A Song For Paddy Joe Crawford – ‘Buried In Full View, But Disappeared’

Ed Moloney with a piece on the late Paddy Joe Crawford which initially featured in The Broken Elbow on 9 December 2013.

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Paddy Joe2


The Mass Card reproduced above is the only photograph I was ever able to trace of Paddy Joe Crawford and it may be, for all I know, the only representation of the 22-year old Provisional IRA victim in existence.

There ought to be something very special created to remember him, for his was not only one of the saddest deaths of the Troubles, it ranked as one of the most barbarous. Now a Belfast songwriter by the name of Dave Thompson has done just that and created a fitting memorial. So, I am grateful to have this opportunity to unveil his tribute to, and remembrance of Paddy Joe, a song called ‘Falling’.
But first a few words of explanation.

Accused of informing but denied the opportunity to defend himself, Paddy Joe Crawford was taken by IRA comrades in the internee huts at Long Kesh in June 1973 and hanged – lynched might be a more fitting word – with all the macabre and grisly ceremonial that accompanies such executions. As if that was not enough, the IRA went on to lie about his death, circulating the story that Paddy Joe had taken his own life.

For nearly four decades that lie was pinned to Paddy Joe as firmly as the accusation that he was an informer, although the lie was purely for public consumption; inside the IRA the reality of his death was a well known secret, something most activists knew about but like the deranged sister locked away in the upstairs attic, would never talk about.

The truth of Paddy Joe’s death appears to be that like scores of young men who joined the IRA in those early years of the Troubles – none of whom were ever trained in counter-interrogation techniques – he broke under questioning. But only he was singled out for death, presumably to warn others of what might happen if they spoke too freely to the police or army.

He was not an informer in the accepted sense, he did not act as an agent, regularly passing on information on a group he had infiltrated to handlers he met in secret. Just a frightened boy who blurted out the truth to people in uniforms, authority figures of a sort that had dominated his life ever since he was handed over to a religious order for rearing a mere eleven days after his birth.

It is hard not to believe that it was his orphan status, his lack of a close family that singled him out for hanging by the IRA. Who would care about Paddy Joe Crawford? Who would ask the awkward and necessary questions about the manner of his death? And so Paddy Joe Crawford was disappeared  by the IRA, every bit as completely as Jean McConville, Joe Lynskey, Seamus Wright, Kevin McKee or Eamon Molloy.

Until that is Brendan Hughes came forward to tell the truth about his death in interviews with Boston College. I wrote about Paddy Joe Crawford at some length in Voices From The Grave not just because it was a relevant story but because it affected me. It made me angry and sad but not in equal measure; I was furious at the lie that defined the entire rotten episode. I also wrote it in the hope that a new inquest might be held into his death, his name restored and his killers shamed. Alas that has not happened.

But then on November 9th, I got an email from Dave Thompson and his partner Lorraine telling me about the song he had written and recorded. Today I heard from Dave that the final version had been perfected and a CD produced with ‘Falling’ the last song on the recording. So here is the song ‘Falling’, followed by the lyrics, the email I got from Dave Thompson and an extract from Voices From The Grave dealing with Paddy Joe Crawford. Please enjoy ‘Falling’, track ten of ten on ‘Newsprint Sky’ by Dave Thompson:

Lyrics:
Orphaned at eleven days; never settled long in one place.
Hardly had the chance to know, who you’d become.
Raised beside the pebbled shore; then seething city streets once more,
To a back room and a bed, inside a storm.
Hostility let loose, the old world blown apart,
Anger couldn’t be contained, collapsed the house of cards,
You were falling, You were falling.
You were falling, You were falling.
*                             *                               *                              *
Seeking purpose and a wage; finding brothers in the fifth cage,
Until life behind the bars, fell through the cracks.
No resistance, nothing said; no recording of the charges read.
Only voices from outside, a pulse away.
Body trembling as you climb onto, makeshift steps draped in black,
Nothing left for you to hold onto, hands bound tight behind your back.
You were falling, You were falling,
You were falling, You were falling.
*                               *                             *                               *
Milltown lay below a leaden sky; single figures came to say goodbye,
Liked by everyone they said; so how come?
Only a few possessions left; you didn’t even own your death,
Buried in full view, but disappeared.
We turned the decade still in shock, standing on the precipice,
Several hundred lights gone out, we plunged into the abyss,
We were falling, We were falling, falling, We were falling.
Nov 9th email:
Ed,
Hard to find a way to start this email, but here goes…
I read ‘Voices’ in the summer of 2011, and was struck by your account of the death of Paddy Joe Crawford. I have been a quiet, amateur songwriter most of my adult life, and I decided that I would like to respond, in some way, to what you had written and of course to what happened. I made a few notes at the time, but didn’t really get anywhere. I came to these notes last summer and wrote a little more, and then finished the song later in the year. For the life of me, I wasn’t really sure why I was doing it, or what I should do with it…
At the end of June I was asked to perform a short set of songs…..along the theme of the arts and social justice, and so I decided to include this song. It was then I had to think carefully about it. What gave me the right to sit in a pleasantly extended semi-detached house in……Belfast, and write about the life of someone who lived forty years ago in circumstances I knew little about?
The conclusion I came to was that Paddy’s life actually mattered. No political ideology or revolutionary ideal should ever become so big, that the lives of ordinary people are trodden on. Paddy Joe should have been protected. So I played the song as part of the set, and in my introduction I noted my discomfort about trying to say something about a time and incident that I had little understanding of. But I also said that as an artist, you respond to what’s around you. It’s not a song making demands of the Republican movement, it’s my response to what happened, and it continues to tell a story that should be told.

Extract From Voices From The Grave, pp 132-145

On Sunday, 3 June 1973, IRA internees housed in Cage 5 of Long Kesh made a gruesome discovery: from a wall heater in the wood-working room of the hut used for recreation hung the lifeless body of one of their comrades, twenty-two-year-old Patrick Crawford from West Belfast, known to everyone as Paddy Joe. His death was regarded then, and ever since, as a suicide, thanks in no small way to the prison authorities’ speedy assertion, issued that same afternoon, that ‘foul play was not suspected’ in the death. That Sunday, IRA internees had taken part in a march and parade to commemorate comrades who had been killed in the Troubles, and so the huts in Cage 5 had seemingly been emptied of their occupants at...

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... the time of Crawford’s death. When  the parade ended, Crawford’s body was discovered by other internees, or at least that is what the story was. One of the first on the scene, within ‘five or ten minutes’ of the grim find, was Father Denis Faul, the Dungannon- based priest who celebrated Mass weekly in the camp for IRA detainees and was a popular figure with the prisoners, thanks to his staunch critique of British security policy and his sympathy for the Republican cause. Some two weeks later, the IRA staff at Long Kesh issued a statement that said that the dead man had been found by two internees immediately after the parade and attempts to revive him were made by prisoners, prison officers and Father Faul. After twenty or thirty minutes these were abandoned and Crawford was declared dead. Paddy Joe, the statement said, was ‘one of the most liked [internees] by all men’.

The suicide theory was widely accepted and Nationalist politicians lined up to blame prison conditions, internment and the British for Crawford’s untimely end. A group of nine priests, led by Father Faul, said the ‘inhuman and degrading conditions of Long Kesh’ had driven Crawford to suicide, adding, ‘Death was his hopeless protest against the whole situation of which Long Kesh is the symbol.’ SDLP leader Gerry Fitt and his colleague Paddy Devlin called on the International Red Cross to investigate the reasons for his ‘suicide’ – although later Fitt, alone of all the Nationalists, would accuse the IRA of hounding Crawford to death – while the Mid-Ulster MP, Bernadette McAliskey, called for the closure of the prison. The Fermanagh-South Tyrone MP, Frank McManus, said of Long Kesh, ‘The entire camp is a torture chamber .’

But Paddy Joe Crawford did not take his own life. In his interviews with Boston College, Brendan Hughes revealed that the IRA killed Crawford by hanging him, supposedly because he was working as an informer for the British. But Hughes was convinced that his only crime was to break during police interrogation, like countless other young IRA activists who were never punished as harshly. It was, he said, ‘a brutal, brutal murder’.

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Hughes’s belief was that the order to kill Crawford had come into the jail from Gerry Adams, who was still Belfast Commander at the time. Hughes was not present, he admitted, at the Brigade staff meeting that discussed Crawford’s fate and at the time of the hanging he believed that Ivor Bell had sent in the order. But when he discussed the matter with Bell some years later Bell told him that it was Adams who had issued the order, not him. Boston College’s researcher, Anthony McIntyre, interviewed former IRA internees held in Long Kesh at this time in an effort to confirm Hughes’s account and they corroborate his claim that Crawford was hanged. But they say that Adams’s role in the affair was to refer Crawford’s case to GHQ in Dublin which then ordered his death. If true this would mean that, ultimately, permission for the killing was probably given by the then Chief of Staff, Seamus Twomey, the most senior figure on GHQ.

According to this account, the usual IRA procedures for handling accusations of informing were ignored both inside and outside Long Kesh. Although the IRA’s justice system was inherently flawed, Crawford should none the less have been court-martialed and given a chance to defend himself from charges that, inter alia, alleged that he had led British troops to arms dumps and IRA safe houses, and had identified fellow IRA members, admissions he had purportedly made when he was debriefed in Long Kesh by IRA intelligence officers. But he was not court-martialed; instead his life was ended on an improvised gallows by fiat of an IRA leader, whether in Belfast or Dublin it is not certain, and the decision made to lie about what had happened. Whatever the truth about who ordered Paddy Joe Crawford’s execution, it is clear that the Belfast Brigade leadership and the IRA’s GHQ were both fully complicit in his wretched death.

The former IRA members interviewed by McIntyre, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added disconcerting detail to the story. The hanging was accompanied by a macabre ceremonial: a black cloth was draped over the improvised steps from which young Crawford was pitched into eternity and his wrists were taped ...

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... behind his back. Afterwards the cloth, a vital piece of evidence, was removed. They also say that he went meekly to his death. Paddy Joe Crawford was a strong young man and could have fought his executioners – and by so doing could have created enough forensic evidence to cast doubt on the suicide theory – but for reasons still unfathomable, he chose not to resist. Four men helped to hang Crawford. One of them was Harry Burns, known as ‘Big Harry’ to his friends, a prominent Belfast IRA man who was related by marriage to Gerry Adams. During the hanging a group of internees inadvertently burst into the hut and saw everything. Afterwards the word spread among other inmates. ‘Prisoners were simply told he had taken his own life. But people knew, although they did not talk,’ one of the sources told McIntyre.

Paddy Joe Crawford’s death was in one essential respect no different from the deaths of those who had been disappeared before him by the Belfast IRA: Joe Linskey, Seamus Wright, Kevin McKee and Jean McConville. While his body, unlike theirs, was not hidden in a secret grave, the truth about his death was buried just as securely. And he has been disappeared from the death lists of the Troubles as well, made a non-victim by those who ordered and arranged his hanging. Neither Lost Lives nor the Sutton Index of Deaths, the two most extensive and reliable records of Northern Ireland’s death toll, list him among those who were killed in the conflict. Paddy Joe Crawford has simply been forgotten, his story erased from the narrative of the Troubles and, for over three decades, lies told about why and how he died.

Paddy Joe Crawford rightly belongs in the list of the IRA’s disappeared victims because, other than wreaking vengeance on him for his alleged treachery, his death, like theirs, was pointless. Fabricating his suicide meant that killing him could never have a deter- rent effect on other IRA members who might have been tempted to work for the British, since only a very small number of people would know the real facts of his death.

It is difficult not to wonder if the reason why Patrick Crawford was chosen to die, rather than other IRA members who had broken ...

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... during interrogation, was that no one would kick up a fuss afterwards, or ask awkward questions about what had happened, much less campaign for years for the truth. Others who were disappeared, such as Jean McConville, left behind relatives to fight for them and, eventually, they persuaded powerful politicians to back their efforts. Apart from one childhood friend, Paddy Joe Crawford really had no one to fight for him afterwards; he was an ideal candidate to be dis- appeared in the way he was.

Paddy Joe Crawford was an orphan, brought up by nuns in Nazareth House in South Belfast after he was abandoned by his mother. According to records kept by the orphanage, Crawford was born on 5 March 1951 and admitted into care just eleven days later, on 16 March. The Poor Sisters of Nazareth, to give them their formal title, no longer look after children. Nowadays they care for the elderly but in the Belfast of the 1950s and 1960s their convent on the Ravenhill Road was home to scores of rejected waifs. Founded in Hammersmith in London in the mid-nineteenth century, the Poor Sisters built a veritable empire of children’s homes in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The Order spread to America, to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, where more homes were built. Paddy Joe Crawford stayed with the Poor Sisters until he reached the age of eleven, when he was transferred to the De La Salle boys’ home run by the Christian Brothers at Kircubbin on the picturesque eastern shore of Strangford Lough in County Down. He stayed at Kircubbin until he was fifteen years old, the school- leaving age, when he was transferred to digs in West Belfast and a job found for him. He lived with a family in Broadway in the heart of the Falls Road and became a builder’s labourer. He and other orphans from the Nazareth and De La Salle homes were members of St Augustine’s Boys Club, run since the early 1970s by Father Matt Wallace, a Wexford-born priest and one of the most loved and popular clerics in West Belfast. Father Wallace helped Paddy Joe Crawford get a job, gave him the last rites an hour after he died and officiated at his funeral, during which his coffin was carried by members of the youth club. To this day Father Wallace tends his ...

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... grave in Milltown cemetery and that of other Nazareth and De La Salle boys killed in the Troubles.
Like other Catholic religious orders in Ireland and around the world, the Poor Sisters of Nazareth and the De La Salle Christian Brothers in Kircubbin have both been embroiled in scandals arising out of allegations from former residents of physical and mental cruelty, of neglect and sexual molestation. Legal suits against the Poor Sisters have been filed as far apart as Aberdeen in Scotland and San Diego in California, where in 2007 former Nazareth residents won part of a $198 million settlement against the local Catholic hierarchy. One elderly Poor Sister from Scotland was convicted in 2000 of cruelty, and former inmates of the Scottish homes have been financially compensated for their ordeals. Former residents of the Belfast home are similarly seeking redress for alleged ill-treatment through the courts. The De La Salle Order in Kircubbin has similarly been caught up in scandal. The home was extensively investigated by the RUC in the mid-1980s after allegations surfaced of physical and sexual abuse and a government report published in 1984 strongly criticised management at the home for employing abusers. In 2001 two former residents were awarded £15,000 each in out-of-court compensation for sexual abuse committed when they were sixteen years old and charges were filed but dropped against a former principal at the home alleging buggery and other offences.

Frances Reilly was two years old when her mother left her and her two sisters with the Poor Sisters in Belfast and ran off to England. That was in 1956 and many years afterwards, when she read about the court case in Scotland, she decided to write her life story, a heart-rending account of physical, mental and sexual abuse, which was published in January 2009. It was a story, she claims, no Catholics in Belfast at the time would believe. What makes her story relevant to events in Cage 5 of Long Kesh in 1973 is that she and Patrick Crawford would have been residents at the Belfast home at around the same time – albeit in segregated sections. There is no evidence that Patrick Crawford experienced the sort of physical and ...

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...sexual abuse that Frances Reilly claims happened to her – nor that he was ever abused at Kircubbin – but it is impossible to read her book and not wonder if he did.

As it is, the story of his life and death has to be one of the saddest of the Troubles: abandoned at just eleven days old, he was destined never to know a mother’s love. Instead he was brought up by nuns and brothers, some of whom allegedly ill-treated those in their care, and when he reached twenty-two, his life was brutally ended, hanged in jail by the IRA on disputed charges, and then the truth about his death covered up for over three decades.

How or why Patrick Crawford joined the IRA are questions that cannot now be answered, but it seems that he may have become a member not long before he was interned. He and seven or eight other young men were stopped on the border near Newry by British paratroopers as they attempted to cross to the Republic in a van in April 1973. Their story was that they were on a fishing trip but when the soldiers searched their vehicle they could find only one fishing rod. It looked as if they were really en route to an IRA training camp, and if so this suggests that Crawford was a relatively new recruit. He was arrested, questioned and then sent to Long Kesh.

After Crawford’s death, the IRA in Long Kesh had described him as one of the most liked of prison comrades but it seemed this feel- ing was not shared by the organisation outside the prison. Although an IRA member, he was not given a Republican funeral. There was no Tricolour on his coffin or guard of honour around his cortège and there were no crowds lining the streets around Milltown cemetery to pay respects to or merely gawk in curiosity at this man whom the British had allegedly driven to suicide in Long Kesh. An eyewitness account of the event, given recently to the author by a Sinn Fein member who attended the burial, described a funeral that had been shunned by West Belfast Republicans:
There were just a few people [there], a couple of Nazareth nuns at it, a hearse followed by a single car, that was all. Just members ...
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... of the family who had taken him in and perhaps one or two of their neighbours and friends. There was nobody from the organisation at all, not one single person. I thought it would be a Republican funeral. None of the general public who come out to look at Republican funerals turned out. There wasn’t a soul when I went down. It was really a sad funeral, it was so small. I’ll never forget it. I was the only Republican who went. I was the only one there I knew.
Years later, this Sinn Fein activist was told the truth about Patrick Crawford’s death by a former IRA prisoner: ‘I must have been the only one in West Belfast who didn’t know,’ the source now says.
Inquests on victims of the Troubles have often been the occasion for controversy and further conflict. Juries are limited in the verdicts they can deliver, something Nationalists have long believed is intended to spare the police and military authorities deserved scrutiny. They cannot make a finding such as ‘unlawful killing’, while inquests into some high-profile victims, such as people killed in disputed circumstances by the police or Army or where security- force collusion with paramilitaries has been alleged, have still to be held years after the deaths occurred. The inquest on Paddy Joe Crawford happened with remarkable speed. On Friday, 15 June 1973, just twelve days after his lifeless body had been discovered in Cage 5, a jury sitting in Hillsborough courthouse, a few miles from Long Kesh, delivered a verdict in the Coroner’s Court saying that Crawford had ‘died by his own act’, echoing the prison service’s statement hours after his hanging. His inquest file, provided to the author on foot of a Freedom of Information request, contains no evidence that the authorities harboured suspicions about the way he died or that anything approaching a vigorous investigation of the death had taken place.
Crawford was, his autopsy report said, a young man of ‘strong, muscular build’ and was six feet tall and healthy. He was wearing a blue T-shirt, a green V-necked pullover and a pair of denims, in the back pocket of which was a plastic comb. An RUC Inspector called ...

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... James Black said that his body was hanging by a linen rope, apparently torn from a mattress cover lying on the floor near by, fixed to an iron strut which was attached to the wall of the hut, some ten feet from the floor. Directly underneath the strut were two plastic chairs with boot marks on one of them and near by a steel locker lying on its side. Inspector Black surmised that Crawford had placed one of the chairs on top of the locker and climbed up to secure the linen rope to the strut. A pair of boots, thought to be Crawford’s, were sitting in the centre of the floor and his coat was draped over one of the chairs. There is nothing in the policeman’s deposition to suggest that any check was made on the boots to determine if they were Crawford’s or if they matched the marks on one of the plastic chairs. Nor were any of Crawford’s fellow prisoners questioned.

The IRA Commander of Cage 5, whose name has been redacted in the released documents, refused to give evidence at the inquest but on the evening of the hanging he provided a handwritten statement to a senior prison officer which purported to explain why Crawford might have taken his own life. Along with this, the IRA leader handed over a note found in Crawford’s personal belong- ings which could be read as a suicide letter. The IRA Commander’s account is peppered with anecdotes that reinforced the view that Crawford was behaving irrationally before his death, including a suggestion that he might have killed himself to put a spotlight on conditions in Long Kesh. There is no evidence in the inquest documents, however, that the police attempted to interview the IRA Commander about his statement or any of the inmates mentioned by him, while the question of why the IRA had possession of Crawford’s personal effects instead of the detectives investigating the death was left unasked.

The IRA Commander’s statement read:
The day before his death he made a number of gestures to his friends in Hut 28 that he might be leaving them soon. The first gesture he made was when he gave his pipe to a friend and told...
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... him to keep it as he would not need it any more. Then in a conversation with his friends he started talking about Long Kesh not getting enough publicity and what it needed was a death to high- light the place. Later on that night he was walking round the cage with a friend and told him that nobody in the cage would talk to him and that they were all against him. This of course is wrong as he got on well with everyone. According to some of the men in Hut 28 he was acting very strange over the past few days, but at no time did anyone think he was about to hang himself. At about 9.00 o’clock that night he went round to the workshop to work on a plaque and he was the last one to leave that night. According to a number of other men he was in the workshop every day for a week before his death and spent long hours in it for reasons unknown. On the morning of his death the Hut O/C woke him up at the normal rising time of 12.00 o’clock and he told the Hut O/C that today would be the last time he would be wakening him. When the O/C asked him what he was talking about, he told him to forget about it. The last time he was seen alive was about 1.55 that day when he was seen walking towards the workshop. At about 2.30 two men went to the workshop to learn music and they found him hanging by a rope from the first heater on the left when you enter the workshop. They then informed me and I ran round and found him hanging there. I then ran to the gate and told the Officer to get a Doctor as a man had hanged himself. When I got back the men and the Officers in the cage had him cut down and tried to help him but it was to [sic] late as he was dead. In his personal belongings he left a note that read, ‘When I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep and if I die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take. God bless everybody. P. J. A. Crawford’. This is all the information I can find. Signed —— O/C Cage 5.
In the context of all that was said in the IRA statement, the two-page note found in Patrick Crawford’s belongings could be regarded as the last words of someone who is about to kill himself.

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Except that the part quoted by the IRA Commander, which has the word ‘poet’ written beside it, is actually a well-known bedtime prayer said by Catholics, something that he would almost certainly have been taught by the nuns in Nazareth House, and evidence only of a Catholic upbringing, certainly not of suicidal tendencies. It is written at the top of the first page, which is headlined ‘Notes’, and underneath the prayer is listed the sort of information that might be given out during a geography or general studies class: a list of the counties of Ireland, its provinces, the two capital cities and some historical sites in Dublin. On the second page Crawford had made a list of precious stones and the countries whose soccer teams played in the 1970 World Cup tournament. All this prompts a question: why would Crawford add all this to a suicide note? It is of course the signature that makes it look as if self-destruction was on Paddy Joe Crawford’s mind when the poem cum prayer was written. After all, suicide notes are always signed, or at least that is what many people believe. But there are problems with this as well. The signature is written at the side of the prayer, not directly underneath, which is where it should have been placed. The line immediately underneath the prayer is where the list of Irish counties begins and the signature seems to have been written by a different pen, as if it was added later. The question is by whom: Paddy Joe Crawford or one of those who hanged him?

It has proved impossible to answer that question and the authenticity or otherwise of Paddy Joe Crawford’s signature remains undecided. To determine properly whether the same or a different hand wrote his name, the original note would have to be examined and the signature expertly compared to other writing on the paper. The inquest file released by the Northern Ireland Court Service is a photocopy and, according to one forensic expert consulted by the author, is useless for this purpose. Only the original copy, which lies in the Court Service’s archive, can tell the full story and permission to release the document to the NI Forensic Laboratory in Carrickfergus was denied. For the moment, the truth remains locked away in the file.

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The real story of Patrick Crawford’s sad and miserable death was for decades an open but never admitted secret among many in the Provo community. His hanging was witnessed by several prisoners and, through them, Paddy Joe Crawford’s murder was known about widely, albeit only by Republican activists. Yet for some thirty-five years they kept it hidden from the rest of the world. Now, thanks to Brendan Hughes, a member of the Belfast leader- ship when the order to kill him was sent into the jail, the truth about Patrick Crawford’s harrowing end can be told.
Patrick Crawford was, well, I don’t even believe he was a tout. He broke during interrogation and then gave intelligence and information to his interrogators. He was then interned and he was put in Cage 5. He was executed by the IRA in the prison; he was hanged. And the order was given by Gerry Adams . . . I believed for a long time that it was Ivor [Bell] but it wasn’t . . . There was no purpose to it. The only reason that you execute someone is [to make] an example and [create] a deterrent to others. To hang someone who broke and then deny it and say he hanged himself was brutal, brutal murder. [During] that period I remember so many . . . going into the cages, kids who had broken . . . When other people broke they were just sent to Coventry. No one spoke to them. They were put in a small hut of their own. It was a brutal regime. And that’s the sort of mentality that brought about the death of Crawford. [If he had lived] Pat Crawford probably would have been on the blanket* as well. I mean, I know so many of them who are grown men now. They were brought into the IRA, they were given a weapon, they were given a bomb, they went out and they did the job well. When they were arrested by the RUC, the Special Branch, or whatever, [and] brought into a room, beaten, interrogated and tortured . . . some of them broke. What do you expect? You don’t hang someone who is going through a war. I mean, if every American soldier or British soldier was hanged for breaking during interrogation by the ...
 * IRA prison protest to restore political status.
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... Japanese or by the Nazis, there’d [have been] an awful lot of deaths. I had this understanding because I recruited so many of these young lads. They went out and they did what they were told to do, but they were never trained in anti-interrogation [techniques] or how not to break when they were caught. So I had a lot of sympathy for people like Pat Crawford, and others. And I know so many others, like —— and so forth, who was ostracised in the jail, who was recruited into the IRA when he was fourteen, and was very, very good at operations. There were loads of others, young ones, and some of them broke.
Two people, both of them close to Paddy Joe Crawford, have for years harboured doubts and suspicions about his death. One of them is Father Matt Wallace, who told the author:

I remember going to the inquest and it was a routine thing, that he died by his own hand. I was so young and stupid I didn’t even question it at that time but I was never satisfied that Paddy Joe did take his own life. I argued that he was in an institution all his life so Long Kesh would have been easier for him than for other young men at the time because he . . . knew nothing else except institutional life.

The other is Gerry McCann, a fellow orphan and resident at the same time in both the Nazareth and De La Salle homes, although McCann was six years younger:

Paddy Joe was one of the older boys and he would be like a protector for me. If you were being bullied as a five-year-old Paddy Joe would have been there for me and I always got on well with him. He was a bubbly, outgoing per- son, out for a bit of craic but a soft, gentle person. His very presence would lift the atmosphere, full of spontaneous laughter and a teller of jokes. He was a tower of strength to those who knew him well.

Gerry McCann had suspicions ‘from day one’ that Paddy Joe had been killed in Long Kesh: ‘My gut feeling was that he had been taken out,’ he told the author. But for over thirty years he kept his doubts to himself: ‘I was afraid of going into something that would burn my hands. I was a wee bit gullible [back in 1973] and only later did I realise that this was a minefield.’ McCann made a success of his life ...

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... and now manages a golf club in Belfast. He got married and had a son and as his boy approached his thirtieth year, Gerry McCann felt the need to tell his life story and so he began writing a book which he hopes one day will be published. It was then that he decided to try to find out what really happened to Paddy Joe Crawford, a mission that would send him knocking at Sinn Fein’s door.

In January 2008, Gerry McCann contacted Gerry Adams via the Sinn Fein website to ask for a meeting and, on 7 March, he and the Sinn Fein President got together at the party’s offices on the Falls Road to discuss Paddy Joe Crawford’s untimely death. While Adams’s role in ordering Crawford’s killing is open to question, there seems little doubt that the Belfast Brigade staff, of which Adams was the leading member, did play a central part in the events. But like Jean McConville’s family before him, Gerry McCann met a wall of denial from Gerry Adams. ‘The meeting was very cordial,’ recalled Gerry McCann:

I gave him a working document with questions. Was Paddy Joe an IRA Volunteer, which I knew he was, and Adams said he wasn’t. I didn’t believe he took his own life at the time and I still believe that he didn’t take his own life and I told Gerry that. His reply was that under no circumstances was he killed by his own people.

Adams told McCann that he wasn’t in Long Kesh at that time and had no personal experience of the event but he would try to contact people who were and they might be able to tell him more.

The matter rested there but nothing happened for five months until McCann contacted Sinn Fein to ask when Adams would deliver on his promise. After that he got his second meeting, not with Gerry Adams but with Bobby Storey, who was a seventeen- year-old internee in Cage 6, next door to Paddy Joe Crawford’s cage in June 1973. Bobby Storey is, as Gerry McCann put it, ‘Gerry Adams’s right-hand man’, named in the House of Commons by the former Unionist MP David Burnside as the then Director of IRA Intelligence and the alleged moving force behind some of the IRA’s more spectacular operations in the last years of the peace process. Among the many tasks Storey has undertaken for the Sinn Fein ...

page 145

... leadership was handling the delicate issue of the disappeared, in particular the potentially explosive case of Jean McConville. As Adams had done, Bobby Storey denied any IRA hand in Crawford’s death: 'I asked him' recalled McCann, 'was Paddy Joe taken out by his own people and Bobby’s response was decisive and direct: “Under no circumstances could this tragedy be attached to the movement or any inmates.”’ Gerry Adams had told Gerry McCann that Paddy Joe Crawford wasn’t an IRA Volunteer but the Sinn Fein President’s right-hand man had a different answer: ‘Storey said he was,’ Gerry McCann recalled, ‘which raises the question why there were no Republican trappings at his funeral if he had committed suicide. It beggars belief.’

15 comments:

  1. I first heard about Paddy Joe when reading voices, seen that article on Ed's site a few weeks back...

    IMO, people can dress it up any way they want. But it was a war crime.

    He was an easy touch..No family around to clear his name etc...

    All because he broke under interrogation. How many others broke and didn't suffer the same fate?

    If the PRM want the truth, then they should lead by example and come clean about their murky past first instead of pointing fingers at every other group involved in the conflict.

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  2. How could they have done that to him, irrespective of what he was or was not?
    Anyone associated with it should hang their heads in shame.

    What must have went through Paddy Joe's head. His so called comrades acting as executioners.
    The fear and absolute horror surrounding it is unthinkable.

    No doubt a few of them who aided and abetted had plenty to cover themselves because that is now seemingly the pattern.

    No one should have been let off the hook on this, every stone should have been turned and the guilty revealed, from those who gave the order to those who took part in his execution.

    Fair play to Brendan. If he had not provided his account the cover up with have continued.



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  3. That was grisly reading from start to finish. God rest that poor lad's soul

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  4. God rest a Volunteer and POW murdered by his own just for being on his own.

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  5. The Dark wanted to tell the truth but he kept quiet on the Volunteers who were supposed to have carried out this deed which suggests that's its just another made up yarn-

    Why Name Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell
    [ again ] and not name the supposed killers-

    RIP Paddy Joe Crawford whilst the dark tried to blacken your name-his dead lies will not succeed-

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  6. Michael,

    What do you believe as the cause of this mans death?

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  7. Antaine-

    Being honest I am like the rest of youse-I don't know-

    But I do know that the Dark kept
    names hid that done the deed- was the Dark in on it and trying to hide demons-why else name two people who were not involved in the actual killing and not name the killers-

    I think it was suicide-my above answer is only in response to why the Dark could not tell his full version of the truth-

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  8. Michael,

    I don't know either although I am inclined to believe Brendan.

    I asked because as you may recall in another debate I took offence at claims you made regarding suicide and victims of suicide and therefore would be as suspicious of your expressions of empathy as I would be your stated opinion.

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  9. Mickey,

    frightening there appears to be more creditable evidence of a heartless self-serving lynch mob murdering the man rather than the glossy picture of suicide or excuse you provide if somehow that protects those you serve or their interests.

    I am not sure there are words fitting to describe such a lonely brutal completely unnecessary murder.
    The man’s minor infraction is offered as a reason then I am sure the lynch mob felt robbed as numerous actual informers did not meet such a barbaric death.

    It sounds like for the first time in his short life he actually might have felt he had a place and in that strange sense of POW comradeship he might have even felt this was as close to family as he would ever experience.

    Betrayed by life only to end up being brutally betrayed by those he considered comrades.

    The legacy of the RM unjustifiable murders still echoes on today’s streets with the same failing tactic of political policing communities under the guise of hunting down hoods and the anti social elements which is nothing short of the same Provo method of control by fear.

    Certainly there is room for Brendan Hughes to be wrong on some issues but it would be impossible for him to be wrong on all issues.

    If Gerry Adams made a statement and acknowledged the brutal injustice delivered to this man would you be willing to agree with him.
    The dark side of Provo rule is not something that should be overlooked.

    This is just one of many brutal murders but this has the hallmarks of personal involvement a psychopathic lynch mob attacking and humiliating a poor lost man robbing him not only of his life but portraying him as an informer the suicide angle makes no sense for someone who struggled so hard and basically alone to survive without the network of family and friend.
    Why would he end his own life in a place he probably felt accepted and I am sure there had to be a few wiser POWs who would have extended friendship and support to the man.

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  10. Tain Bo-

    " Why would he end his own life "-

    God-I will never know that answer-
    Pauper's and millionair's-cowards and hero's have committed suicide-
    and all those in between along with the happy and content and those who did not want to see another dawn because they were sick of the sight of it-

    I knew a Volunteer who shot himself in the head in the early 90s-cant explain that one either-is someone going to come out with a yarn about him in years to come-

    There are many reasons for suicide-
    there are no reasons most of the time-
    Some-times it just happens-but not one fcuk did they give about the ones they left behind to be brutally honest-

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  11. Mackers, I recall vividly two years ago speaking with a former volunteer of D/coy about The Darks book. He told me he was a good friend of Brendan and found him a trust worthy person. This man was a guard of honour at Brendan's funeral. He spoke fondly of Brendan and assured me that like Brendan he is not pro SF, thus I don't believe he has any reason to cover for them. He said that one account in the book was flawed - the death of Paddy Crawford. He said that Paddy was a quite sort and never spoke to many and that himself and paddy had a natter now and then due to both sharing the same cage. He found paddy to be a friendly guy. He recalled with certainty Paddy telling him, some hours before his death, that he was feeling suicidal.

    I'm not saying that he was not killed. I don't know. |I am aware that paddy allegedly stating his depressive mood does not equate with him following though with his urges and it may be that others took advantage of this in order to cover the truth. I merely felt I had to add this to the record. As I stated before I have no reason to doubt the man's integrity who told me this as he is not the type to be covering for anyone.

    Furthermore, Michael Henry's comments are abhorrent. I would suggest he cares not a bit about people with mental illness. His focus always being on blindly defending what he perceives to be his side - SF. To suggest that people who take their own life are selfish is the stuff of armchair Psychologists. His final wording on the subject is uncouth and highlights his level of sensitivity - zero! No wonder his centre of political thought swings to the right.

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  12. Emmett,

    of course, anything that adds to the mosaic is welcome. However, as Ed pointed out in the above, the people who were on the ground on the day were spoken to completely separate from the BC project and outlined very clearly what happened. I think what you say can gel with their account: the guy is being out through the mill by the people dealing with his case. That might explain his depression.

    There were flaws in Brendan's account in respect of other matters, one of which I addressed in one of the annual lectures.

    Brendan gave his account and people have the right to challenge it. You did right to introduce your point.

    What is available thus far lends itself to one conclusion. I am left in no doubt he was killed. The mechanisms of what level of the IRA it was approved at and for why, I can't say with certainty. It was certainly not something the prison command structure approved on its own.

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  13. I think Mickey in his usual crass way has been picked up wrong and was not calling those who commit suicide selfish at all but stating that when they go that far they are so far through they're not thinking about anyone but themselves such is their level of pain

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  14. michael henry - if it was suicide he must have had some sympathetic volunteer to help him tape his hands behind his back. also ur comment 'not one fcuk did they give about the ones they left behind to be brutally honest' is a bit wide of the mark in this case. i think ur more brutal than honest

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