Death by Committee

By AM Monday, July 8, 2013

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Joe McDonnell died 32 years ago today. If memory, with its seeming paradox of increasing unpredictability, is faithful I had a visit on the afternoon of his death with a friend whose brother had just been killed by the IRA after being labelled an informer. Having shot him they ended up beating him around the head for good measure before throwing him down a rubbish chute.

His family always refused to believe he had worked for the British and given the people in the IRA’s security department that were both working and killing for the British, the family certainly have grounds for grievance. But that is something the HET could never be expected to properly examine. In any event his sister never lost her republican conviction and I was immensely pleased to see her for the first time in over a year when then too she had visited me on the blanket with her son still only months old. Because of the regime of putrid squalor we then lived under in April 1980, the fear crossed my mind that I might transmit something to one so young.

Joe McDonnell was a boisterous character and according to all accounts very much one of the lads. I first met him the day after my release from Magilligan in 1975. A feud between the Official and Provisional IRAs was in full throttle at the time I was released so arrangements were made from within the prison to send me to a safe area, Lenadoon, where the local Provisional IRA put me up for the night and helped me consume as many pints as I could down on my first thirsty night out of prison. The following day before being sent to Ardoyne for a week, the volunteers I was with called on Joe at his home where we stayed for about an hour. Joe did a lot of the talking but little of it was about matters republican. He had other interests in life which helped make him the lively character cum rascal that made him so popular among friends and comrades. In spite of that it was always known if he set his mind to something it was a done deal. I only ever saw him once again; leaving the visits in Crumlin Road jail in January 1977 where he was nonchalantly dandering as if out for a stroll.

The fifth of ten republican hunger strikers to lose their lives he was the first of six hunger strikers to die after the protest had broken the resolve of the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. But that information was withheld from him. That he died was not primarily because Thatcher had the will to hold his gaze. She blinked and Joe McDonnell never did. He died because Danny Morrison of the ‘Committee for Prisoner Safety’ went into the prison hospital on the 5th of July 1981 with a vial of knowledge, the contents of which would have saved the lives of six dying men, but it never reached them. Morrison flushed it, and with it their lives, down the drain and has tried to keep knowledge of it there ever since. None have lied more about the hunger strikes than he. John Major once said of Normal Lamont ‘if he says it's Wednesday, people think it’s Thursday.’ As a name, Danny Lamont would not be out of place.

In terms of republican history the 5th of July 1981 is on a par with Ballyseedy. Morrison subsequently became a man of influence and for decades sought to influence and move activists away from the republican ideas and beliefs that sustained them during arduous times and towards the ideas the British had promoted throughout the republican armed campaign and prison struggles.

John Sergeant’s book Maggie, from where the anecdote on Major’s take on Lamont is drawn, doesn’t mention the hunger strike and gives surprisingly little coverage to the IRA, the organisation being mentioned on only two pages. Sinn Fein is referred to just once. What Sergeant does do is prick the balloon that has floated the myth of Thatcher’s Iron Lady image. This was not the hardnosed immutable ideologue depicted by the Tory faithful. She was a ruthless pragmatist who had the knack of shifting onto the shoulders of others responsibility for the many U turns that were made on her watch and with her approval.

She made a U turn on the hunger strike in the days before Joe McDonnell died. But the self-serving Tory myth of her unshakeable conviction and determination has been used for decades to sustain another myth, that she alone was responsible for the deaths of the ten hunger strikers. She played a big part in their deaths but she did not betray them. That dishonour belongs to the Committee men who sat on the banks of their own Vistula waiting for the moment that would be kind to them.

The moment was kind to them, history will not be.