A Dark Night In Belfast

By AM Monday, May 2, 2011

Share Tweet Share Share Email

The other evening saw me in Belfast. Along with my wife and children I made the journey up to deliver the inaugural Brendan Hughes annual lecture. The venue was Conway Mill and the event pulled a packed hall. I shared the platform with Terry Hughes, a brother of the late Brendan. Paddy Joe Rice from the famous IRA Dogs Company was also billed as a speaker but a last minute illness prevented him from making it. Tommy Gorman, a former H Block blanket man, chaired.

It was an honour to be asked to do the talk. I had a long and close relationship to Brendan Hughes. I found it uplifting to see so many of his loved ones attending. It was in Conway Mill that Fourthwrite magazine first saw the light of day. Brendan was interviewed for the first issue and spoke at the launch. He could pull interest like few other dissenting republicans. Sinn Fein hated his participation in the Fourthwrite project and immediately began a campaign of character assassination which was itself openly ridiculed in some areas of the media. Gerry Adams asked to meet him and Brendan agreed. All he got was a rant about the type of people he was associated with. But the influence of old had gone. Brendan was not dissuaded from speaking his mind and venting his misgivings about the non republican political orientation of the peace process. From that point on he was relentless in his determination to provide an alternative narrative which culminated in the publication of Voices From The Grave by Ed Moloney in 2010.

So many old friends and comrades turned up for the inaugural lecture it was hard to greet them individually. It was heart warming to see many of the men Brendan had led on the blanket protest in the audience to commemorate him. Later in the evening I travelled up to Lenadoon for a drink with some of those one time H Block stalwarts. Leaving the pub to walk to a friend’s place where I would stay the night there was a certain irony in seeing election posters of a former blanket man Pat McCotter placed on lampposts. McCotter is contesting the upcoming council elections on an unmistakably republican ticket for éirígí. He will be competing with Sinn Fein for votes.

I haven’t bothered with Pat McCotter in years so would not be au fait with his views other than the broad republican thrust of them. But I was struck by the amount of people in the bar, some of whom I did not know, who asked me how I thought they should vote. While I naturally expressed a preference for McCotter what interested me more was the fact that he was the subject of so much conversation. People who have not yet broken with Sinn Fein are wrestling with their long held loyalties to the party. While they would never throw a vote the way of the SDLP or even groups like Republican Sinn Fein, they are certainly considering McCotter who they see as one of their own despite attempts by Sinn Fein to depict him as just the latest in a long line of heretics unwilling to believe that the peace process is the real thing in terms of advancing the republican agenda.

I no longer live in West Belfast and have no vote to cast in the election. But it would be a serious fillip for republican sentiment if a candidate who was on the Blanket protest under the leadership of Brendan Hughes, and who continues to hold to something identifiable from then, was to take a seat on the 30th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands.