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| Mark Lenaghan |
At that stage, in 1984, there was probably no one else in the republican wings with that level of education, although by the time of the Good Friday Agreement and the surge of releases many republican prisoners were emerging from the jail with third level qualifications.
Mark Lenaghan, known to his fellow prisoners as Fiddler, was a rare bird in more ways in one. Well educated, he was also deeply religious. It gave rise to a certain touchiness on his part. Once when I referred to a rare monastic-type silence on the wing he took umbrage, thinking I was having a go at his beliefs, leaving myself and Somhairle Dines bemused and amused in equal measure. On that wing with people like myself and Big Syd McManus housed there, religious conviction was never spared the whip of wit. This just didn't happen to be one of those occasions.
On the wing, despite his deeply held beliefs I don't recall him as religiously in the face of others. That was more a feature of life on the loyalist wings where the common religious currency was Old Testament fire and brimstone.
His religious belief, or fervour as it seemed to me, was an enduring feature of his life, and when he had completed his sentence he taught religion at St Malachy's College before later in life becoming an ordained deacon of the Catholic Church. I had sometimes wondered what became of him and have a grudging admiration for the fact that his religious conviction was not the result of some jail fad, to be abandoned like old socks that have outlived their usefulness.
That he never returned to the IRA on his release was entirely in line with the evolution of his religious thinking which placed an emphasis on the rejection of armed force as a way to tackle political problems. He felt the slippage into a military mindset was simultaneously the withdrawal from a moral mindset, the result being that anything can be justified for the big picture; that ultimately the practitioner of political violence ends up deceiving themselves.
Like many of his generation he did not drop from the sky into jail. State violence produced street violence, with many young people seeing armed responses as a productive way of addressing state repression. As part of an apolitical family he grew up in a loyalist area, Woodvale at the top of the Shankill Road. Describing his upbringing as being in the Catholic faith, the family home was first bombed and then in a second attack loyalists, behaving like Israeli settlers, stole their home and evicted the family. This stirred great resentment within the young Mark Lenaghan. Once allocated a home in Twinbrook he exchanged religious views for political ones.
Twinbrook, a burgeoning estate on the outskirts of West Belfast and also home to Bobby Sands, was an exclusively nationalist community 'seething with resentment' at the unionists, the police and the British army. The area was 'pickled in violence.' While still at school, midway through his teens he decided to join the IRA.
He moved into the IRA's civil administration and detailed how the IRA system of policing left a lot to desire. He identified the dynamic driving IRA policing as less one of seeking control over the community, and being more of a response to community pressure, something often overlooked by observers. Gradually he moved to the Active Service Units which brought him to the coalface of armed conflict with British forces. After one such confrontation in February 1982, he was captured and imprisoned.
Prior to finding himself in jail he also found himself outside the Catholic Church, coming to see it through a Marxian lens as one more Ideological State Apparatus. He put this down to having acquired a perspective of if you are not with us you are against us. Imprisonment, and the time for reflection it allows, brought him back to his faith.
His death was the first I had heard of him in decades. I had no idea that he was married with three children or had become a church deacon. Other former prisoners had died in 2025, most notably Brendan 'Bik' McFarlane but they had tended to remain politically involved whereas Mark Lenaghan's life took off in a completely different direction.
By all accounts, he was deeply committed to the parish he worked in as a deacon, becoming immensely popular with the congregation. For those who knew about his IRA past it didn't much matter. They took him as they found him.
While religious belief to me is ridiculous, it would be churlish to heap ridicule on Mark Lenaghan. Given that he took a road less travelled by people of his background he came to strike me as a formidable man man on a remarkable journey.
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