Joe Cahill

A Life in the IRA

Brendan Anderson, Joe Cahill

• Publisher: The O'Brien Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781847171016
• eBook ISBN: 9781847174284
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'I was born in a united Ireland, I want to die in a united Ireland.'

Born in Belfast in 1920, Joe Cahill has been an IRA man motivated by this ambition all his life. IRA activists rarely speak about their lives or their organisation, but here Cahill gives his full and frank story, his viewpoint, his experiences -- from Northern Irish prison cells of the 1940s, on a death sentence, to Washington when the Good Friday Agreement was being negotiated.

He tells of the visit he made to Colonel Gaddafi to arrange for arms and ammunition, and the fateful voyage of the Claudia; Bloody Sunday and the burning of the British Embassy in Dublin; the high-drama helicopter escape of IRA prisoners from Portlaoise Jail.

This is the story of an extraordinary journey, Cahill's own life mirroring the growth, changes and development of the republican movement as a whole through more than sixty years of intense involvement.

CHAPTER ONE

Birth of a Rebel

In March 1920, the notorious Black and Tans arrived from England to begin their campaign of destruction and violence in Ireland. Towards the end of the year the young republican Kevin Barry was hanged, and Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) Auxiliaries put Cork city to the torch.

A flying column attached to the Volunteers’ West Cork Brigade ambushed a convoy of Auxiliaries travelling in two lorries towards Kilmichael in late November. The Auxiliaries, all experienced ex-British Army officers with wartime service, lost eighteen men in the carefully planned attack.

That same year saw the appearance of the first of eleven children born to Joseph and Josephine Cahill, a young couple from west Belfast.

Their oldest son, Joe, was born on 19 May 1920, before the drawing of the border which partitioned Ireland’s six northeastern counties from the rest of the country. Shortly after his eightieth birthday, Joe Cahill summed up his lifelong battle against British rule in his country in a simple sentence: ‘I was born in a united Ireland and I want to die in a united Ireland.’

James Connolly, the Citizen Army leader executed by the British for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising, lived next door to Cahill’s grandparents on the Falls Road. Joe Cahill’s parents became good friends of the Connolly family. In later years, the younger Cahill came to know Connolly’s daughters well and formed friendships, particularly with Nora Connolly, which lasted for more than half a century.

The Belfast which Cahill was born into looked, on the surface, like many Victorian cities across England. The cramped rows of houses in the mean little gas-lit, cobblestoned streets were hastily built in the late nineteenth century to accommodate the influx of country people arriving in the city to work in the linen, shipbuilding and rope-making industries.

Belfast, however, differed from Manchester or Birmingham in one vital respect – its savage sectarianism. Four years after Irish republicans catapulted their cause onto the pages of the world’s press with the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, Belfast’s Protestant community regarded the Catholic minority with deep suspicion, and often with loathing. The city’s Catholics, long cast in the role of second-class citizens, waited in trepidation as plans emerged from the English parliament at Westminster concerning the partition of the island.

Their fears of being isolated and cut off from co-religionists in the southern counties proved to be well founded. The British government offered all nine Ulster counties to unionists, who rejected the plan on the grounds that the province would be ungovernable – meaning, of course, that it would contain too many Catholics for comfort.

Unionists demanded, and were granted, the present six counties of Northern Ireland. These included two – Tyrone and Fermanagh – with nationalist majorities, as well as Derry city and Newry town, both also with nationalist majorities. The Government of Ireland Act – better known as the ‘partition act’ – thus divided the country in two in December 1920. The new state was to be called Northern Ireland. The other Ulster counties of Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal, each overwhelmingly Catholic, were to be severed from the province and included with the twenty-three counties of Munster, Leinster and Connaught on the southern side of the new border.

The twenty-six counties south of the border were known as the Irish Free State after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which ended the war of independence. Free State status was conferred through British legislation in 1922, and recognised the authority of Dáil Éireann (the Irish parliament), while locking the South into the British Empire. The Treaty resulted in the Irish Civil War, with the IRA split along pro- and anti-Treaty lines. The pro-Treaty forces supported the Free State and were ultimately victorious. The term Free State was used until the late 1940s, when an Irish coalition government unilaterally declared the Irish Republic.

Although the revamped northern area had a large unionist majority, with 820,000 Protestants and 430,000 Catholics, it still posed problems for unionists. While Catholics accounted for just over one-third of the population, they had managed to do surprisingly well in the local government elections held throughout Ireland in January 1920. Under the proportional representation (PR) electoral system – ironically introduced by the British to counter the increasing Sinn Féin vote in the southern counties – northern nationalists gained control of several councils.

Derry city, under Protestant control since the siege of 1688, was now, to the consternation of the new unionist government, in the hands of a nationalist administration.

Unionists were eventually able to drastically reduce the influence of the nationalist vote, by abolishing PR and adopting a policy of flagrant gerrymandering (creating artificial electoral majorities by manipulating constituency boundaries) of local government boundaries to give them false majorities in many councils. In the meantime, however, they were in no mood to tolerate nationalist council successes. Sectarian violence, long a way of life – and death – for the minority community, was about to reach unprecedented levels.

The War of Independence, initially being prosecuted by what was to become the Irish Republican Army against the British Army in the south and west of Ireland, had spread to Ulster. The IRA comprised, in the main, Irish Volunteer veterans of the 1916 Rising. Its republican socialist counterpart, James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army, had largely disintegrated with the execution of its founder after the Rising. The role of southern republicans was clearly defined – they were simply to engage the occupying forces. In the new Northern Ireland, where Catholics were in a minority, the IRA’s units were pressed into assuming the additional role of defending the nationalist population in a hostile state.

Tensions had been running high in Derry for months after the January elections and unionist resentment was spilling over into violence. A concerted attack was made on a Catholic area by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a Protestant paramilitary organisation. Armed RIC men and British soldiers with fixed bayonets charged and fired into the Catholic crowds which had formed. IRA volunteers returned fire, fatally wounding a Special Branch officer, the first RIC man to be killed in the new state of Northern Ireland.

As the violence spread to Belfast, the overwhelmingly Protestant Harland and Wolff shipyard workforce laid down their tools and held a meeting. The workers cheered as speakers urged loyalist hero Edward Carson MP to call out the UVF in the city. Carson, a Dublin-born lawyer and politician, was a fiery orator who had helped establish the UVF in 1913 to resist the Liberal government’s plans to grant Home Rule, a limited form of self-government, to Ireland. When the First World War broke out, many UVF men responded to Carson’s plea to enlist in the Army. The UVF men, now formed into the Thirty-sixth (Ulster) Division, died in their thousands in the trenches of France and Belgium.

A highly inflammatory speech by Carson at the traditional 12 July Orange rally at Finaghy, on the outskirts of Belfast, not only roused Protestant wrath against Catholics, but against any trade unionist, labour supporter or socialist who posed a challenge to the master–worker relationship.

On the eve of yet another anti-Catholic pogrom, Carson declared to the crowd at Finaghy that unionists would ‘tolerate no Sinn Féin in Ulster’. This was followed by a concerted letter-writing campaign in the unionist press, alleging ‘republican infiltration’ of unionist firms and neighbourhoods.

Carson’s words were taken at face value and, once more, murder stalked the streets of Belfast. Catholic workers were expelled from the shipyard – often at gunpoint, always violently. Some unfortunate nationalists were thrown into the tide, forced to swim for safety while being pelted with iron nuts and bolts. In all, some 10,000 Catholics and a small number of ‘rotten Prods’ (for example, Protestant trade unionists and socialists) were expelled from Belfast shipyard, and from the mills and engineering firms in Belfast, Lisburn and surrounding towns. Rioting and looting became commonplace and there were frequent attacks on Catholic ghettos, churches and businesses. Retaliation was met with reprisal, murder met with murder. To visit a neighbour or walk to a back-street grocery shop was to gamble with death.

In the first thirteen months of Joe Cahill’s life, 455 people were killed in Belfast – 267 Catholics, 185 Protestants and three of unknown religion. More than 2,000 others were wounded. The new Cahill baby came into the world to the sound of gunfire and explosions, sounds which would echo in his ears for most of his life.

Joe Cahill was born in the family’s rooms above a tiny printing house at 60 Divis Street, in the part of nationalist west Belfast closest to the city centre. Joseph senior, a jobbing compositor and printer, struggled to support his large family by setting and printing dance tickets, bookmakers’ dockets, letterheads and advertising posters. That both parents were republican-minded is reflected in the fact that several of their children rose to prominence in the republican movement. Josephine Cahill, in particular, was always anxious to instil in her family a sense of Irishness and a love of all things Irish.

As the new century unfolded, Joseph became more involved with republicanism and joined the Irish National Volunteers, the group which joined the socialist Irish Citizen Army in the Easter Rising in 1916. Increasingly, he found his time being taken up with printing republican material. In the years following the Rising, he applied for membership of the IRA, hoping to see active service, but was requested to stay on at the printing house because of the value of his work to the republican cause.

As a boy, Cahill junior, by now attending St Mary’s Christian Brothers’ primary school in nearby Barrack Street, was well used to strangers visiting his father’s little business premises. He never tired of hearing the story about Eamon de Valera, the most senior surviving commandant of the Easter Rising, coming to the shop on behalf of the republican movement to congratulate Joseph senior on his work. The future taoiseach (prime minister) and president had come to Belfast to oppose local Irish Parliamentary Party MP Joe Devlin in the 1918 Westminster elections. Devlin, standing in the west Belfast Hibernian bastion of Falls, defeated de Valera by almost two to one.

In 1932 Joseph senior was arrested and charged with printing illegal literature – posters advertising a protest meeting. He was later acquitted. During the war years, he printed forged ration coupons, which were sold to help finance the republican movement.

Joe Cahill recalls that although his father could have been classed as a ‘self-employed small businessman’, the family nonetheless had their share of tough times.

‘Our mother and father had eleven children, but two died. The printing gear took up all the ground floor. We lived in two rooms and a small return room on the first storey, and two other rooms on the second storey. The outside toilet was at the bottom of the backyard. Like most working-class people then, bath-time meant filling the tin bath in front of the fire on Saturday night.

‘We got it tough at times. My father was a good worker but not a good businessman, and I remember when there would not have been a loaf of bread in the house. Mother, however, was a good manager and she would have made the shilling stretch. I remember, too, that the pawn shop was used quite often.

‘My mother’s father had a fairly good job. He was head water commissioner – whatever the hell that job entailed – down at the docks, and my mother would regularly bring us down to his office. He would always give me five shillings, a hell of a lot of money in those days. He knew damn well what I would do with the money. Probably that’s why he gave it to me. As soon as we were outside, I handed it over to Mother.

‘I would be sent to the Ormo Bakery shop on the Ormeau Road twice a week, at eight o’clock in the morning before school. It was around two miles to the bakery. I brought a pillowcase to fill with yesterday’s bread, which could be bought cheaply. The women waiting to be served got to know me and, I suppose because I was so small and young, they would push me further up the queue to be served more quickly. They thought I was a great lad, and said things like, “You’re not like them bastards of mine – I can’t get them out of bed at this time of day.”

‘Mother could always have sent me to one of the bakeries in west Belfast, which were closer. There were a number in the area at that time, but I would have been recognised and there was a bit of family pride to be lost in being seen standing in a queue for cheap bread.’

Despite the hardship, Joe Cahill senior always managed to put aside a small sum of money to rent a seaside cottage every year, either just over the border in County Louth or on the beautiful Antrim coast to the north of Belfast. While their father worked in the printing house, joining them on occasional weekends, the Cahill children spent the summer frolicking on the beach or exploring the unspoiled countryside. It was during one of these rough-and-ready but idyllic summers that Joe Cahill almost drowned and developed a life-long aversion to the sea.

‘My father had a theory that if we got a good holiday in the summer time, it saved doctors’ bills in the winter and the rest of the year. We would have had a cottage either in Omeath, near Dundalk, or in Glenarm, in the Glens of Antrim. We generally went away for the duration of the school holiday and sometimes we were even granted an extension from the school, which meant our break could last up to ten or twelve weeks.’

Cahill was around the little printing house from the age of eight, and acquired a good working knowledge of the trade over the next six years, occasionally helping his father to set up and print jobs. Once, when Joe senior was ill, he asked his oldest child to stay off school for the day to complete an urgent job.

‘It was the chance I had been waiting for. I told my father that it was 19 May, I was fourteen and I wanted to leave school for good. My mother and father had a discussion about it. Mother wanted me to stay on, but Father left it up to me. So I went to the school and proudly presented myself to the headmaster, a Christian Brother. I told him I wanted to leave and start work in the printing trade. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Well, you never were the brightest anyway, Cahill.” But he wished me well and told me I was very lucky to have a trade to go to. Before I could leave, however, he made me promise to continue studying at home and to return at the end of June to sit the final exam. At that stage, I would have promised him the sun, the moon and the stars, just to get out of school.

‘I thought no more about the exam until a friend reminded me that we were to turn up at the school and bring a pencil. I had always been very nervous during examinations and had not performed very well. I supposed I was just not academically-minded. On that day, however, I did not give a damn how I did. It did not worry me at all. There were two boys who achieved ninety-seven percent that day – I was one of them. The headmaster, Brother “Fish” Aherne, told me he knew I always had it in me, and the examination result had proved that.’

From around the age of twelve, Cahill says, he became aware of the cancer of sectarianism that was part of the way of life in the northern counties in the ‘hungry thirties’. Looking back, he now laments a lost opportunity to build on working-class solidarity, when Catholics and Protestants united briefly against the government, during what became known as the Outdoor Relief riots.

The ODR scheme, as it became known, tapped the vast reservoir of the unemployed, using them to carry out heavy labouring work, such as repairing roads and laying pavements. The pay was poor, barely enough to alleviate the appalling hardship. When authorities announced plans to cut the wages as an austerity measure, poverty, hunger and resentment boiled over. The ODR workers, Catholic and Protestant, united to embark on a strike which was to deteriorate into serious rioting.

The unionist government, acknowledged since its inception by unionists and nationalists alike as ‘a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’, became worried at the possibility of united working-class support for the Labour movement. Provocative anti-Catholic speeches soon became the order of the day.

Working-class unity was short-lived; the North soon fell back into a familiar pattern of sectarian violence. Pilgrims on their way to Dublin for the 1932 Eucharistic Congress, an international Catholic religious event, were attacked. The sight of the little ghetto streets adorned with altars and bedecked with flags and bunting in the papal colours proved altogether too much for the bigots and ignited a spate of house burnings and evictions.

The recently formed and openly sectarian Ulster Protestant League was to fan the flames of discrimination for the next few years. Community violence reached a peak in 1935 when Cahill, who has always claimed to be staunchly opposed to any form of sectarianism, was fifteen years old. That summer of sectarian madness left eleven people dead.

‘There was a great depth to the hatred of some loyalists,’ says Cahill. ‘One particular incident which sticks in my mind occurred in east Belfast, when St Anthony’s Catholic church was being built, at Willowfield on the Cregagh Road. In May 1936, some guys climbed a tree on the site in the middle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Reviews
• Title Page
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• PROLOGUE
• CHAPTER ONE : Birth of a Rebel
• CHAPTER TWO : The ‘Prod Squad’
• CHAPTER THREE : In the Shadow of the Gallows
• CHAPTER FOUR : The Prison Years
• CHAPTER FIVE : Reporting Back
• CHAPTER SIX : The Informer and the ’56 Campaign
• CHAPTER SEVEN : Out of the Ashes …
• CHAPTER EIGHT : Father Brown’s Mission
• CHAPTER NINE : Operation Demetrius
• CHAPTER TEN : ‘A Terrible Anger’
• CHAPTER ELEVEN : The Claudia Affair
• CHAPTER TWELVE : Missing the Flight
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN : From Pistols to Politics
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN : Peace?
• Epilogue
• Dessie Mackin on Joe Cahill
• Martin McGuinness on Joe Cahill
• Afterword
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• List of Sources
• Index
• Plates
• About the Author
• Copyright