Bloody Murdah

By AM Thursday, May 16, 2013

Share Tweet Share Share Email

We have never accepted or used the word murder. We would regard it as legislative language and aggressive language. It was the sort of language was always used against us. It would be like acknowledging that we were ‘criminals’ or ‘terrorists.’ - Michael Culbert, Irish News, 4th October 2011.

Frank Hughes’s 32nd anniversary took place on Sunday. The second of ten hunger strikers to die Big Frank, as his comrades from South Derry referred to him, although only 22 at the time of his arrest on St Patrick’s Day 1978, had already established a formidable reputation as one of the IRA’s most militarily efficient volunteers. His ability to emerge alive, although wounded, the same day from a British Army ambush and also kill a special forces member of the ambush team set him apart from many of his comrades who died in the course of similar encounters. It said something about his field craft and military instincts. A year earlier he had been named as one of the North‘s 3 most wanted men while he was evading the largest British security cordon yet seen in South Derry. The Repressive Security Apparatus of the British state feared Frank but he didn’t fear it.

The evening of his death after 59 days on hunger strike saw a silence descend upon the wing where I was held. If we didn’t know it already we realised it then that the British had successfully weathered the storm that followed the death of Bobby Sands and would give no quarter to either Patsy O’Hara or Raymond McCreesh, the two volunteers remaining on the strike after Frank’s death. It would take a strategic hiatus after the first four deaths to create the conditions in which the British were forced off their one track approach. The fate of Patsy and Raymond was as certain as the setting of the sun. They would as surely go down with it.

In one of the Sunday papers after Frank’s burial a member of the RUC was quoted as saying ‘Frankie was a murderer’ before going on to grudgingly acknowledge Frank’s efficiency at plying his armed craft. The RUC man’s comment was an attempt to state what was very much not obvious to many people the length and breadth of Ireland. He sought to criminalise Frank. There is nothing to suggest that Frank could not have lived with the description of him as a killer. Killing is what military personnel do. He killed the British soldier who engaged him in armed combat. He did not die disputing that he killed people but did so to make the point that he was not a common murderer and to have that recognised as a war right, an intrinsic but much fought over component in the war between the British state and the IRA.

The image of Frank Hughes in a military crawl as he, gravely injured by British Army gunfire, made his way to some form of shelter is far removed from the undignified crawl that the public witnessed Gerry Adams make during his Prime Time debacle with Miriam O Callaghan. There Adams, trying to slither away from a politically violent past he helped create, fallaciously argued that all killings are murder.

That is all very well if we wish to make an abstract philosophical point that war is murder on stilts even where stilts haul lethal war driven actions above the level of commonality; where the primary focus is on the violence sustained rather than inflicted, on what it means to be killed rather than to be killing, where the horrors of war in all its savagery are thrown up without the legal niceties and moral theorising. 

Adams was not making his point out of any philosophical conviction. It was made on grounds of pure pragmatic opportunism. In his own peculiarly serpentine way of doing business, he is meeting the establishment demand for the IRA’s armed struggle to be defined as a murder campaign. Crooked step by crooked step the IRA Adjutant General at the time of Frank Hughes’s death is moving toward the consummation of the Thatcher logic that crime is crime is crime.

There is nothing new in this approach. When Martin McGuinness in furtherance of his own political career during the Irish presidential campaign insisted that some IRA killings could be regarded as murder, it was clear that the thin edge of the stake was being pressed against, although not quite yet thrust into, the heart of the values of Ten Men Dead. Michael Colbert, currently aligned to Sinn Fein, convicted for killing a member of the RUC, objected.  Having spent years on protest denying that the action for which he was convicted and sentenced to life was criminal, he complained that it was a step too far.

Is Gerry Adams willing to tell the family of the IRA hunger striker Frank Hughes, convicted for killing a British soldier in an armed exchange, that Frank was a murderer? Will he attend a hunger strike commemoration in Bellaghy’s graveyard and announce ‘we gather here today to honour this murderer’?

It is as blunt as this: if we, the IRA volunteers, who killed on the orders of people like Adams, are murderers, he then is a mass murderer better suited to stand in The Hague rather than sit in the Dail.