Read: The Disappeared: Scraping The Barrel

From: Irish Political Review: Editorials

Date: December, 2012

By: Editorial

The Disappeared: Scraping The Barrel

The Disappeared: Scraping The Barrel
The political campaign, waged in humanitarian guise, to remove Gerry Adams from Southern politics and to undermine the Agreement in the North, was intensified during the month. The SDLP is increasingly co-operating with the Official Unionists and facilitating fundamentalist Unionist opposition to the Agreement in the Northern Assembly, and a joint British/Irish television programme which attempted to connect Adams with the killing and/or burial of Jean McConville was broadcast in prime TV time in both states.
If either the SDLP or the UUP were to make very great gains against their opponents at the next election, it is probable that the Agreement would revert to being dysfunctional, as it was when the SDLP and the UUP were the major parties. If the SDLP revived by use of its present methods and overtook Sinn Fein, it is improbable that it could bring itself to work the system with the Paisleyites. And if the UUP were to overtake the DUP, what prospect is there that it would work the system with Sinn Fein?
The Anti-Adams TV programme, The Disappeared (8.11.13) centred on the Jean McConville incident because, as was explained in the course of it, it is thought that, for technical reasons, the case remains open in the South (where the body was found), and subject to Garda investigation. It is hoped that Adams can be connected with it and that charges can be laid against him. And Fianna Fail in particular thinks that would greatly boost its chances at the next Election.

The programme made no headway at all towards achieving this. That, no doubt, is why Noel Whelan, an almost Fianna Fail columnist in the Irish Times, wrote the next day:

"It may not be possible to prove things in a criminal court of law but in the court of public opinion… the expert evidence is overwhelmingly against them. Security sources and senior political figures in both sides of the divide and both sides of the Border have always placed Adams besides McGuinness at the senior levels of IRA management. Most journalists and academics who have specialised in the study of the IRA have long disputed Adams' denials about such involvement. To these voices must now be added those of former leading IRA commanders who have spoken about the extent of Adams' knowledge and involvement… The Sinn Fein leadership, and a generation of voters with no memory of the IRA's campaign, must be repeatedly confronted with the stark and horrific reality of what the IRA did" (Sinn Fein Leadership's Cavalier Relationship With The Truth, 9 Nov.).

(Adams was charged, in Belfast, with membership of the IRA and acquitted. On his way back to West Belfast from the courts, he was shot when his car was stopped at a traffic light around the corner from Athol St. The media experts have lived all their professional lives on propaganda handouts from Government agencies. The former IRA commanders who give evidence against Adams are those who detest him for having ended the War.)

The programme consisted chiefly of mood music—but not entirely. There was an interview with Nuala O'Loan, former Police Ombudsman in the North, who had investigated the McConville affair. She said quite definitely that McConville had not been an informer against the IRA. She was not questioned about how she knew that for a fact. Her statement was accepted as the truth.
But it gave the lie to the chief IRA witness against Adams, Brendan Hughes.
Hughes gave his evidence to the Boston College operation set up by Lord Bew of the Official IRA, and Ed Moloney, an English journalist who began his Belfast career in the utopian People's Democracy movement which helped to break open the old Northern Ireland system and provoke the backlash which gave rise to the War. Hughes' evidence was given in taped interviews conducted by Anthony McIntyre, a former Provisional who left because of the Peace Process.
Hughes gave his evidence against Adams on the condition that it would be kept secret in Boston College until he died, which he expected to do shortly. The evidence was used, without attribution, by Moloney in the writing of his best seller, The Secret History Of The IRA (2002). Extracts from the interviews were published, in 2010, under editing by Moloney, in Voices From The Grave, and with comment by him.

The TV programme was a joint BBC/RTE production. The BBC in Northern Ireland is a Government broadcasting station—the Government, of course, being Whitehall. On the 'mainland' the BBC has a degree of independence from the Government. Politically it is a service to the party system in Parliament and is required to be 'impartial' between Government and Opposition. But the British party system has always excluded Northern Ireland from its sphere of operations. BBC NI has, therefore, always been an anomalous region of the BBC. Even in the days of the old Stormont, when everything seemed secure in the North, Whitehall never relinquished control of BBC NI to NI. It is always controlled by the Whitehall Government of the day.
The Boston tapes, in which Hughes gave his evidence against Adams, were broadcast for the first time in The Disappeared, by grace of HMG. That is, we heard Hughes in his own voice saying that Adams ordered McConville to be killed. But we did not hear him say that he discovered that McConville was an informer. And his testimony to that effect was not mentioned in the programme.
Here is his statement on the tapes, as given in the transcript edited by Moloney (dots and dashes being as they appear in the book):

"At that time Divis Flats still existed and it was a major source of recruitment and activity by the IRA . . . I'm not sure how it originally started, how she became . . . an informer [but[ she was a informer; she had a transmitter in her house. The British supplied the transmitter into her flat.——, watching the movements of IRA volunteers around Divis Flats at that time . . . the unit that was in . . . Divis Flats at the time was a pretty active unit. A few of them, one of them in particular, young ———, received information from ——— that ——— had something in the house. I sent . . . a squad over to the house to check it out and there was a transmitter in the house. We retrieved the transmitter, arrested her, took her away, interviewed her, and she told [us[ what she was doing. We actually knew what she was doing because we had the transmitter . . . if I can get hold of this other wee man he can tell you more about it because I wasn't actually on the scene at the time. And because she was a woman . . . we let her go with a warning [and] confiscated the transmitter. A few weeks later, I'm not sure again how the information came about . . . another transmitter was put into her house . . . she was still co-operating with the British; she was getting paid by the British to pass on information. That information came to our attention. The special squad was brought into operation then. And she was arrested again and taken away" (Voices From The Grave, p128-9).

The programme broadcast a few sentences from that tape that come immediately after this in the transcript, saying that Adams ordered the killing. Perhaps it was considered morally irrelevant whether she was a British informer or not, but it can hardly be argued that it was causatively irrelevant

We must assume that the programme makers knew very well that they were broadcasting an assertion by O'Loan which was incompatible with the evidence given by Hughes, who was the man on the spot at the time, and chose to suppress Hughes' evidence in order to enhance O'Loan's.
The presenter of the programme, Darragh McIntyre, then interviewed Moloney, the organiser of the Boston College operation. He did not ask about the conflict between O'Loan's statement and Hughes' evidence. That was something viewers should be kept ignorant of. What he asked him was the reason why Hughes recorded secret evidence against Adams, to be held in the United States until his death and then made public. Moloney replied that it was because Adams had told a lie. Suddenly we were in the Kindergarten.
The programme included a snippet of an interview with Adams. He was told that his former colleagues, Hughes and Dolours Price, had recorded testimony that he had ordered Jean McConville to be killed and buried [after she had been found to be spying on the IRA in Divis Flats].—Well, no, Darragh didn't put that last bit to him, and if Adams referred to that aspect of Hughes' testimony in his reply it was edited out.
His reply, insofar as it was presented to us, was that it should be taken into account that Hughes and Price regarded him as a traitor.
Within the terms set by the programme for itself, this came as a bolt from the blue. What! Adams, the IRA Commander with blood on his hands, regarded as a traitor by staunch Republicans, who on that basis were driven to give evidence against him to the Imperial State! How absurd!
Darragh did nothing to relieve the incredulity with which many of his millions of viewers must have responded to that statement by Adams. But the programme-makers knew very well that Hughes and Price had come to hate Adams because he launched a Peace Process that stopped the war.
Here is Adams' reply as broadcast:

"Question: Brendan Hughes has alleged that there was only one man who gave the order for… Jean McConville to be executed. That man is now the head of Sinn Fein… Did you give the order for the execution of Jean McConville?
Adams: No, I had no act or part to play in either the abduction, the killing or the burial of Jean McConville, or indeed any of these other individuals. And Brendan is telling lies. You know himself and Dolours Price, opponents of the Sinn Fein leadership, opponents of our strategy, from their point of view, and obviously I profoundly disagree with them, they see us as having sold out. They see us as traitors. And they also have their own demons to deal with, and their allegations have to be set in that context."

Not all the people whose evidence against Adams figured in the programme were dead. There were two who were alive. Unfortunately they were also anonymous. Darragh confronted Adams with the evidence of one of these ghostly entities and he dealt with it appropriately.
A fifth appeared in person. There were two disappearances from Crossmaglen. Darragh introduced his witness about them as follows:

"Whatever you say, say nothing, is a local mantra. But there is one man who knows this place and isn't afraid to speak up. Martin McAllister is a former member of the IRA's South Armagh Brigade, with the scars and the prison terms to prove it.
Question: Who carried out these disappearances?
McAllister: It would have been the local IRA…"

McAllister's testimony began in the subjunctive, and so it continued. There was no factual detail. There was no who, why, when, and where. There was only speculation that the IRA must have been responsible, and that if Adams didn't know it was probably because he didn't want to know.
But the interview was not without interest. McAllister said the reason for the disappearances was—

"a very simple one. The community, the local community, the ordinary decent people would not have put up with it. So, no claim, no blame. Everybody was aware what had happened to them. The fact that they didn't leave them at the side of the road, so to speak, saved their own grace a little".

If everybody was aware of what had happened, what was it that the community would not have supported? Leaving bodies at the side of the road? Things had to be done discreetly.
The role of Crossmaglen in the War might have been dwelt on a bit. By the 1990s the IRA had been heavily penetrated by British Intelligence. It was rendered incapable of major operations everywhere except South Armagh. And, when the Peace Process was stalled in the mid-Nineties, it was given a fillip by South Armagh placing a very big bomb in the City of London.

There was in fact a sixth witness against Adams, live and not anonymous: Billy McKee, one of the founders of the Provisional IRA. He was presented as the honest terrorist who executed people, no problem, but never buried them. He said the IRA in Belfast was stronger under his command in 1970 than it had been at any time since 1920. That was certainly true. It was much stronger in 1970 than in 1920. It was stronger even than it had been in 1922 at the time of the Treatyite invasion of Northern Ireland, when Whitehall allowed its Treatyite Provisional Government of the 26 Counties to invade the recently-constituted Northern Ireland region of the United in Kingdom in May 1922, with the object of disconcerting the Anti-Treaty forces, before instructing it to make war on the Anti-Treatyites in June.
The new IRA of 1970 was not only stronger numerically than that of 1920, but was a body of a different kind. In 1920 the Northern IRA was the tail of the all-Ireland IRA which was at war with Britain—which refused to recognise the elected Government in Ireland. In 1922, with the Border drawn, the IRA in the North was used as a pawn by the Treatyite Provisional Government in its efforts to consolidate the position in which Whitehall had placed it in the 26 Counties. The Anti-Treatyites were appealed to for support in the invasion to knock down the new Northern Ireland Government. Many of them from around the country responded to the call and so the volunteers were at hand to be rounded up when Collins received orders from Whitehall to make war on the Anti-Treatyites.
The campaign of 1922 had a delusory object—to destroy the Northern Ireland Government, which, however, had no independent existence, and was merely a device of the British State. The Six County IRA went into action in alliance with the Free State invasion force in May 1922, and was then abandoned to its fate in June. Material and moral collapse followed the Free State betrayal.

A small core group kept itself in being during the following decades. It engaged in escapades which had an enlivening influence on the spirit of the nationalist community, but major actions were out of the question.

Darragh McIntyre told us that:

"Gerry Adams joined the IRA around 1966. He rose up the ranks quickly… Interned… in June 1972, the 23 year old Volunteer was released to represent the IRA at talks with the British Government. Later the same year… he was promoted to the post of Officer Commanding… the Belfast Brigade."

But, supposing it to be the case that Adams joined an Army in 1966 and was commander of a Belfast Brigade of an Army in 1972, the Army in which he commanded the Belfast Brigade in 1972 was not the Army he joined in 1966. And it is inconceivable that the British/Irish programme makers did not know that.
The 1966 Army, following the fiasco of its action in the Summer of 1969, became the Official IRA when a new Army was formed during the Winter of 1969-70 under the impact of the Unionist madness of August 1969. The organisers of the new IRA, the Provisionals, were people who had been expelled from the IRA, or marginalised within it, during the 'modernisation' of the late 1960s. But the bulk membership of the new IRA was composed of people who for the most part had taken no part in Republican affairs before the wild Unionist assault on nationalist West Belfast in August 1969.

One of the slogans of the reform agitation of 1968-9 was "British rights for British citizens". The Unionist regime was seen as the body that withheld British rights from the nationalist community in Northern Ireland. The Unionists declared that Ulster was British, so the nationalists campaigned for British rights, only to find the Unionists refusing them. But Britain had no ideology of 'rights', apart from the politics of government. And Northern Ireland was excluded from the politics of British government. It was because of that exclusion that the Unionist regime existed as the form of the British State in the Six counties. And the Unionists were no less excluded from the political life of British democracy than were the Nationalists.

The prevailing view amongst those who were being radicalised by the agitation of 1968-9 was that, because of certain post-1945 developments in Europe, Partition had become irrelevant. And many of them had, furthermore, a healthy scepticism about life South of the Border—which was invariably referred to as the Free State, with all the pejorative overtones of that term.
And yet a war came to be fought with the nominal object of abolishing Partition. This happened because British politics was closed to the Northern Ireland populace, and because there were old IRA men—rejected by the modernisers—to hand when the event happened that ensured that life in Northern Ireland would never again be what it had been since 1923.
it was not the effects of Partition as such that ensured the rapid growth of the new Army. It was the effects of the devolved regime of communal Unionism, which the Westminster Government interposed between itself and the populace of the Six Counties, cutting the region off from the representative government of the state and the democratic politics by which it operated.

The fact that the formal aim of the new Republican movement was not directed at the actual source of the discontent of the Catholic community was virtually certain to lead to tensions between the post-August membership and the pre-August leadership.
According to Brendan Hughes' account, the move which led to the ousting of the old leadership began in the mid-1970s in a prison collaboration between himself, Ivor Bell and Adams. They decided that the leadership of Billy McKee (who was a long-standing friend of the Hughes family) had to be ended. The issue which brought on this decision was the response of the leadership to the British Government's efforts to bring about civil war, during its 1974-5 Ceasefire with the IRA, with which it had a 'hot-line' communication.
Here is Hughes' account:

"There were communications from the outside leadership to the prisoners… telling us that 'We have fought the British to a standstill, the British want out…' At the same time… Protestants were getting shot, Catholics were getting shot. But there were no British getting shot. I was… getting more and more frustrated… I was sharing a cubicle with Gerry Adams at the time and I packed my gear. By this time the INLA had been formed and had prisoners in Cage 13, and I was heading there. I was going to leave the Republican movement and join the INLA. They had just been formed from a split within the Workers' Party. I was talked out of it by Gerry and remained. He convinced me that the only way to defeat these people was to oppose them from within… they'd be quite happy for me to walk away. But here we were in this situation; it was very demoralising. We then got the word that we must prepare for civil war and, Jesus Christ… we had to start training for that possibility… The British were pulling out and the Loyalists were going to rebel…
"At one time, I actually advocated shooting the Belfast leadership, which Gerry and Ivor were opposed to…
"This sectarian war that the British were able to manipulate the IRA into was part of the Ulsterisation of security… We started to hear words like 'Godfathers', 'Chicago-type killings'. The British sent a guy, Peter Jay, as Ambassador to America, and he went there to convince the Americans that this was a sectarian war here and the British were caught in the middle. The IRA had facilitated this image…" (p193-4).

It is no misrepresentation or exaggeration of Government policy to say that it tried to bring about civil war. When the Labour Secretary of State, Merlyn Rees, failed to crush the Unionist Strike against the establishment of a Council Of Ireland (under the Sunningdale arrangements) while Dublin continued to assert sovereignty over the North, he suggested that the Strike meant the end of Ulster Unionism. Times correspondent, Robert Fisk, was inspired to write a book about The Strike That Broke The British In Ulster, or words to that effect. Rees declared that Protestant Ulster had renounced the Union and become Ulster Nationalist. In the face of this development, Rees told Loyalists, the Government had decided to end the Union. He arranged Conferences abroad, at which Loyalist paramilitaries were indoctrinated with Ulster nationalism, and urged to get ready for war with the Provos as the British Army withdrew. (See Against Ulster Nationalism, a BICO pamphlet of the mid-1970s, which was published as a book in 1992 about this.)
That was "Ulsterization". If the Provos had accepted it as setting a new framework for the War, something like the 1922 situation brought about by the Treatyite pseudo-invasion would have happened.

With the rise of a new leadership from the 1969 generation, a political adaptation to Northern realities was brought about. Spectacular retaliations in kind to Loyalist atrocities were phased out. It was tacitly admitted that the unification of Ireland by force was an unachievable object. The leadership felt its way towards an achievable object—a drastic alteration of the internal mode of Six County sub-government which would enhance the power of the nationalist community and then bring about an alteration of relations between the Catholic and Protestant communities.
That this was happening became evident about ten years after Adams dissuaded Hughes from shooting Billy McKee.

McKee has reason to be resentful. The movement of which he was the initial leader was taken from him. And because it was taken from him, it did not merely fail to bring about a United Ireland, but achieved something else.
McKee's contribution to the BBC/RTE propaganda operation against Adams is remarkably short of relevant factual detail.

A serious effort is being made t undo the interim settlement that has been made under Adams' leadership. The Jean McConville incident is being given worldwide publicity by the two States only because it is thought that would help to drive Adams out of politics.

If the Fianna Fail leader could get rid of Adams at the cost of undermining the Northern settlement, who can doubt that he would do it? So apparently would the SDLP. And the Official Unionists (politically advised by Lord Bew and other members of the IRA in the critical years following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement), are acting as a fundamentalist pressure on the DUP. So it is conceivable that the Adams variant on Republicanism might be destroyed. And we gather that arrangements for reconstituting the IRA as an effective force in case of that eventuality are quietly being made by mainstream Republicans who have little in common with the mentality of the super-revolutionaries who have joined with Fianna Fail et al in the propaganda against Adams that is facilitated by the two States.

Eamon McCann, in a comment on the programme in his Irish Times column (Nov. 13), joined the prosecution. In a rare media comment on Adams' remark that his warmongering super-revolutionary Republican opponents looked on him as a traitor because he made peace, and that their allegations should be seen in that perspective, McCann said that Adams' treason had caused his opponents to tell the truth about him, not to tell lies. He did not reveal how he knows this.
McCann is an adherent of revolutionary socialism of the kind that facilitates a journalistic career in the capitalist press. His party, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party, declared unconditional support for the Provisionals' war effort. "Unconditional but not uncritical" support is how we remember it being put.
This journal opposed the War. Its founders took no part in the 'civil rights' agitation of 1968-9. They played a part in defending the Falls against the Unionist pogrom in August 1969 but then urged a different course than warfare to establish ground for socialist unity. However, when an actual war situation was brought about, they recognised it as a fact that had gone beyond the remit of the criminal law and become a Constitutional issue beyond the capacity of the legal system of the state. We looked on Internment in 1971 as a kind of prisoner-of-war status appropriate to a war situation. We did not support the anti-Internment campaign for criminalisation. (And, when this succeeded, it was followed by a campaign for political status for convicted prisoners, i.e. for internment conditions.)

The mere advocacy of peace in a war situation is futile unless it is connected with a policy directed at the causes of the war. Therefore we never supported the spectacular Peace Movements that were given worldwide publicity by the propaganda apparatuses of the two States. We treated them as mere expressions of groundless pacifist idealism, and, in a world whose practices are largely the creation of British Imperialism, pacifist idealism has little grasp on reality. Those great Peace Movements withered as easily as they had sprouted.
Our first alternative to war was that Dublin should recognise the communal/religious division in the North as a national division, and should repeal the sovereignty claim as a precondition of engaging in discussion with Ulster Unionists. That proposal was instantly shot down by Taoiseach Lynch, who asserted that Partition was the cause of the trouble in the North and so the ending of Partition was necessary to peace.
Treating that view as nationalist Utopianism, we looked for a settlement within the UK on the basis of ending the exclusion of the North from the democratic political life of the state, and we campaigned for that for twenty years before concluding that the united opposition of London, Dublin and Ulster Unionism rendered it hopeless.
We addressed the question of how it was possible for a war situation to come about, and be sustained for a quarter of a century, in the most experienced democratic State in Europe. We concluded that it was because this region of the State was excluded from the democracy of the State—a thing which is found nowhere else in the world. And exclusion from the democracy of the State hinges on exclusion from the party system of the state.

In last month's Irish Political Review Michael Stack gave a vivid account of how, in what we call democracy, people are disempowered by the party system which is central to it. But, such as it is, it is effective. It is the means by which the oligarchic mode of representative government had a general franchise attached to it so that it could be called democratic, and the old system be largely preserved at the same time. It is the means—perhaps because it is disempowering—by which internal peace was maintained in the British State during a period of great change. When the Six Counties were detached from the Irish state to remain part of the British, they were excluded from this feature of the British State.
Northern Ireland is a kind of false front on the British State, established at the moment when Britain found it necessary to allow most of Ireland to have something like independent government. And it can hardly be doubted that its purpose was to facilitate continuing Whitehall influence over Irish affairs as a whole. If, when the country was Partitioned by Britain—the Six Counties had simply been included in the democracy of the British State, it seems highly probable that the nationalist community would quickly have found a place in British politics. In that event Partition would not have been a central issue in Irish politics, and a distraction from the independent development of the 26 County state.
We concluded that it was the exclusion of the Six Counties from the democracy of the state that preserved and aggravated the antagonism of Protestant and Catholic on which the devolved system was imposed in 1921. And, in the era of democracy, which Britain was loudest in proclaiming, democracy cannot, with impunity, be flouted as brazenly as Britain has flouted it in its Northern Ireland region.

Brendan Hughes was a revolutionary socialist. Within British democracy it is usual for revolutionary socialists to evolve into pillars of the state.
Hughes said:

"My father was a Republican, but I think, foremost, he was a socialist. At that period in the 1960s, up to 1969, Republican socialists did not have a great deal going for them, and so my father was a constant British Labour voter. He was always voting for the Labour Party because there wasn't an alternative, but, when we talk about socialism and socialists and the ideology of socialism, I think Catholic Nationalist people at that time were largely socialists at heart. They… could not quote Marx or Engels or anyone else, but by and large they were working-class socialists… During that time in Belfast you were either Protestant or Catholic and the alternatives weren't great. That's how my father finished up voting for the Labour Party" (Voices, p29-30).

Ed Moloney, when editing the extracts from the Boston Tapes, must have known that it couldn't have been the case that Hughes' father voted British Labour for lack of an alternative. British Labour would have been the alternative to voting Catholic or Protestant. Moloney, an Englishman and a journalist, could not have failed to notice that, when he moved from England to Belfast, he moved out of the sphere of operation of British politics. (Hughes' father could only have voted for a 6 County party that called itself Labour, but was excluded from the Labour Party of the state.)
It is a remarkable fact that people bred to familiarity with a particular political system tend not to see it as a whole, but to have their vision confined within it. But an English political journalist moving to Northern Ireland could not fail to notice that he moved out of British politics. Moloney preferred not to comment on this fact. Presumably he understood that his career prospects would diminish greatly if he did comment on it. The British ruling circles which arranged that this should be the case also arranged that it should not be noticed, or at least not commented on, by 'investigative journalists', who depend very largely on Government goodwill, or by 'political scientists' paid for by the State.
But the fact of exclusion from the British democratic set-up remained a fact, though not commented on by journalists or political scientists, and the lines of opportunist progress to the corridors of power for revolutionary socialists, carefully kept open in Britain, were kept tightly shut in Northern Ireland. (Lord Bew's transition to the Lords as a member of the Official IRA occurred outside the political system and is of no political significance. What is significant is that this rather startling event has scarcely been noticed, except by the London Review Of Books. Carroll Professor Roy Foster, for example, makes no mention of it in a CV with which he prefaces a review of Bew's book on Parnell in the London Review Of Books, 13 December 2997. He merely describes him as "a graduate of the Peoples Democracy marches as well as of the Cambridge history faculty". (But a later reviewer in the magazine made good the omission.)
The revolutionary socialist in Northern Ireland was subject to none of the opportunist temptation which lured him into the Establishment in Britain. So Brendan Hughes just kept on being a revolutionary socialist while exercising his tactical military talent in the Provos. And, when the War ended in a settlement that was not a socialist revolution, he was a lost soul, repeating the age-old cry that the revolution had not failed but was betrayed. And who betrayed it? The Catholics, it seems:

"People like Billy were about protecting the Catholic people whereas we were developing into… a revolutionary organisation that wanted much more than that. I mean, who gave a fuck if Loyalists blew up the Catholic church . . . we weren't there to protect the Catholic church . . . we were there to bring about a united Ireland. The old Brigade attitude was: 'We must protect the Catholic religion; we must protect our faith'. We were developing into an organisation that really didn't care about such things. Certainly I was, and so was Ivor. Ivor was anti-religion. Gerry was still very much in the religious mould but a modernised religious mould. And to this day I'm not sure exactly where his thoughts were. I mean, I shared a cubicle with him, and when I was reading Che Guevara and Fidel Castro speeches he was saying his rosary. There was always that sort of contradiction: here he was, a revolutionary socialist, yet he was very much involved in his religion and his Catholicism which conflicted [with] what we were trying to achieve. But I think because of the friendship and the comradeship that had built up during the early 1970s most of those apparent contradictions were put aside because we were fighting a war. And the main thing was to fight the war" (Voices p196). Omissions are Moloney's).

The war was the thing. But for Hughes it had become a war without a purpose. A war for Utopia. A visionary war in the proper sense of the term. Carroll Professor Foster has disparaged the War of Independence as visionary, but the policies which the elected Government of 1919 sought to implement were entirely practical. All that stood in the way of them was the Imperialist militarism of Westminster. But what realisable object did Hughes, Price etc—who are now championed by Fianna Fail against Adams—want to keep on fighting for?
They were desperadoes in the upheaval precipitated by the 1969 pogrom. Wars need desperadoes. But wars also need realisable purposes. That war was given a false purpose by the circumstances of 1969, a purpose which did not relate to its effective cause. Adams' offence was to give it a realisable purpose, related to its cause.
*
The programme was interlarded with readings by Seamus Heaney from his poems, which seemed to be about undead corpses being conscious of their decomposition in bog-holes.

Against Ulster Nationalism, A Review of Northern Ireland Politics in the Aftermath of the 1974 UWC General Strike, with Insights into the Development of the Catholic and Protestant Communities, their interaction, and their relation to Britain, in Reply to Tom Nairn and Others by Brendan Clifford. 88pp. €10, £8
Northern Ireland What Is It? Professor Mansergh Changes His Mind by Brendan Clifford. 278pp. €24, £20

CONTENTS
Gerry Adams And Jean McConville. Seán McGouran
Apprenticeship Review Must Not Miss The Point. Philip O'Connor
'The Disappeared': Scrapping The Barrel. Editorial
Cluane, Clancy, McKee Oration. Paul Mc Guill. (Press Release, Irish National Congress)
Readers' Letters: Gilmore Does A Redmond. Donal Kennedy
German Model And Apprentices. (Report: Eoghan Harris)
With Friends Like That. John Morgan, Lt. Col. Retd. (Review of Lethal Allies)
Digging. Wilson John Haire (Poem)
Shorts from the Long Fellow (ACC Loan; Foreign Banks In Ireland; The Death Yugoslavia; Austerity Works; Political Implications; JFK Assassination; Dallas 1963; 25 Years Of Fintan O'Toole)
Anti-Semitism On The Increase? Nick Folley
the last word on the last survivor. John Young, Jack Lane
Es Ahora. Julianne Herlihy (The Raj In The Rain, Part 2)
Did Borgonovo Miss The Point About The AFIL? Manus O'Riordan (Some Collinses And Somervilles, Part 4)
A Critic Emerges From Academia, Michael Carragher. Brendan Clifford
Whatever You Say . . . Pat Walsh
A British Undercover Unit. Wilson John Haire
Does It Stack Up? Michael Stack (The Banks; Public Servant Top-Ups; Irish Holocaust
Labour Comment: Destruction Of The Guilds, Mondragon, Part 25
The Battle Of Clontarf
Finian McGrath (Press Release)
Labour Problems
Trade Union Notes

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