Suspect Device
They take away our freedom
In the name of liberty
Why can’t they all just clear off
Why can’t they let us be
My favourite anti war lyrics from any song; ever. As a 16 year old I should have been studying for my Inter Certificate Examination in Clones Co. Monaghan, but in 1978 these boys from Belfast, Stiff Little Fingers had a rawness that was paradoxically fresh. A bona fide distraction from textbooks. I played their debut single, Suspect Device on the loop daily from its release. Here was a group of young lads led by Jake Burns showing two fingers to the paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland. Their message was a simple one. Stop hurting us. Let us enjoy ourselves. Just go away. In hindsight it was a very brave protest to engage in. Those were very dangerous times. Very, very dangerous. They didn’t care. They were punk rockers. The following year they released their debut album Inflammable Material which also included their immortal anthem Alternative Ulster.
Fourteen years later I was given the opportunity to manage a department store, located in the Park Centre, a shopping complex in the heart of west Belfast. Stiff Little Fingers by then were on the back foot, their message had long fallen on deaf ears. Well not entirely. The men of violence were still on the rampage. Someone in the IRA was a SLF fan as they were executing a policy of targeting big retail stores with Inflammable Material. The previous year they practically demolished the sprawling Sprucefield shopping complex in Lisburn by planting incendiary devices that would combust during the non trading hours. Previously, they only seemed to target GB retailers, but by late 1992 any retailer or shopping centre was fair game.
I had witnessed at first hand the destruction an incendiary device could cause. At 4 am one Monday during the summer I received a telephone call from the local key holder informing me he was inside the shop but ‘it was not good’. An incendiary device had detonated inside a packet of firelighters but thankfully the sprinklers had extinguished the blaze. I had to travel all the way from Portrush to inspect the damage, which included the steel shutters cut to ribbons by the firefighters as they were on the scene before the local keyholder.
Apart from the physical injuries inflicted on victims or the structural damage to the building, the grocery retailers’ greatest heartache was caused by the water damage to the actual stock, which would have to be individually itemised for insurance purposes, dumped, but physically witnessed by the department of health. The shelves would have to be washed down and restocked. Added to this, was the inconvenience of customers who simply went elsewhere. The company point blank refused to pay for overnight security or allow me to leave a member of staff during the night in the building.
The following day I attended a security meeting with senior RUC officers who advised me on what incendiary devices looked like, where they were most likely to be concealed in a shop. I was surprised to see a policeman anywhere near the building as they wouldn’t even come to the store to arrest a shoplifter out of fear of an IRA attack. Most incendiary devices were made with acid contained within condoms that had a flammable material like lighter fuel or sulphur inserted in cigarette packets. After a period of time the acid would eat through the rubber igniting the fuel. They were crudely designed but effective, especially as they were practically impossible to detect, unless by a physical human search. We were advised to manually check the store daily for these devices in the most likely areas such as textiles department, especially garments with pockets, paper-ware products, firelighters or matches. In hindsight it was negligent of employers to ask untrained casual staff to risk their wellbeing in pursuit of these dangerous devices.
On the run up to Christmas the threat had still not abated. A device was discovered in one of the smaller units in the shopping mall. Very soon RUC sniffer dogs were in action heavily guarded by the British Army. A couple of hours later an employee, wee Johnny Fenton, whispered ‘boss there’s a dodgy cigarette packet in the Andrex display’. I inspected the area immediately to be faced with an opened packet of Benson and Hedges replete with a purple coloured dry substance, crammed into a type of paste attached to a plastic rubber tube of petrol lighter fuel.
The RUC protocol was to evacuate the building immediately, alert them and the fire brigade. But that would have meant lost sales, defrosted food dripping from abandoned trolleys with disgruntled customers going across the road to Crazy Prices, our competitors. No, I was the company man. The diehard. I told wee Johnny to seal the area off, as I scarpered to the warehouse, returning with a yard brush and a navvy shovel. I scooped the cigarette packet on to the shovel, scurried to the drain in the service yard out of vision, placed it on top of the steel grille returning with a fire extinguisher. The impact of the water initially caused the device to emit a plume of coloured smoke before it disintegrated into the drain. I continued to work as if the incident never happened. The drive home that night was exhilarating. I was the hero. I wouldn’t let them beat me. I wouldn’t close the store in the face of terrorism. I saved my billionaire owners more money. In hindsight, I was an idiot.
The next day I received a phone call from a CID officer Bryans based in Grosvenor Road RUC base inviting me down to the station at my earliest convenience to discuss the ongoing incendiary threat to retailers. I agreed reluctantly as I didn’t want to be seen coming out of an RUC building. After the short journey down to the station, I was led into a suite of offices. Well that’s a complete exaggeration. I was led into a room that had one MFI type table bolted to the floor as were two hard backed plastic chairs. The room was nothing more than a cell: a single bulb illuminating an unplastered breeze block wall painted the colour of green I last saw coming out of the mouth of Linda Blair in The Exorcist.
I sat there like a convict as Bryans entered the room looking like a schoolboy in a plain blue shirt his plum red face exploded with acne. He probably used a moon buggy to shave that morning. ‘Mr McCabe you think you’re a modern version of Werner Heubeck? Hearing that I knew immediately I was goosed. Mr Heubeck, a German, was the infamous boss of Ulsterbus and Citybus who physically carried bombs off vehicles during the mayhem. What made this situation even more bizarre is that Heubeck bought my father in laws tour bus company in the mid 70s. ‘We have a visual image of you in your service yard disposing of an incendiary device down a drain. We saw it on the centre’s CCTV’. I nodded nervously. ‘You have endangered yourself, staff and the general public with your macho behaviour. Do you realise that?’. I offered him the same explanation that Mr Heubeck gave years previously, that the show must go on. People have the right to go to work, to shop, to go about their daily endeavours without disruption from terrorists. I was tired of all this hassle.
He wasn’t a bit impressed. Even less impressed when I quoted SLF they take away our freedom in the name of liberty. ‘What are you talking about Mr Mc Cabe? Who are SLF? Do you realise I could charge you for conspiracy, for destroying evidence or both’. He realised by my expression that I was oblivious, explaining further that they had a database of such devices helping the arrest of many individuals through design and fingerprint analysis. I had to describe in detail the contents of the destroyed cigarette packet when a much larger detective entered the room. He was like someone who would have been bouncing around a ring with the wrestler Big Daddy a decade previous. His body odour should have come with a government health warning. If I was a Provo I would have immediately signed a confession to get him out of the room. He explained that I wouldn’t be charged but warned me I should never do that again but to contact the RUC if such an incident should happen in the future.
I left the police station like a mongrel stealing a string of sausages out of a butchers shop. Soon I was back in the store working away as if nothing had happened, as excited as a teenager with an Ann Summers underwear catalogue watching the queues at the checkouts, the noise of the cash registers ringing in my ears. Later on that day I was in the cubicle of the staff toilets, constipated. There was a six inch gap between the door and the floor. ‘Mr Mc Cabe I have a Christmas present for you’. It was wee Johnny. He pushed a cigarette packet under the door (it was a Rothmans packet this time). No longer constipated, I enquired ‘did anyone see you with this?’ my tongue swelling as if stung by a wasp, ‘no I found it when I was packing the firelighters’. ‘Good man thanks. I will look after it. Don’t breathe a word’. He left as I flushed the packet down the toilet. All the colours of a rainbow swirled before me in that toilet bowl as I watched it disappear, convinced the show must go on. After all, it was Christmas. We are retailers. We own West Belfast. We have to make money for our billionaire owners.
A week later walking around the shop floor I noticed a few of the staff congregating around the checkout area. ‘What’s happening here lads? have you no work to do?’ I asked all officiously. ‘Boss, boss it’s your man from SLF, Jake Burns, can we ask him for an autograph?’ ‘No, leave him alone to do his shopping but I know a boy in Grosvenor Road who would like to have a chat with him’. They looked at me like I was an alien. Later that evening, on the 80 minute drive home to the north coast Jake Burns told me from the radio:
Don’t believe them
Don’t believe them
Don’t be bitten twice
You gotta suss, suss, suss, suss, suss, suss
Suss, suspect device
Houdi originally told this story at the tenx9 Storytelling event in Belfast. You can also listen to stories on their podcast.
Originally from Clones Co. Monaghan, Houdi McCabe is a legend in his own mind. He worked as a Branch Manager with Dunnes Stores all over Northern Ireland for 42 years. Retired, he now writes and acts on a full time basis, with over thirty films/plays within his oeuvre. Some of his stories have been adapted for short films, by himself and with other collaborators. He is a regular performer at literary events TENX9, Soundwaves Portrush, Pub Poetry Causeway Coast, First Drams NI and Flash Fiction Armagh. Resident in Portrush Co. Antrim he is married to local girl Carole Robinson.
They have three adult children and one grandchild, Genevieve. Houdi doesn’t have any pets as he loves himself too much.
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