in the north of Cork city, for active service. The call-up came as a surprise, and Brendan had to ask Kevin, who lay sick in bed, to look after a dinner date that weekend. As Brendan and Jim were packing their things, their mother came up the stairs to the bedroom with a tray for Kevin. She said, ‘I know you won’t be back this time.’ Brendan said, ‘We will, Mother, we will, we’ll be back on Sunday night at the latest.’ My grandmother said, ‘I don’t care if you get ten years or twenty, but don’t come back cowards.’

However, Uncle Jim returned from Mayfield within a few hours,
in tears: the Army would not allow brothers from the same family, or newly married men, to go up, and five such volunteers were sent home. Brendan, though, was one of around twenty Corkmen to leave on the night of 7 December in a truck filled with straw. They were driven to billets in Co. Meath, where they stayed until Tuesday 11 December. Then they crossed into the Six Counties and met up with columns from Limerick and Dublin. The combined forces numbered fifty or sixty men. They were split up into units of eight or nine under the command of men who’d already been planted in the North a month or two previously. They were to go into action that night.

Back in Cork, Jim and Eileen O’Neill waited for news. My grandfather, who knew nothing about the raid in advance, was very upset that his sons had not confided in him. ‘The worst time was the waiting,’ Grandma said. ‘Oh, that was terrible. Then the news broke on the radio of the first attack, and I felt relieved.’

The news was that, in the early hours of 12 December 1956, IRA units had attacked, with varying degrees of success, targets such as a transmitting station, a radar installation, a courthouse, a Territorial Army building, a B-Specials’ hut, a bridge, and an army barracks. The following day, the IRA issued a proclamation announcing that, ‘Spearheaded by Ireland’s freedom fighters, our people in the Six Counties have carried the fight to the enemy.… Out of this national liberation struggle a new Ireland will emerge, upright and free.’ The famous Border Campaign of the winter of 1956/57 had begun.

That first night, Brendan’s unit was given the job of attacking Lissanelly Barracks, which was to the rear of Omagh army barracks, and stealing arms. Brendan’s task was to take the guard room with a man called Bertie Murphy. In order to penetrate the barracks, a breach had to be blown in its wall, and two men drove off to a quarry at Mountfield, seven miles away, to steal gelignite. ‘But,’ Brendan said, ‘the two fellows never returned; and just as we were getting into position to attack, all hell suddenly broke loose: the attacks had started all over the North and the barracks had gone on the alert.’ Brendan’s unit withdrew into the Sperrin Mountains,
near Gortin, Co. Tyrone, and waited for a few days and nights in the trees, frozen cold.

Brendan returned to Cork in February 1957. He and other young veterans of the Border Campaign were sent on an intensive training course and made training officers. They trained two nights a week and every weekend: the campaign in the North was still going on and replacements were needed for the large numbers of volunteers who were being arrested. The Border Campaign had not, as had been hoped, decisively swung public opinion behind the IRA, and the security forces in the Republic were proving to be assiduous in their pursuit of IRA men who came within their jurisdiction. To make matters worse, internment at the Curragh was reintroduced in July 1957 by Éamon de Valera, who’d been voted back into power in the March election. All but one of the IRA leadership was picked up in the sweep – Seán Cronin, the IRA Chief of Staff, avoided capture by holing up at the Dublin house of Tadhg Lynch.

A year after the introduction of internment, the Border Campaign was still dragging on – but not, in the view of uncle Brendan, anywhere near boldly enough. When a plan he’d devised to ambush an enemy patrol at the border near Belleek, Co. Fermanagh was not sanctioned, my uncle’s frustration led him to strike out on his own.

And so, in September 1958, three O’Neill brothers – Brendan, Jim (who had resigned from the IRA in sympathy with Brendan) and Kevin – drove up to Dublin with their uncle Jack Lynch and Brendan’s friend Jim Lane. The boot of the car was filled with weapons retrieved from dumps in West Cork. The plan was to spend the night in Dublin with Tadhg Lynch and the next day drive on to the Six Counties, where Jim and Brendan O’Neill and Jim Lane were to engage the enemy. Kevin, who according to uncle Jim had been ‘roped’ into going along, was to drive the car back to Cork, even though he barely knew how to drive.

Tadhg was not home when the five men reached Dublin, so they stopped in O’Connell Street and had a meal at a pub called the Green Rooster. At midnight they got back into the car and headed back towards Tadhg’s. Driving through Dublin at that time of
night was a hazardous business, since the laws against drinking and driving made an exception in favour of persons deemed to be travellers – i.e., persons returning home from their ‘bona fide’, a pub five miles or more from their home – and consequently the roads after closing-time were full of cars weaving their way homeward across the city. The O’Neills were driving along the Ballymun Road when a van suddenly cut across them. There was a smash. Jim and Brendan went through the windscreen, breaking their noses and, in Jim’s case, losing consciousness. The van driver immediately restarted his engine and drove away from the scene. Then guards appeared, asking questions and nosing around the scene of the accident. The Corkmen had no option but to keep calm and answer the questions asked of them and hope that the boot of the car was not examined. Eventually the guards completed their inquiries and set off after the hit-and-run driver. My father quickly removed the weapons from the boot and stowed them under the hedge of a nearby garden.

The police caught up with the driver of the van, Connolly, and brought charges against him. At the trial, a barman gave evidence that Connolly had been drinking at his establishment for many years and customarily drank a few whiskies and five or six pints in a night; Connolly’s counsel accordingly submitted that his client, with such a pedigree and experience as a drinker, could not have been intoxicated on the night in question, during which his consumption of alcohol had not exceeded his regular quota. The submission was accepted by the judge, and the accused was acquitted of driving whilst drunk and convicted of the less serious charge of dangerous driving. My uncles Jim and Brendan, and great-uncle Jack Lynch, who had broken a wrist, received compensation for the injuries they suffered in the crash, though it was not until 1977 that Brendan discovered that in flying head-first through the windscreen he had fractured his neck in four places.

Despite their injuries, Brendan and Jim checked themselves out of hospital on the night of the accident. Jim was too hurt to travel on and spent three days recuperating at Tadhg’s place before returning to Cork by train; Kevin also turned back for Cork.
Brendan and Jim Lane, meanwhile, continued north in a hired car. But the car turned out to be defective and would only go in first gear, and the two guerrillas were forced to dump their weapons and return home.

After their exploits became known, the IRA issued a statement disassociating itself from Brendan O’Neill. When my grandfather raised the matter with an IRA man at a republican commemoration, the IRA man, a cigarette dangling from his lip, answered with an insolent air; and the next thing he knew, an open hand had slapped him across the face and knocked his cigarette from his mouth. The hand belonged to my grandmother.

On Christmas Eve of 1958, only three months after the crash in Dublin, Brendan and Jim Lane set off to the North once more, determined to carry out the Belleek ambush the next day. ‘But it was a white Christmas,’ Brendan said, ‘and the action had to be aborted because the snow cracked underfoot like glass and the target would have been alerted to our approach. We walked the seventeen miles back to Kinlough, hoping for another day. That day never came, and we headed back to Cork.’

Brendan and Jim Lane did not give up there, though. They returned to the North the following year, and, with their friend Charlie Ronayne, participated unofficially in the IRA’s Border Campaign. All told, Brendan said, he went up three or four times. Aside from a reference to setting fire to a Territorial Army building in Garrison, Brendan was not inclined to detail the actions his unit had taken. A lot of time was spent subsisting, he said, moving from house to house. When the IRA officially abandoned the Border Campaign in January 1962 (the number of fatal casualties of the campaign – eight IRA men; two civilians; two men from the republican splinter group Saor Uladh; six RUC men – said something about its relatively ineffectual nature), Brendan joined another group and continued his underground activities until 1963. He was involved in securing control of arms that others proposed to give away to Welsh nationalists, and, finally, in a fruitless scheme to capture the newly appointed Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Captain Terence O’Neill (no relation).

My father’s flirtation with the armed struggle against the British ended with the disastrous venture with his brothers, an episode that afterwards took shape in his mind as pure comedy. As for Uncle Jim, although he never re-enlisted after his resignation from the IRA in 1958, he remained a republican, and when the violence in the North began he sympathized with the Provisional IRA. He never became involved with the Provos but supported them in parades, commemorations, and collections for prisoners’ dependants. Then something happened that changed his political outlook. Jim – a gentle man who, after retiring from a long career as a quality controller for Ford, drove a van for disabled people – told me his story when I visited him and his wife, my aunt Kitty, at their house in Cork. My uncle, who began by telling me that Kitty’s uncle, Billy Horgan, was shot dead by the Black and Tans, spoke softly and fluently, at dictation speed.

‘In 1984, when I was hospitalized for three days for a minor matter, Jim said, I learned from Kitty that the wife of a neighbour, John Cochrane, was looking for me. John was forty-five and a father of eight; he belonged, I knew, to some republican organization – either the IRA or the INLA. When I came out of hospital on Thursday, Eileen Cochrane (who neither supported nor objected to John’s politics) said John had been missing since Tuesday. She asked whether I could find out if he was away on IRA business. So I tried to help, and was up till 2 a.m. trying to contact people in the movement; but to no avail. The following day, I went to another contact, who put me in touch with another fellow, who put me in touch with the No. 2 of the Cork Brigade. I met the No. 2. I told him we were worried because John Cochrane suffered from epilepsy. He said he’d look into it. “I’ll call you when the Angelus bells stop ringing,” he said. At six o’clock, the phone rang. The voice said, “There’s no match this weekend, and even if there was, the man you’re looking for wouldn’t even be a sub.” I passed this on to Eileen, and then I accompanied her to the Gardai station at Union Quay. We asked whether John Cochrane was being held; they assured me he wasn’t. So we went to the
Cork Examiner
offices with a photograph of John and took out a missing person’s notice.
The next day, at lunchtime, I heard screaming outside the house. It was Eileen, screaming that they’d found a body on the silage heap at Ballincollig; and straightaway we were fairly sure. By this stage, I’d learned that John had been an IRA information officer for two years but that he’d been relieved of his post because of his epilepsy. On Sunday morning, the guards came round to ask whether I’d identify the body at the morgue. John’s father and brother-in-law came with me. They were not allowed into the morgue, where Dr John Horbison, the State pathologist, was still working on the body. I went in alone. There was so much damage to the head that I had to walk out of the mortuary to compose myself. Then I went back in and identified John. He’d been shot through the temple. They had shot him as an informer. I went back to my contacts to throw a few fucks into their faces and tell them what I thought of their organization. They tried to reassure me that they knew what they were doing, but I later found out that it was a fellow called O’Callaghan from the North who was the informant and to cover his tracks he’d fingered John Cochrane. It was a crowd from Belfast that came down to shoot Cochrane. All the while, the OC here continued to insist that Cochrane was the informer.’ Jim paused. His arms were crossed and resting on the table. He said, in the same measured tone he used when reminiscing about his childhood, ‘I heard that on Tuesday John was seen running through a department store, running through coat-racks. They left him on a pile of dung and tyres. And that’s why I think my father’s five years at the Curragh were a waste of time.’