Murmurs of Dissent

By AM Tuesday, July 7, 2009

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For the second June in succession we journeyed deep into the Cooley Mountains to assemble at the final resting place of Brendan Hughes. I brought my daughter with me. Along with Tommy McReynolds and myself, Brendan drank the night away on the day she was born in his favourite haunt, the Oasis, in Distillery Street. Friends picked us up a few miles from the mountains and we made our first stop at a pub where I sampled the cider and met others who were there for the same reason – Brendan’s memory, not the cider.

Once everyone arrived we winded our way to the spot where his ashes were scattered a year and a half ago, bringing to an end a tumultuous journey for one of the troubled souls of republicanism. A man who was denied peace of mind during much of his life finally rested at peace in an area he would often escape to for the tranquillity it offered.

It was heartening to immediately note that the crowd in attendance this year was even bigger than it had been when we last stood where Brendan lay. We made our way up a country lane and then over a low stone wall which was not just as easy to navigate as it appeared. Helping hands are always available to assist and guide the less agile – of which there are quite a few – across to the plot of land that held what was left of Brendan’s earthly remains.

Terry Hughes, a brother, opened proceedings. The crowd seemed to keep one eye on him and another on the sky and its clouds, heavily pregnant with the moisture they seemed ready to give birth to. His speech was short, merely pointing out that as time moved on it as becoming clear that his brother’s misgivings about the strategy of the movement that had claimed so much of his life was proving correct. Paddy Joe Rice of the famous IRA ‘Dogs’ and Ivor Bell a former chief of staff of the organisation were equally as brief in their comments, focussing on the integrity of the man we had come to remember and his ability to rapidly discern that things were not always what they were served up as.

When the speakers had finished flowers were laid and old friends pulled together in front of the memorial stone to be photographed together. It was brief event so in keeping with the Dark’s own disdain for formality and standing on ceremony.

Having done what we set out to do we retired to a local hotel where food and refreshments had been laid on and where I continued with the cider sampling practice started earlier in the day. As people relaxed the conversation turned to where the republican struggle had ended up, the disappointment with the outcome, the growing head of steam gathering behind the probe to find out just what did happen during the 1981 hunger strike, and speculation about the possibility and type of alternatives that might emerge as more people were beginning to accept that republicanism had been seriously short changed by the peace process. There was also discussion about another solid republican who had died in the period that had elapsed since our last venture into the Cooleys. John ‘big Duice’ McMullan did not have the public profile of his fellow D Company volunteer, the Dark, but his commitment to the republican cause and his staying power was every bit as formidable.

Later as I travelled home half listening to my daughter chatter about the things in life that interest her - republicanism and its icons do not figure highly there, Horrid Henry books and Nintendo DS games do – I reflected that had the Dark managed to extract a few more years from life he would have experienced a sense of satisfaction long denied him as alternative discourses mushroom and dovetail with the perspective he had for long offered. He would have derived a certain joy from the fact that the strangulation of republican sentiment had not been an unmitigated success for the Sinn Fein leadership; those ‘murmuring lips of dissent’ continued to undulate despite all attempts to hermetically seal them.

From the silence of the Cooley Mountains a little murmuring can still be heard.