In IRA mythology, the name Hughes looms large
THE name Brendan Hughes is a big one in the history of the IRA. Mention that name and most people will assume that you are talking about ‘The Dark’. Brendan Hughes from the Lower Falls Road in Belfast was the commanding officer of D Company, nicknamed ‘the dogs’.
In prison he was the leader of an IRA hunger strike in 1980, which he called off when one of his men was close to death.
He was a sceptic of the peace process and critical of the political path taken by Gerry Adams. He died disillusioned and regretting that so much blood had been shed for a cause which, he thought had been betrayed.
Perhaps he should have faced up to that cause - a united socialist Ireland - never having been attainable through what the British army called ‘low intensity conflict’, essentially a protest campaign expressing itself through murder and sabotage.
Mention the name of Francis Hughes and those who know their history will assume you are talking about Francis Hughes of South Derry, the second prisoner to die in the 1981 hunger strike. This strike had been called by Bobby Sands after the previous one led by Brendan Hughes had failed.
The OC of that strike, Brendan McFarlane, died last month.
A lesser-known Brendan Hughes turned up in a BBC Northern Ireland film last week, Those Who Want me Dead. This Brendan Hughes had a remarkable story to tell of a short but busy IRA career in the early seventies.
He talks in the film of how he had organised three big jail breaks, two of which succeeded.
In 1973 he directed a hijacked helicopter to land in the grounds of Mountjoy jail and left with three top IRA men, Seamus Twomey, JB O’Hagan and Kevin Mallon.
Sentenced to three years in Portlaoise prison for that - an extraordinarily light sentence - he blasted his way out of there with 18 other prisoners.
And he came back with an armoured truck to break through the gates but the truck overheated and stalled.
Wondering how we had heard so little of this green pimpernel I saw that he was occasionally confused in the media with the Belfast man Brendan Hughes.
His real name was Francis Bernard Hughes. Perhaps he preferred to be ‘Brendan’ and confused with a top IRA man than to be ‘Bernard’ or ‘Barney’ and confused with a Belfast bakery that also features in street humour.
A song about Barney Hughes bread woes, “Barney Hughes’ bread, sits in your belly like lead, Not a bit o’ wonder, you fart like thunder, Barney Hughes Bread”.
But why did he not call himself Francis Hughes?
He had an alias too, John Patrick Murtagh.
Francis Bernard [Brendan Hughes] was the single interviewee in the film about his life. He talked of how he had joined the IRA because of the indignity of discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland. He was not asked how he thought shooting police officers and bombing pubs might have rectified that problem. He was asked very little.
His specialisms in the IRA were jail breaks and armed bank robberies.
He was drummed out of the IRA in 1975 after carrying out a bank robbery during a ceasefire and he says that he got a call to say that he had been court-martialled in his absence and sentenced to death.
Hughes was now on the run from the law on both sides of the Irish border and also from the IRA. He might have added that if Northern loyalists had got hold of him they too would have been happy to kill him.
And he says that that threat from the IRA made him realise the trauma that his own threats against bank staff and others had caused decent people to suffer.
The plausibility of that penitential insight is undermined by the fact that he then went on to rob more banks as a freelance gangster outside the IRA.
He shot at an Irish police officer, Garda Brendan Keys, while fleeing with the cash from a bank in Navan.
The law caught up with him and he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
Those Who Want me Dead is a remarkable story of the short career of an undoubtedly resourceful and dangerous criminal.
Hughes might be the role model for Ructions O’Hare, the IRA man turned criminal mastermind in the novels of Richard O’Rawe.
The film is oddly made. Clearly determined not to lionise him or to allow it to have the feel of a thriller, it is more like an art film, padded with slow motion archive and doleful music.
The angle that the media lighted on afterwards was Hughes’s declaration that his IRA career was a waste of life.
But many other former IRA members have said the same thing.
He said that he would talk honestly about the past if there was a process which brought no repercussions.
Finding him and getting him to talk openly about those dramatic jailbreaks is an undoubted scoop.
But he shouldn’t have been left just to speak for himself and weave his own myth.
Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book
How To Fix Northern Ireland
is published by Atlantic Books
See More: IRA, Northern Ireland, Troubles
