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| Brendan Bik McFarlane |
Which I doubted. Stage 4 cancer is usually a one-way street with a literal dead end at the bottom. I tried as best I could to keep abreast of his condition before word came through from a former blanketman in Belfast that he was on the driver. When the end came, I took a solitary walk along the roads of Drogheda to reflect on his passing.
From I first met him in Crumlin Road jail in March 1976, I always liked Bik. Everybody did. At 23, he had that magnetic charismatic personality and pop star looks that put me in mind of David Essex who from 1973 had been having huge chart success.
When he was sentenced to life with a stipulation that he serve twenty-five years before being considered for release, I bristled at the prospect. At 18 years of age a quarter of a century in jail seemed incomprehensible to me. Eight months later the same sentence was handed down to myself, but it didn’t look so daunting by that point. There was the additional factor of being youthful enough to still believe Provisional propaganda which forecast both victories and amnesties, neither of which came to pass.
Bik along with the late Skeet Hamilton and Seamus Clarke had been convicted of launching an attack in August 1975 on a Shankill Road bar believed by the IRA to be a UVF meeting place where its headquarters staff regularly convened and drank. The bar had been previously attacked in June when a bomb was hurled into it from a pillion passenger on a motorcycle. If memory is reliable the earlier attack which resulted in no fatalities was claimed by the IRA, although Shane Paul Doherty argues otherwise, feeling that a cover name was used.
It was an attack that earned Bik the tag of a brutal mass sectarian killer. He would always insist in conversation with me in the H Blocks that he wasn’t sectarian. I think that was true attitudinally; he harboured no animosity towards Protestants, and I never heard him brag about the attack. It wasn’t his form.
Yet it is undeniable that for a two-year period beginning in November 1974, the IRA did prosecute a sectarian campaign against the unionist community, with many people being killed for no reason other than they were Protestants. The worst atrocity came in January 1976 when the Kingsmill massacre occurred. In Belfast the Ardoyne IRA was particularly active when it came to waging the sectarian war. While in the Crum’s A Wing, in 1976, a chant that would often echo around the landings was ‘up the sectarian assassins.’ It never came from Bik.
When I arrived in Cage 10 Long Kesh after being sentenced, Bik was across the gap in Cage 11 but moved over to 10. I had many conversations with him before I moved to 11 - to walk the yard for hours each day with Pat McGeown, wise beyond his years - and he to 12 from where he launched an escape bid with Larry Marley and the same Pat McGeown, both now deceased. Pat too had moved to 12 for reasons that are now obvious. The plot failed and the three were deprived of their political status and sent to the H Blocks. I would end up in H4 with them a couple of months later, having also been accused of plotting to escape.
Bik went on to lead the prison protest during the hunger strikes. He was committed to the course. When our wing moved as one from H6 to H3 shortly after the election of Bobby Sands as MP for Fermanagh South Tyrone, the wing we moved to was adjacent to Bik’s own. We would see him at mass each Sunday. There was never time for more than a few passing words because he was totally absorbed in strategizing, frequently huddling with Richard O’Rawe and Jake Jackson and at times with the hunger strikers who happened to be on the wing before they were transferred to the prison hospital. I have vivid memories of Pat Sheehan and Pat McGeown looking incredibly frail and fragile, causing me to feel relieved that I was not in Bik’s position. It took enormous reserves of mental strength to be able to deal with that.
On one occasion there was a furious row between Bik and Denis Faul, which others claimed resulted from Denis accusing Bik of being responsible for the death of Martin Hurson. Bik was livid with rage.
There is no doubt in my mind that the account put forward by Richard O’Rawe of how external leadership figures, operating outside the structures of the army council, effectively sabotaged an outcome that would have resulted in six fewer deaths. While Bik denied this, I found his account unpersuasive.
I have never held him responsible for the six deaths, feeling that within the crucible that was the H Blocks protest at that particular juncture, most leaders (with the likely exception of the Dark) would have placed their trust in the outside leadership, believing that it had a more panoramic view of the wider battlefield, and therefore better placed to make difficult strategic decisions. However, I feel as strongly that where Bik failed was in not endorsing the account of Richard O’Rawe in 2005 when Blanketmen was published to critical acclaim, seriously shifting the course of the hunger strike narrative. Rather he responded unsteadily, on occasion shifting his position, and ultimately rendering a counter to O’Rawe that was implausible. He opted to hold the line which in the hands of the Adams leadership was incapable of running a straight course.
We shared the same dinner table for almost a year in the canteen throughout 1982, and were in adjacent cells for the same period. I even managed to do his ligaments in with a tackle in the yard during soccer, for which he held not the slightest grudge. So, I got to know him quite well. While Bik was to the fore in all IRA activity within the prisons I was never convinced that the IRA was the type of life he envisaged for himself or one which he felt comfortable with. It always struck me that he had so many interests outside of the IRA, that being in the organisation was a chore which he performed out of a sense of duty. Behind the steely façade of an unyielding and ruthless IRA leader, there was a compassion and empathy, which I was the beneficiary of in difficult times.
I always liked to see Bik except for the time when he was retuned to the jail having been extradited from the Netherlands. Despite my many clashes with the Sinn Fein and IRA leadership he never failed to speak to me when our paths crossed. At the funeral of Jimmy Drumm he was the only person who did speak. The anonymous pressure of the group weighed heavily on others who would normally pass themselves. On another occasion when we stopped to chat in Belfast city centre, I declined his invitation for lunch only because I had another schedule which could not be shelved.
Bik was an outstanding jail leader, on a par with The Dark and Bobby Sands. Measured but thorough in all matters, for a time at the end of 1982 we corresponded daily. His advice never lacked gravitas, his scrutiny of my contribution, forensic. When he escaped the following year, my first thought was the IRA on the outside had acquired an asset but the IRA on the inside had lost one.
I always liked to see Bik except for the time when he was retuned to the jail having been extradited from the Netherlands. Despite my many clashes with the Sinn Fein and IRA leadership he never failed to speak to me when our paths crossed. At the funeral of Jimmy Drumm he was the only person who did speak. The anonymous pressure of the group weighed heavily on others who would normally pass themselves. On another occasion when we stopped to chat in Belfast city centre, I declined his invitation for lunch only because I had another schedule which could not be shelved.
Bik was an outstanding jail leader, on a par with The Dark and Bobby Sands. Measured but thorough in all matters, for a time at the end of 1982 we corresponded daily. His advice never lacked gravitas, his scrutiny of my contribution, forensic. When he escaped the following year, my first thought was the IRA on the outside had acquired an asset but the IRA on the inside had lost one.
Bik, I felt, was one of those republican activists who for all his loyalty to it, was quite distinct from the leadership cabal. He had something none of them had - enough.
Eternal Dreamless Sleep, Bik.
Eternal Dreamless Sleep, Bik.
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