I was standing with a group of friends on the steps outside the old Shantallow Community Centre, that dark winter’s night back in October 30th 1974.
I can’t honestly remember who those friends were, but I do remember someone coming from the direction of Moyola Drive. Again, I can’t remember who this person was, only that he had shouted over to us that Wee Ben had been killed in a bomb explosion.
The memory of those brief few moments have been etched into my mind since then; a memory as dark as that night had been. Word would soon follow on the heels of that terrible news that Sa Gallagher and another Volunteer had also been in and very close to the car when the bomb exploded prematurely while Ben sat with it on his lap in the back seat.
Óglach Michael Meehan was only sixteen when he died that night almost fifty years ago. Sa was barely a month from his seventeenth birthday and the third volunteer would have also been a teenager.
They had pulled into a petrol station, between where the Council offices and the roundabout are located today. Their intended target was a British army sangar on the Quay. The third Volunteer got out of the car holding a 45 handgun and ordered civilians who had been in the forecourt to leave. He then proceed to put petrol in the car so as not to arouse any suspicion. Inside the car, Sa, who had been the driver on that night, turned around to speak to Ben and at that very moment the bomb exploded.
The volunteer, who had been outside putting petrol into the car, was thrown back by the force of the blast. For Sa time would have been frozen in a brief few moments of shock and uncertainty, there would have been a nightmarish ringing in his ears. Then the door to survival in his mind would have been prised open by instinct. But another door kept him locked inside the waking nightmare; the car door, which he couldn’t open. Then instinct intervened again and he kicked out the windscreen. As he crawled free the thought that he had escaped the clutches of death would surely have crossed his mind. The rear of the car where Ben had been seated only seconds beforehand was nothing more than a twisted mess of smothering metal. Sa heard the ominous sound of wailing sirens in the distance and saw the flashing blue lights of the fast approaching enemy vehicles coming up Strand Road from Fort George army barracks. Instead of running in the opposite direction towards Lawrence Hill, as instinct would have most of us doing, Sa and his comrade had the presence of mind to walk calmly towards the oncoming Military and RUC vehicles.
As the enemy roared past them they saw that a group of people had gathered outside The Carraig Bar, so they approached them and Sa recognised one of the men, a teacher, and asked him to take them to Shantallow, which the man did. Sa was later smuggled across the border where he received treatment for his facial wounds. He was then billeted with an old farmer who fed him with spuds and very little else. Sa told me that the old fella gave him a large tub of Vaseline and instructed him to keep applying it to a wound on his face. He did so and the wound quickly healed leaving barely any sign of a scar.
Anything was better than life on the run in an isolated farm and a daily ration of spuds, so Sa left the old fella to his endless supply of spuds and returned to Derry and the war.
That was Sa Gallagher, he had Republicanism flowing through his veins. His father, Dinny, was a Republican, as was his grandfather James Gallagher. By the time I joined the IRA as a 16 year old, Sa, who was five months younger than me, had been a veteran. He had even been a member of Na Fianna as a small boy, in the 1960s. He once told me that the Fianna at that time had been more like the Boy Scouts.
When I moved to Carnhill from Rosemount around the middle of 1972, I got involved in the Shantallow riots which were a daily occurrence, while Sa was an active member of the IRA, putting his life on the line each day. On one of those days, he almost shot me while I was hanging on to the back of an RUC Land Rover, which was slowly moving down Drumleck Drive. I was attempting to pull the rear doors open so that someone running behind could hurl a paint bomb into the back of it.
I heard an awful rattle on the side of the Land Rover and quickly realised that it was bullets hitting it and not stones, so I jumped off and rolled behind a parked car. The Land Rover then sped up and roared on down the street.
Sa had stepped out from Deery’s alleyway and opened fire on the Land Rover not knowing that I was hanging on to the back of the thing. Shortly after that he came and said to me, ‘what the bloody hell were you doing, hanging on the back of that Land Rover?’
‘Trying to open the back door,’ said I. ‘I didn’t know you were going to open up on it, did I?’
I was still a just rioter at that stage, throwing stones and paint bombs at the Brits and the RUC, while this IRA volunteer, who had been around my own age was firing live rounds at them. Sa and I have laughed about him almost shooting me many times over the years. Not long afterwards, I was taken aside and told that I would be better putting my energy into the IRA than rioting. So I joined Na Fianna and within a short time, The IRA. From that period on Sa and I formed a bond that would last the rest of our lives, a brotherly bond.
Around August and September of 1976, the British policy of criminalisation, was in full swing. they wanted to label Republicans as criminals. The so called conveyor-belt system of arrest, brutality and torture was quickly filling the prisons with young men and women. The first IRA volunteer to be sentenced as a result of this policy, Kieran Nugent, refused to wear the uniform of a common criminal, famously telling the screws that they’d have to nail it to his back before he’d wear it. The Blanket Protest had begun and many more Republican prisoners would follow him onto it.
One after the other, or in small groups, we found ourselves on remand in Crumlin Road jail and one of the very few active volunteers left in Shantallow was Sa Gallagher.
But his freedom would be short-lived, Sa was eventually led, in handcuffs, through the gates of the Victorian prison to reunite with the rest of us. On the day of his trial a grim-faced judge, wearing an absurd wig which made him look like King Billy, looked down on him from his lofty position of power.
Sentencing was quick, without the nuisance of having to prove guilt. And in Sa’s case it was shocking in it’s severity. He received two life sentences, plus 365 years in jail.
After that it was a short van journey to the concrete hell known as the H Blocks and the long years of brutal beatings, torture and food which wasn’t fit for animals. The bitter winters, which included the Winter of 1978, when the cold winds would reach into our cells, through windows without glass, and grip our naked bodies with their icy fingers.
The summers would come, when the warmth of the sun could only be felt by reaching through the concrete bars of the cell windows, and they would eventually leave us to make way for another cruel winter. The unrelenting violence meted out to us by the screws was the constant thread which wove the seasons together. The birds would visit and entertain us with their antics and their songs of freedom, while the shifting clouds or the blue skies would remind us of a life we had once known beyond those high walls and watch towers.
The H Blocks were prisons within a much larger prison and throughout those long years of confinement we might only have seen each other on our way to and from the monthly visits, which were a valuable means of smuggling comms in and out of the jail and tobacco for the smokers among us. As we passed each other we gave a quick greeting and moved on like the wretched ghosts that we had become. In September 1979 I was moved from H6 to H3 where Sa was at the time and we got to meet up at the weekly mass in the canteen.
It was a Sunday just like the many other Sundays in the H Blocks and I was sitting in the front row of seats with Sa. The second hunger strike led by Bobby Sands had just begun. As we spoke to each other, Bobby came over and squeezed in between us. I introduced him to Sa and for a few moments we engaged in small talk. There was little we talk about knowing what lay ahead for Bobby in the weeks and months to come. He then got up, we said our farewells and watched as he went around the other men doing the same thing. We both knew that Bobby was saying his goodbyes to the men he had led during those hellish years and we knew that we’d never see him again in this life.
When Sa was told the terrible news that he had cancer and that it would eventually take him from his family and friends, he faced it with the same courage that he faced the forces of the British Crown as a youthful yet fearless IRA volunteer. He refused to lie down and wait on the end, and we were awestruck at how he got on with what had to be done, painting and decorating his home, doing repairs and getting out and about as normal.
I spoke to Sa one day, about what lay ahead of him, and he told me that he should have been buried in the Republican plot beside young Ben Meenan since 1974, but that he had somehow survived, that he had met and married Anna, who gave birth to his two girls, Sarah and Tricia and watched them grow into young women and in turn bless him and Anna with grandchildren. Ben never got to have that he told me.
A Dolmen, which is a monument to the Irish warriors of legend and of more recent times, stands on or near to the spot where the Gallagher family home on Hogg’s Folly, once stood. And today we lay one of those Irish warriors, Sa Gallagher, to rest.
Óglach Denis Gallagher has left us. His heartbroken family, Anna, Sarah and Tricia. His grandchildren, Donnchadh, Heidi and Darcy. His brother and sisters, Helen, Philomena, Jamesie, Lizzie, June, Jacqueline, Geraldine, Anne and Majella. And we who are his friends and comrades.
We remember at this sad time his father, Denis, a proud Republican, his mother Molly, a gentle soul, Charlie, his brother and Katie his sister and his grandchild, Darragh.
Although we grieve for him, Sa leaves us with memories which will never diminish with the passing of time.
The oak spreads mighty beneath the sun,
In a wonderful dazzle of moonlight green -
Oh would I might hasten from tasks undone,
And journey whither no grief hath been!
- Ethna Carbey, Bobby Sands’ favourite poet.
Codladh éasca mo shean cara.
Sleep easy my old friend.
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Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman. Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie |
Powerful Eulogy
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