Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Read Online Free PDF

French windows in and we’re cutting the drainpipe off the toilet to get food. When she died most of her money went to the Catholic Church. She went to Lourdes every year, religiously every year, and I don’t know to this day just how much money was left to the Catholic Church. But certainly none of it was left to my father … my father and his mother did not get on very well together .
     
     
    I think all my life, my father has been my hero … if you look at the life that my father had after my mother died. He was only a young man himself, and yet he gave up everything. He devoted his whole life to bringing his children up as best he could. And I believe he did a pretty good job. When we all began to leave, for instance to England or Australia, I had a great desire to do something to pay back all the years that my father spent in bringing us up. He never had another woman in his life. He could easily have sorted us out, or separated us, which was suggested at one time by an aunt of mine and my father threw her out of the house! … So, there was a great strength there, a great love, a bond there with his kids. And right up until the day he died. I remember when I was on hunger strike, my father and Tim Pat Coogan † came to me [on a prison visit] and Tim Pat Coogan asked the question, as a journalist would, a direct question to me: did I think I was going to die? And I felt the tension in the visiting box at that moment. My father just froze and it seemed like an eternity before I could answer, and by that time my father had broken down, had got up and walked out of the visiting box, crying. Crying! I think it was the first time in my life I ever saw my father crying except for the time when my mother died. It must have been like a knife piercing his heart and I felt it for him. I remember thinking, during the hunger strike, the love I had for my father was great, and the love he had for me was great. I remember feeling totally confused at one period [during the hunger strike] when I feared for my father’s life and I remember thinking that ‘I hope I die before my father does’, because I couldn’t bear to see him die. And then the thought occurred to me that ‘I hope that does not happen, I hope my father dies before I do’, because if I died before my father did then it would break his heart .
     
    Both of Brendan Hughes’s parents and one set of grandparents had been involved in the IRA. He grew up hearing all the stories of the terror Belfast Catholics had experienced in the 1920s and how sometimes the IRA could strike back, although such incidents would pale in comparison to the activities of the IRA units of 1972 that he would lead. One famous action, ‘The Raglan Street Ambush’, took place in West Belfast on 10 July 1921, just a day before a truce between the British and the IRA was to come into effect, and two days before the annual Orange ‘Twelfth’ celebrations when Protestant emotions usually ran high. The timing was unfortunate. A large force of policemen, known then as the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), and Specials – an exclusively Protestant auxiliarypolice force established by the new Northern Ireland government – were on a mission to raid homes in the Lower Falls Road area when they were ambushed by the local IRA. One policeman was killed and two were wounded in the fierce gun battle that followed. Already angered by the truce with the IRA, which proved to be a prelude to the Treaty negotiations, lorry loads of Specials went on the rampage in Catholic parts of Belfast shooting wildly. In the following few days twenty people were killed, scores wounded and over a hundred and fifty Catholic homes were torched. 8
    Four months before, in March 1921, a great-uncle, Eoin Hughes, was taken off a tram in the York Street area of North Belfast and shot dead. His killer is believed to have been a notorious Loyalist gunman known as ‘Buck Alec’ Robinson, a petty criminal who had been inducted,