Ireland will remember the name of Brendan Hughes ,   A working class hero, An  heroic soldier in her cause .

True to the Republic to the end.

“Stormont is still there, but it is a Stormont with Republicans in it. Stormont has not changed. The whole apparatus of the Stormont regime is still there, it is still controlled by the British, it is still unjust, it is still cruel. The RUC is still there. The whole civil service are still there, the same civil servants who controlled the shoot-to-kill policy, who controlled the plastic bullets, who controlled the H Blocks of Long Kesh, who took responsibility for ten men dying. It is all still there. But, saviour of saviours, we have two Sinn Féin ministers there, who happen to close hospitals. The sad thing about all this is that the British set this up. This is the British answer to the Republican problem in Ireland. It’s a British solution, it’s not an Irish solution. It’s not a solution that we have control of. There are people up there and the British ministers are handing money out. But the whole thing is built on sand.” Brendan Hughes.

Brendan Hughes comes to the aid of a woman who was injured when Stone, the Loyalist, attacked mourners at the burial of the Gibraltar Martyrs at Milltown Cemetery.

DEATH OF PATRIOT BRENDAN HUGHES

16TH FEBRUARY 2008

Brendan Hughes was born into a republican family from the Grosvenor Road area of Belfast. Brendan joined the IRA in 1969 and was a very effective street fighter in his local Grosvenor road area. He went "on the run" in Belfast by 1970. From 1970-1972 he was involved in a number of attacks on British soldiers and bank robberies in order to raise funds for the republican movement.

Brendan one time described his normal day during 1970’s as “ you would have had a call house [a safe meeting place] and you might have robbed a bank in the morning, done a float [gone out in a car looking for British soldier] in the afternoon, stuck a bomb and a booby trap out after that, and then maybe had a gun battle or two later that night."

On 19th July 1973,  Brendan was arrested on the Falls Road along with Gerry Adams and Tom Cahill. They were tortured for in excess of 12 hours at the Springfield Road R.U.C barracks and later Castlereagh Torture Centre before being transported to Long Kesh Concentration Camp.

Brendan, On 8th December escaped from Long Kesh inside a rolled up mattress in the back of a  bin lorry and escaped across the border to Dundalk. Ten days later he had returned to Belfast after assuming a new identity, becoming a travelling toy salesman named "Arthur McAllister". For five months Brendan lived in the upper class Malone area at Myrtlefield Park. By now he was the new O/C of the I.R.A in Belfast following the arrest of  the heroic Ivor Bell.  Brendan was arrested  in 1974 following a tip-off, and the house was found to contain some weahons and several thousand rounds of ammunition. Hughes was subsequently sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Three years after his arrest Hughes was involved in a fracas, and received an additional five year sentence for assaulting a prison officer. As he was convicted after 1st March 1976 Brendan was transferred from the compounds to the H-Blocks and lost his special category status He refused to wear prison uniform and joined theblanket protest . Shortly after arriving in the H-Blocks Hughes became the OC of the IRA prisoners, and in March 1978 ordered the prisoners to begin the dirty protest .

 During the first hunger strike Hughes was the 'O.C' at the Kesh. On the 27th October 1980  Hughes along with six other republican prisoners, refused food and started a hunger strike which lasted 53 days.

During the second month of the hunger strike the british government led by Thatcher, sent an intermediary to inform Brendan of a possible compromise, despite previously having publicly rejecting any compromise. This of course was a deceit by Thatcher and in fact when the strike was called off the prisoners discovered there was no compromise made by the British.

Brendan, a staunch republican socialist,  became very critical of the political direction of the Sinn Fein leadership. In 2000, he criticised the Sinn fein leadership for allowing building firms in west Belfast to pay low wages to former prisoners and that the republican leadership had sold out on their ideals in order to achieve peace in Northern Ireland. he once desribed Gerry Adams as being the Amani suit brigade.

 In October 2006 after Brendan underwent an operation to save his sight which had been badly damaged due to his hunger strike.

In February 2008 he was taken to the City Hospital Belfast where he died February the 16th.

The Putrid Smell Of The Middle Class

I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me,
and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all possible means
-- except by getting off his back.
- Leo Tolstoy

Brendan Hughes • 18 April 2002

I used to watch them. They came and they went. The collar and tie. The priest, the probation officer, the so-called social worker. Through the broken window or grill from my stinking cell I watched them pass, the clean smell of their after shave wafting across and into my nostrils. I liked the scent but not the people bearing it. I wanted it but I did not want to change places with them. I was with the poor - as unwashed as I was - of Belfast and Derry estates, Tyrone and South Armagh villages. A better class of people. Despite no after-shave they even smelt better too. For years I never could figure out why.

There was no envy on my part for those 'Christian' people of so-called good intent. I would watch as they walked, ignoring me and the 'bad' people. Their smug sense of self-satisfaction adding a bounce to their step. Hypocrites that they were they could walk out smiling after having witnessed another beating, a kid being tortured, starved, beaten and degraded. And they walked but never talked. Their comfortable existence kept them quiet.

Ten men died because people like that did nothing. Because they stayed silent ten men had to speak in the only way they could in order to make the world listen. The boys on hunger strike were no saints - we can be grateful for that. If being saintly meant walking up the H-Block yard with your nose in the air, indifferent to the misery just yards away, feigning some Christianity then sainthood was definitely not for us. It seemed to be anything but what Jesus Christ stood for. But then he wasn't saintly enough for them either so they done him in. Just as they did Bobby, Tom, Red Mick and the others in.

Of course, it was 'suicide'. People 'took their own lives' and sinned against God their maker. Perhaps that eases the conscience for them as they sit in their big houses, looking out at their latest fancy car, tripping over the altar rails, collecting the next fat wage packet, buying the newest cologne.

Now when I think back to those days in the H-Blocks, I know why we smelt better than the 'good' people. They carried the real stench - the rotten odour of middle class corruption.

The above is from "THE BLANKET" Website

A life dedicated to the IRA and a broken heart

(by Suzanne Breen, Sunday Tribune)

From his flat high in Divis Tower on the Falls Road, Brendan Hughes looked down on the city he bombed. He pointed to a car hire firm, owned by a wealthy unionist businessman in the 1970s, and one of the IRA's prime commercial targets.

"We bombed that place so many times, yet he kept re-opening it. I respected him for not giving up," said Hughes. In the end, Hughes' heart was broken by the belief that the leadership of the movement he served for three decades had given up the goals he still cherished.

Visiting the former Belfast Brigade OC in the tiny, threadbare flat where he spent his last years was always an emotional experience. The war, and the peace, had left him with indelible physical and mental scars. A slight figure in a Che Guevara t-shirt, he chain-smoked and drank to ease the pain of what he called "the sell-out", but it never really worked.

As I'd leave his flat, he'd hand me pages of thoughts he'd scribbled down on Sinn Féin, poverty in republican areas, the Middle East conflict, and Catholic Church child abuse scandals. An atheist, he wanted the Church – not the IRA – disbanded.

Nicknamed 'the Dark', Hughes had been a ruthlessly committed paramilitary. His gun battles with the British entered republican folklore. Yet he was a complex man, displaying a compassion often missing in republican ranks.

Once, he'd a chance to kill a young British soldier in Leeson Street. The terrified soldier cried for his mother: "I stood over him with a .45 aimed at his head. I could have pulled the trigger and sent him to eternity. But morally and emotionally, I wasn't able to end his life. He was a mere child, so frightened."

Later, Hughes was haunted by the faces of IRA colleagues whom, he believed, had died for nothing. He'd spend days crying in his flat. A photo hung on the wall of Hughes in Long Kesh, with his best friend, Gerry Adams, arms around each other. "I loved him. I'd have taken a bullet for Gerry. I probably should have put one in him," Hughes said.

He accused the leadership of abandoning republicanism for "personal power" and said the GFA (Good Friday Agreement) stood for 'got f**k all'. He'd developed left-wing politics as a teenage merchant seaman. Entering African ports, he was appalled by the poverty he saw. He gave boxes of the ship's supplies to locals.

He joined the IRA in 1969 and was jailed in 1973. He soon escaped, rented a house in the affluent Malone Road, dyed his hair, and donned a suit and tie. He became businessman Arthur McAllister, travelling around Belfast in disguise, coordinating the IRA campaign.

Eventually, his cover was blown. He spent 13 years in jail and 53 days on hunger-strike. On release, he rejoined the IRA. He worked for internal security but became suspicious of the 'department' which, it has since been revealed, included high-placed British agents.

His first clash with the leadership came when he complained of the £20 a day wages paid to ex-prisoners by a large west Belfast building contractor. An Official IRA member, shocked to see 'the Dark' carrying bricks and sweating in a ditch for a pittance, was told by the boss: "He's cheaper than a digger."

When Hughes tried to organise a strike, he was offered £25 a day on condition he not tell the others. "I told (the boss) to stick it up his arse and I never went back. I wrote an article about if for Republican News but it was censored."

His wife had become involved with another man when he was in jail. Other prisoners urged him to give her a hard time. Hughes apologised to her for "always having put the movement first", and told her to be happy.

While others of his rank secured holiday homes and businesses after the IRA ceasefire, Hughes survived on disability allowance. Just last month, he was left without heating until another ex-prisoner lent him an electric fire.

He craved solitude, visiting the pub in the quiet of early afternoon, and coming home to watch Channel Four's 'Deal or No Deal'. Prison had left him with arthritis. He was prone to chest infections and started to go blind. He didn't eat well and neglected to take his medication. Political disillusionment had weakened his will to live.

.In 1995, he was approached by army council member, Brian Keenan, who expressed discontentment with Adams and McGuinness and asked for help in devising a new military strategy. Hughes was interested but thought it a false approach to have him reveal his hand.

While he remained against the peace process, he came to believe all opposition should be peaceful and 'armed struggle' was pointless. Despite his militancy, Hughes' outlook wasn't narrow. He was chuffed when, years after jail, a Protestant prison officer tracked him to Divis. They went for a drink.

Two years ago, he visited Cuba to see the Sierra Maestra where Che had fought. He loved the locals and was angry the authorities barred them from hotels reserved for Westerners. In solidarity, he refused to enter.

He died, aged 59, after total organ failure. His ashes will be scattered on the Cooley Mountains, his parents' grave, and the Falls Road IRA garden of remembrance. The last of the writings he gave me conveyed his inner torment: "I go to bed in pain, I wake in the middle of the night in pain, I get up in pain. What the f**k was it all about?"

This article appeared in the February 24, 2008 edition of the Sunday Tribune.

Ireland will always remember with pride the name of Brendan Hughes.