Both were deeply involved in the Provisional IRA. Both went to prison. Both lived long enough to see the armed campaign end and Sinn Féin enter the political institutions it had once rejected. And both looked at where republicanism had arrived and asked, in different words, essentially the same question: Was this what we fought for?
There is another connection between them. We heard some of the most important things they had to say only after they were dead. Brendan Hughes gave his extensive recorded testimony to Anthony McIntyre for the Boston College Belfast Project. His interviews were conducted on the understanding that they would remain confidential until his death. They subsequently became the centrepiece of Ed Moloney’s Voices From The Grave. Billy Kelly created his own, rather less formal, voice from the grave.
Six months before his death, he contacted Sunday World journalist Hugh Jordan and offered him an interview. Kelly imposed one condition: it was not to be published until he was dead. His explanation was extraordinary. “ If you put this out now I’ll be in big trouble. You’ll need to hold on to it until after I’m gone.” Kelly said he had wanted to speak for a long time but believed that, had he done so, he would have been “castigated and pressurised into retracting it”. So Kelly spoke while alive but chose to be heard from the grave. And when the grave finally released his words, they sounded remarkably familiar.
Big Houses
One passage in Kelly’s interview immediately brought Brendan Hughes to mind. Kelly said: “A number of republicans have ended up with big houses and cars and a load of money and property.” He then contrasted their circumstances with his own: “But people like me and others – who fought the war and went to jail – ended up with nothing.”
Almost a quarter of a century earlier, Hughes was making a strikingly similar complaint. Interviewed by Anthony McIntyre in Fourthwrite , (issue 1--interview starts at page 6) , Hughes talked about former IRA volunteers struggling economically while others prospered. When McIntyre pointed out that some people believed the struggle had been worthwhile, Hughes replied that among them were people with “big houses and guaranteed incomes”. Hughes’s criticism was not merely jealousy over who owned what. His argument was political and social. He believed a movement rooted in working-class republican communities had changed character. In his view, some people had moved into comfortable political and economic positions while former volunteers and the communities from which they came remained behind.
Kelly, speaking decades later from his New Lodge flat, sounded remarkably similar. Different man. Different interview. Different time. The same uncomfortable image: big houses on one side, former volunteers wondering what it had all been for on the other.
“The Brits Won”
Kelly went considerably further. His assessment of the IRA campaign was brutally concise: “The Brits won. There’s no other way of saying it.” Kelly said that he and others had joined the IRA believing they were fighting for a united Ireland and to end British rule. Looking at Northern Ireland at the end of his life, he concluded that they had failed. “We fought to get the Brits out of Ireland, but we failed,” was his assessment. He pointed to the continuing British constitutional position and the provisions governing a border poll. He even ridiculed the black-taxi cavalcade which accompanied the IRA ceasefire, saying it created the impression that republicans had won something when, in his opinion, they had secured nothing.
Again, Brendan Hughes had travelled much of this road before him. Hughes became deeply disillusioned with the direction taken by the republican leadership. He complained that the thirty-two-county democratic socialist republic for which he believed he had struggled was no longer even being discussed. He regarded the political direction taken under Gerry Adams’s leadership as a fundamental departure from what he believed the IRA campaign had been about.
There is an important distinction here. These were the assessments of Hughes and Kelly. Sinn Féin and Gerry Adams presented the peace strategy very differently, arguing that it created a peaceful and democratic route towards republican objectives. Adams also publicly rejected some of Hughes’s allegations and described Hughes and other critics as opponents of Sinn Féin’s strategy. But whatever view one takes of that argument, Kelly’s words demonstrate that Hughes’s disillusionment was not unique.
What was it all for?
Perhaps Kelly’s most powerful words were not “The Brits won”. They were these: “What was the point of the IRA campaign in the first place? What was it all for?” That question could almost have come from Hughes. Hughes had spent his later years wrestling with much the same issue. Men had died. Men had spent decades in prison. Hughes himself endured the blanket protest and hunger strike. Families and communities had lived through enormous suffering. What, Hughes wanted to know, had justified it? Kelly’s conclusion was even harsher. He said the IRA campaign had not been worth the loss of a single life and described the Troubles as a waste of human life, explicitly including violence beyond that committed by the IRA. Whatever anyone thinks of that conclusion, it is difficult to dismiss the significance of who was saying it.
Kelly was not an academic analysing the IRA from a university office. He had been an IRA gunman and prisoner. He admitted killing British soldiers. He travelled to Libya as part of the delegation which sought weapons from Colonel Gaddafi. This was a man who had helped acquire the means to continue the war eventually asking: What was the war for?
Adams And The Destination Of The Struggle
Hughes’s criticism became deeply personal because of his former closeness to Gerry Adams. The two had been comrades and friends. Hughes subsequently came to believe that the political strategy associated with Adams had taken republicanism somewhere fundamentally different from the destination for which volunteers such as himself believed they had fought.
Kelly’s final interview approached the issue from his own direction. “Sinn Féin led the people up the garden path,” he said. He contrasted republican rhetoric with the political reality he saw around him and complained that some republicans had prospered while people like himself had not.
It would be too simple to say that Hughes and Kelly held identical views on every question. There is no evidence for that. But on several fundamental points their criticisms converge. They believed the IRA had fought to end British rule. They did not believe that objective had been achieved. They questioned what decades of armed struggle had accomplished. They believed some people associated with the republican movement had prospered while former volunteers and working-class republican communities had been left behind. And both expressed deep dissatisfaction with the political direction taken by Sinn Féin under Adams’s leadership.
The difference Was When They Spoke
There is one fascinating difference. Hughes became publicly outspoken while he was still alive. As early as 2000 he was telling Fourthwrite that he felt “no satisfaction whatsoever” with how things had turned out and urging republicans who disagreed with the leadership to speak out. But his most extensive historical testimony was preserved under the Boston College arrangement for release after his death.
Kelly went further in protecting himself. He specifically instructed Hugh Jordan not to publish until he was gone. And he told us why. He feared being “in big trouble”. He feared being castigated. He feared being pressured into retracting his words. That ought to interest anyone concerned with republican oral history.
How Many More?
Kelly said something else in his final interview which deserves attention. He felt qualified to speak not only for former prisoners but also for dead comrades who could no longer speak for themselves. There is a strange irony in that. Kelly wanted to speak for the dead, yet apparently believed he needed to become one of them before he could speak freely himself. Brendan Hughes became a Voice from the Grave through Boston College. Billy Kelly became one through Hugh Jordan and the Sunday World. Which raises the question: How many more Blue Kellys are there?
How many former IRA volunteers have already recorded interviews with journalists or historians on the condition that they remain unpublished until death? How many have left tapes with their families? How many have written accounts sitting unopened in drawers? And how many hold views similar to those expressed by Hughes and Kelly but have decided that saying them publicly while alive simply isn’t worth the consequences? We don’t know.
Nor should we assume that any future testimony will agree with Hughes or Kelly. Other veterans may leave behind accounts defending Sinn Féin’s strategy and reaching completely different conclusions. That is the point of oral history. You record the voices first and argue about what they mean afterwards.
Voices From The Grave
There is something almost eerie about reading Kelly’s final interview alongside Hughes’s words from a quarter of a century earlier. Hughes talked about republicans with “big houses and guaranteed incomes.” Kelly talked about republicans with “big houses and cars and a load of money and property.” Hughes wondered what had become of the republican objectives for which his generation had fought. Kelly asked: “What was it all for?” Hughes believed the political direction of republicanism represented a departure from what he had fought for. Kelly’s final verdict was: “We lost and the Brits won.”
Two veteran IRA men. Two different lives. Two different recordings. Two voices from the grave. And, separated by more than two decades, two remarkably similar questions about where Irish republicanism ended up and who benefited from the journey. Perhaps the most important question now is not whether Hughes and Kelly were right or wrong. It is how many more voices are still waiting for the grave before telling us what they really think.
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