Slugger O'Toole

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“We on the outside finessed…”

Mon 10 January 2011, 6:51pm

76

In today’s Belfast Telegraph, Liam Clarke observes Danny Morrison’s admission that “we on the outside finessed the sequence of events for the sake of morale” at the end of the 1980 hunger strike. This is a major admission, as it changes the whole narrative that had been pushed for years, and also removes the main [...] more »

The “Top Secret” Press Release

Mon 8 November 2010, 1:07pm

202

One has to admire the sheer chutzpah of Brendan McFarlane. He was in Saturday’s Irish News trying to pass off a 1981 press release as a secret comm reflecting the personal viewpoint of Richard O’Rawe. Mr McFarlane said yesterday he would break five years of silence by producing secret IRA comms written by Mr O’Rawe [...] more »

Voices from the Grave

Sun 24 October 2010, 7:02pm

13

Coming up to the Halloween holiday, some people might be frightened of the idea of Voices from the Grave – but for others, the chance to hear an oral history of the Troubles from the mouths of two (in)famous protagonists, PUP leader and former UVF member David Ervine, and Brendan “The Dark” Hughes, is not [...] more »

Latest comments from Rusty Nail (see all)

Rusty Nail has commented 53 times (0 in the last month).

1. Comment on Further to Morrison’s attempted revisionism
   on 1 January 2012 at 3:26 pm

   Excellent quotes, Terry.

   Go to comment

2. Comment on Further to Morrison’s attempted revisionism
   on 1 January 2012 at 3:10 pm

   “5 July
   After exchanges, Mountain Climber’s offer (concessions in relation to aspects of the five demands) goes further than ICJP’s understanding of government position. Sinn Fein’s Danny Morrison secretly visits hunger strikers. Separately, he meets prison OC Brendan McFarlane, explains what Mountain Climber is offering should hunger strike be terminated.”

   Was Morrison lying then or is he lying now?

   “According to our critics, the hunger strikers, on whose behalf we were acting, should have accepted an ‘offer’ which came to the prisoners and us, via a phone-call from a British official in London, through the intermediary (since identified as Brendan Duddy – an honourable man), to myself, to a phone-call to Gerry Adams, and in a verbal message to Danny Morrison to the prisoners.” – Martin McGuinness

   Lie then or lie now? Is Duddy still an honourable man?

   Ten Men Dead describes in detail the offer Danny was tasked with bringing into the prisoners (it can be read online). Lie then or now?

   Morrison today says “the British Government had yet to even formulate its position, never mind proposing a ‘deal” – Adams in 2009 said, “Danny Morrison visited the IRA and INLA Hunger Strikers to tell them that contact had been re-established and that the British were making an offer.” How could the British be ‘making an offer’ if as Danny now claims, contrary to what he wrote in 2006 and in 2009, they had yet to even formulate its position or propose a deal? Is Gerry lying or is Danny?

   What was the purpose of Danny’s visit to the prison?

   Paragraph 16 of the document being discussed explains:

   15. He then returned to the subject of the prison visit. He said that the number of senior Provisionals with a full grasp of the situation including knowledge of the SOON channel and the status to enable them to act authoritatively was very limited. He said that if the key to accepting any agreement was persuation [sic], education and knowledge, then that is not available outside the very upper echelons of the Provisional Movement. It is not even available as of right to the entire PSF leadership. He said that this poses a problem. In response to our request for suggestions of Provisional who would fit this description, SOON produced Morrison, Adams and McGuinness as the only three candidates. After consultation with HAG, we said that we would accept Morrison but would on no account accept either Adams or McGuinness. SOON said that this was understood but that a problem with this was that Morrison was rumoured to be in the USA. The Provisionals were, however, taking steps to try and find him. (Call No 3 – 1045-1125, 5 July)

   Morrison was chosen because he had ‘a full grasp of the situation including knowledge of the SOON channel’, he had ‘the status enable them to act authoritatively’, and – ‘the key to accepting any agreement’ – he had the knowledge, education and ability to persuade needed.

   To suggest that his only purpose in going to the prison was to tell them that the channel had been opened and no more is, especially given the urgency of the negotiations, utterly ridiculous. He went into the prison to explain the offer that had come through the channel and to report back whether it would be accepted or not.

   That is what the ‘current position’ of the British was when asked by Martin McGuinness during the 2pm SOON conversation on July 5th, after Morrison had been dispatched to the prison:

   “SOON then indicated that McGuinness had just arrived. He said that time was of the essence and asked what the current HMG position was. We explained that it was important, before drafting any document for consideration by ministers, that we should possess the Provisionals’ view. SOON then undertook to seek clear views on their position, which would be relayed to us later after discussion in the light of Morrison’s visit.”

   As said before, the British explained that it was ‘important before drafting any documents for consideration by Ministers’ that the British should ‘possess the Provisionals view’. Their view, of course, could not be known until after Morrison returned from delivering the offer to the prisoners and was debriefed. McGuinness told Duddy their views would be relayed to the British ‘after discussion in light of Morrison’s visit’.

   Go to comment

3. Comment on National Archives 30 Year Papers – July, 1981
   on 31 December 2011 at 12:29 am

   Previous comments in this thread have claimed:
   “There was no deal offered in early July 1981 reading the transcript of calls between duddy and london they were negotiating but the British wanted movement first”

   “At the time of Morrison’s visit to the prison on the afternoon of Sunday July 5th, 1981, the British government had yet to even formulate its position, never mind proposing ‘a deal’.”

   “The Brits had not even sent a proposal through – and did not do so until Monday night!”

   “We now know, from call no 4, that the British had not even formulated their response while Danny Morrison was in the camp.”

   “Get that, it was only after Danny Morrison’s visit that the British were prepared to formulate their position.”

   “The O’Rawe account was of a ‘deal’ brought into the camp by Danny Morrison. We have established from the recently released papers, courtesy of call no 4, that the British were waiting on Danny Morrison to come out of the camp before they formulated their position.”

   For clarity’s sake, regarding the purpose of Danny Morrison’s specially arranged visit into the prison to see the hunger strikers and Bik McFarlane, please consult:

   Danny Morrison, writing in Daily Ireland in June, 2006 and again in An Phoblacht in April 2009; his timeline of events, about the 5th of July and his visit into the prison:

   5 July
   After exchanges, Mountain Climber’s offer (concessions in relation to aspects of the five demands) goes further than ICJP’s understanding of government position. Sinn Fein’s Danny Morrison secretly visits hunger strikers. Separately, he meets prison OC Brendan McFarlane, explains what Mountain Climber is offering should hunger strike be terminated.

   See also David Beresford’s Ten Men Dead, where the 5 July offer is described on pages 292-294:

   The channel had been reopened by the Foreign Office in the wake of the conciliatory 4 July statement by the prisoners, in which they had insisted that their five demands could be met without any departure from ‘principle’ on the Government’s part. The Mountain Climber had told Adams, through their middlemen, that provided it led to an immediate end to the hunger strike, the Government was prepared to issue a statement setting out agreed concessions.

   – The Foreign Office, in its first offer, had conceded the prisoners’ main demand of their own clothing – all of the prisoners in the north would get it, irrespective of the reason they were in jail, so that the Government could claim it was no recognition of any ‘special’ status.
   – Visits and other such privileges had been agreed: the protesting prisoners would have them all restored on the ending of the hunger strike. But the prisoners were sticking on work, association and the restoration of lost remission.
   – On work, the Foreign Office was prepared to fudge the issue, suggesting that the main prop would be domestic tasks, such as cleaning, laundry and kitchen duties, together with “constructive work” such as building a chapel in the prison – the proposal put forward by Cardinal O Fiaich to Roy Mason so many years before – making toys for charities and studying for the Open University, or other educational courses. The prisoners wanted self-education to be the main prop, while being prepared to do maintenance work.
   – The Foreign Office was offering nothing new on free association, arguing that the prisoners were already allowed to mix during leisure hours, in the evenings and at weekends, and that what they were demanding was ‘unsupervised’ association, which would create unacceptable security problems – paramilitary activities like those which went on in the Cages. The prisoners had retorted that they only wanted free association in the wings and that there was no requirement that control be restricted – they would not interfere with the supervisory duties of warders.
   – The Government had made a vague offer to restore a proportion of lost remission; the prisoners wanted it all back – for some men it meant an extra year or more in jail.

   The “current British position” discussed in the phone calls being referred to here by some could not be formulated until Morrison delivered his report on the response from the prisoners to what he was specially tasked to bring to the prison to ascertain.

   That is only a logical sequence of negotiating volleys. That in no way, obviously from the historical record we have provided by people like Danny Morrison himself, means that the British ‘had yet to even formulate a position’ on July 5th.

   To suggest anything of the sort is incredibly ridiculous, and to expect anyone to believe such nonsense is beyond wishful thinking at this stage.

   Go to comment

4. Comment on “We on the outside finessed…”
   on 13 January 2011 at 10:49 pm

   Mark and Brian,

   This has been previously discussed in detail on Slugger, comments 20 & 21. It is also archived on the longkesh.info site.

   To wit:

   “If you take a look at page 299 of Denis O’Hearn’s biography of Bobby Sands, Nothing But an Unfinished Song:

   “The movement had sent comms to let him (Sands) know that the British government was sending a courier with a document that might be a solution. But Bobby never got the comms until the next day because “the lad had to swallow them”. It would not have made any difference because the authorities refused to let Sands go to the hospital, where the drama of the negotiations and pressures on Brendan Hughes was unfolding…”

   “The next thing he knew, he was taken to the prison hospital at 6:45 in the evening. What he found there shocked him.

   I saw Index (Father Toner) and Silvertop (Father Murphy) in the corridor as I walked down the wing. There were three cartons of eggs sitting in a doorway. My heart jumped. Dorcha (Brendan Hughes) came out of Tommy McKearney’s room and went into Tom (McFeeley)’s room in front of me. Tom was in bed. Raymond and Nixie were sitting beside the bed. They were all shattered. Dorcha said, “Did you hear the sceal (news)?” I said, “No.” He said it again. I thought Sean was dead. Then he said, “We’ve got nothing, I called it off.” The MO was banging an injection into Tommy. Sean was en route to the hospital. Tom had been against it, wanting to wait to see what Atkins was going to say in the Commons. Dorcha was under the impression that Sean had only twelve hours to live.”

   And also look Adams’ description of the end of the first hunger strike as he writes of it in A Farther Shore, pages 12-13:

   But with the commencement of the hunger strike, the British government opened up contact with republicans. Through this contact in the British Foreign Office – code-named “Mountain Climber” – a channel of communication which had been used during the 1974 IRA-British government truce was reactivated. Father Reid’s role had been filled by another Redemptorist priest, Father Brendan Meagher. The British said they wanted a settlement of the issues underpinning the protest and committed to setting out the details in a document to be presented to all of the prisoners formally and publicly after they came off their hunger strike.

   Mountain Climber brought the document to Father Meagher, who delivered it to Clonard Monastery where I and a few people who were assisting the prisoners were waiting for him. As he was briefing us, Tom Hartley, the head of our POW department, burst into the room where we were meeting to tell us the hunger strike was over in the blocks.”

   See also pages 108-109 of Richard O’Rawe’s Blanketmen:

   By 18 December the hunger strikers had not eaten for over seven weeks. Bobby was summoned to the camp hospital about ten o’clock that night. (We later found out that while there, he had met Father Meagher, who presented him with a document from the British government on prison procedures.) You could feel the tension on the wing as Bobby got ready to leave for the hospital. Everyone knew this was an important meeting, because reports had been circulating that Sean McKenna was in a critical condition. After an hour and a half, Bobby returned with the news that the hunger strike was over. My immediate reaction was one of huge relief, but this was tempered when Bobby said, “Ní fhuaireamar faic.” (‘We didn’t get anything.’)

   Brendan Hughes had made a commitment to Sean McKenna that he would not let him die, and when he was close to death, he kept his word and called the strike off, before any British documents came in or any deal could be done.

   As he wrote in a letter to the Irish News, 13 July 2006, “Risking the lives of volunteers is not the IRA way”:

   In a recent BBC documentary Bernadette McAliskey said she would have let Sean McKenna die during the 1980 hunger strike in order to outmanoeuvre British brinkmanship.
   Implicit in her comments was a criticism of those senior republicans who decided against pursuing the option favoured by Bernadette.
   As the IRA leader in charge of that Hunger Strike I had given Sean McKenna a guarantee that were he to lapse into a coma I would not permit him to die.
   When the awful moment arrived I kept my word to him.
   Having made that promise, to renege on it once Sean had reached a point where he was no longer capable of making a decision for himself, I would have been guilty of his murder.
   Whatever the strategic merits of Bernadette’s favoured option, they are vastly outweighed by ethical considerations.
   Terrible things happen in the course of any war and those of us who feel obliged to fight wars must take responsibility for the terrible consequences of actions we initiate.
   I can live with that – in war we kill enemies and expect to be killed by them.
   I can stand over the military decisions I made during our war against the British.
   But there are no circumstances in which I was prepared to make a cynical decision that would have manipulated events to the point where a republican comrade would forfeit his life.
   Twenty-five years on, I have no reason to change my mind that the decision I made to save the life of Sean McKenna was the proper one.
   Faced with similar circumstances I would do the same again.
   History may judge my actions differently but preventing Sean McKenna from becoming history rather than my own place in history was my prevailing concern.
   Brendan Hughes, Belfast.

   At the meeting in Derry, this was discussed and former blanketmen Gerard Hodgins, Tommy Gorman, Dixie Elliott and Gerard Clarke, and Richard O’Rawe, were all very clear that there was no deal for the British to renege on, and that those inside the prison at the time knew this. They had decided to save face, however, and claim that was what ended the hunger strike in order to keep the pressure on the British. This discussion should be available in the You Tube videos and when I have time I will find it for you later, if you have not already viewed them.

   So the idea that the rejection of the British offer in July during the second hunger strike was based on the prisoners’ fear of the British ‘dirty joeing’ them again is a nonsense. The Brits could not renege on a deal that had not been struck. It is propaganda, nothing more.”

   Go to comment

5. Comment on “We on the outside finessed…”
   on 13 January 2011 at 2:12 pm

   I see Pat’s been sent in to clean up Danny’s mess. Sleight of hand won’t rectify this, nor will shouting “Bobby!” or “Brendan!” in the hope that blaming everything on dead men will get the leadership a free pass. The most important point is, Danny has started telling some truths – which he should be commended for.

   The sleight of hand being applied here by Pat is shifting the timing of when the British “reneged”. But Danny has throughly exploded that myth. No amount of backspin now can save it.

   There was no deal, no offer, no promises. “We got nothing,” Brendan Hughes said, “‘Ní fhuaireomar faic”, as Bobby Sands put it. Brendan called the strike off to save Sean McKenna’s life, with no thought to any promise, deal or document. It was done.

   Bobby knew immediately there would be a second hunger strike.

   He was also angry at reports that Sinn Fein was spinning the end of the hunger strike as a victory, unhappy with “a buoyant Danny Morrison”, saying he had a “brass neck”.

   Danny Morrison now eloquently describes what was on offer from the British at that time: unsecured promises. The first word negates the second. In other words, absolutely nothing.

   But face had to be saved, and momentum towards the second hunger strike had to be built. So in this, Pat’s important point is correct – Bobby, the prison leadership and the leadership on the outside all eventually agreed to present a united front, to put pressure on the British, to give cover to the claim that the British had reneged. But they all knew that was a fig leaf designed to spare their own blushes. The British had reneged on nothing, as there was nothing there to renege on.

   And Danny now admits the truth of it in his Andersonstown News article.

   “We on the outside finessed the sequence of events for the sake of morale”

   “At a midnight press conference [we] merged the secret arrival of a British government document (promising a more enlightened prison regime: falsely, as it turned out) with the ending of the hunger strike”

   “It was either that or admit – which to the republican base was inconceivable – that Brendan had ended the strike without getting a thing.”

   “Bobby – who turned out to be right – did not believe the British had any intention of working the unsecured promises contained in the document. But we begged him to put them to the test and that if the administration made things impossible then it could be claimed that the Brits were reneging.”

   The importance of all this is that it is the first time Danny Morrison has admitted it.

   The fiction that there was a deal that the British reneged on underpinned Morrison’s, and those who carried the can for him, claims about the handling of the second hunger strike. He’s now exploded that myth and with it the legs out from under him when his argument attempts to stand against O’Rawe’s.

   By the time of the July, 1981 offer from Thatcher, things had radically changed from where they stood in December, 1980. Not least was the amount of people who had already died on hunger strike, and those who were poised to. In addition to that, Thatcher was dealing directly with the IRA through Adams and his cadre. The prisoners all knew the truth of how the first hunger strike had ended, and they knew too the fiction of the document they pretended to work, the happy face they were forced to put on. Did Danny and company decide a second time to “finesse” the situation, for the sake of appearances?

   Go to comment

6. Comment on Former Hunger Striker Calls on Adams to Resign from Sands Trust
   on 29 December 2009 at 8:55 pm

   Actually, Padraig, the headline should have read, “Fomrer Hugner Stikre Sllacs No Sadam to Gernis Rofm Dans Rustt”!

   Go to comment

7. Comment on Former Hunger Striker Calls on Adams to Resign from Sands Trust
   on 29 December 2009 at 8:37 pm

   A typo, now corrected. Thanks.

   Go to comment

8. Comment on 1981 Hunger Strike: Feint and Retreat
   on 5 October 2009 at 2:16 pm

   Regarding Garret Fitzgerald – let us read his own explanation. From his autobiography, All in a Life, published in 1991. Page 371.

   “During these weeks in July and early August I may also have been influenced more than I realised at the time by the frustration I felt at having to deal thereafter with the British government while I had, in a sense, one hand tied behind my back. For I would naturally have liked to confront them with — and would have liked even more to be able to make public — my knowledge of the furtive contacts on their behalf with the IRA, which seemed to have proved fatal to the resolution of the problem. But careful reflection led me to conclude that any revelation to the British of our knowledge of these activities would be likely to render a solution less rather than more likely. Disclosure of this knowledge could have drive the British government, and the Prime Minister in particular, into a state of embarrassed intransigence. This might have been accompanied by denials, which — if we had refused to accept them, as in honesty we would have had to do — would have made impossible the development of any kind of reasonable relationship between that government and ourselves. The fact moreover that our information, while absolutely convincing in its detail, was necessarily second-hand (it was what a member of the commission had told us Adams and Morrison had said to them) reinforced the need for caution.”

   It does not get more clear than that.

   However, to make it a little clearer – in last week’s Irish News, Fitzgerald revealed:

   “They were keen to accept that. We knew that. We had our sources within the prison,” he said.
   “As well as from the commission, we knew something was happening in the prison from other sources.”

   This would also be a factor as to why the then-Taoiseach could not press the British or make public what they knew.

   Go to comment

9. Comment on “I will not be attending and will not send a representative”
   on 28 May 2009 at 5:52 pm

   Danny, you know who I am. I am the rusty nail on which your woolly lies have become unravelled.

   Sin é

   Go to comment

10. Comment on “I will not be attending and will not send a representative”
    on 28 May 2009 at 5:12 pm

    @circles:

    You should know by now that I do not say anything I am not absolutely sure of or am unable to verify.

    @Danny:

    I am not the one who rejected the prisoners wishes and spent the next two decades covering it up.

    That would be you.

    Go to comment