Gerry Adams came outside and brought them a tray of drinks.

Eventually, on Good Friday, the parties emerged and announced that they had arrived at a pact to which all sides could agree – a mechanism to end the three-decade conflict. Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom, but with its own devolved assembly and close links to the Republic of Ireland. The agreement acknowledged that the majority of people on the island wanted a united Ireland – but also that a majority of people in the six counties favoured remaining part of the United Kingdom. The key principle was ‘consent’: if, at some juncture, a majority of people in the North wanted to unite with Ireland, then the governments of the UK and Ireland would have a ‘binding obligation’ to honour that choice. But until that time, Northern Ireland would remain part of the UK, and Sinn Féin agreed to set aside its principle of abstention and allow its representatives to serve in the newly created assembly.

‘We’ll deliver the end of British rule in our country, and until we do, the struggle will continue,’ Adams said in a speech at the grave of Wolfe Tone, a few months after the agreement. Adams had played an instrumental role in securing the deal, and the very ambiguity that he had cultivated around his own persona may have been what made it possible for the various negotiators to deal with him. Even after the agreement, Bill Clinton would wonder about Adams. ‘I don’t know what the real deal is between him and the IRA,’ Clinton mused to Tony Blair on a telephone call in 1999. But the fiction that Adams had never been a paramilitary created a political space in which interlocutors who might not want to be seen negotiating with terrorists could bring themselves to negotiate with him.

In his speech, Adams couldn’t exactly declare victory. But he was upbeat, saying, ‘The Good Friday Agreement marks the conclusion of one phase and the beginning of a new phase of struggle.’ He wanted to see ‘a new Ireland’, he said. ‘An Ireland in which the guns are silent. Permanently. An Ireland in which all of the people of this island are at peace with each other and with our neighbours in Britain. An Ireland united by a process of healing and national reconciliation.’

Two years later, across an ocean, Paul Bew was enjoying a stint as a visiting scholar at Boston College. Bew, who was normally based at Queen’s University, was a professor of Irish history. He had also served as an adviser to David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, who had played a major role in the Good Friday negotiations and was now serving as first minister for Northern Ireland. Boston College had a dignified legacy as a bastion of scholarship on Irish history and literature. In the spring of 2000, the college administration was looking for a way to mark the end of the three-decade conflict in Northern Ireland, and Bew mentioned to Bob O’Neill, the head of the John J. Burns Library, that the college might consider some way of documenting the Troubles. Perhaps, Bew suggested, the college could gather some sort of testimony from people who had participated in the Troubles, in order to create a historical record of the conflict. ‘This will be for graduate students a generation from now,’ Bew said. O’Neill liked the idea. But the new project would need a director. Bew proposed a longtime Belfast journalist named Ed Moloney, who had been a respected reporter and editor at the Irish Times and the Sunday Tribune.

Moloney was a bold choice, a sharp-minded, sharp-elbowed chronicler of the Troubles. He had been a student at Queen’s during the 1960s and had witnessed, first hand, the emergence of the civil rights movement and the dawn of the Troubles. He took part in demonstrations himself and got to know Dolours Price, Eamonn McCann, Bernadette Devlin and other radicals of the day. As a newspaperman, Moloney covered the conflict with painstaking attention, breaking important stories at a frantic clip. Physically, he was unprepossessing: as an infant, he had contracted polio, so all his life he had walked stiffly, with metal braces on his legs. But he was known for his fearlessness and his unwillingness to back down from a fight. His disability had endowed him with a lifelong sympathy for the underdog. When the hair on his head went grey, his eyebrows remained thick and black, which gave him the appearance of a tenacious badger. Once, in 1999, the government used a court order to try to force Moloney to turn over his interview notes from a meeting with a loyalist paramilitary. He refused, risking prison. Then he took the government to court, and won.

Moloney had written a critical biography of Ian Paisley and had developed extensive sources in both the republican and loyalist communities. There had been a time when he was quite friendly with Gerry Adams. Once, when Adams was on the run, the two men sat up chatting in a hotel room, and, because it was unsafe for anybody to leave, Moloney spent the night sleeping on the floor. As Adams grew more political in the 1980s, Moloney would go and see him every few months at the Sinn Féin offices on the Falls Road. Adams would make a pot of tea and the two of them would sit in a back room and talk. But eventually the relationship soured. Moloney had grown convinced that Adams was deliberately misleading the rank and file of the IRA. He suspected that Adams had privately resolved early on to give up the army’s weapons in the interests of the peace process but that he and the people around him had kept this closely guarded secret from the rest of the organisation. Moloney had begun work on a new book, A Secret History of the IRA, which would draw on his decades of reporting to tell the story of this process. But as he broke stories that conflicted with the Sinn Féin party line, he encountered hostility. Martin McGuinness nicknamed him Ed ‘Baloney’. One night, someone slashed his tyres. In 2001, Moloney left Belfast and moved to the Bronx, to be closer to his wife’s family but also because he was beginning to feel some discomfort in Northern Ireland. Besides, he figured, he had spent his career covering the Troubles, the biggest story in Europe at the time. And now the story was over.

Moloney took Bew’s general notion of documenting the Troubles and proposed something more specific: Boston College should conduct an oral history, in which combatants from the front lines could speak candidly about their experiences. There was a challenge, however. Because of the traditional prohibition on talking about paramilitary activity, the details of many of the key events of the Troubles were shrouded in a fog of reticence. The peace process might have normalised Sinn Féin as a political party, but the IRA remained an illegal organisation. Just admitting to having been a member could result in criminal prosecution. And if the paramilitaries feared the authorities, they were even more afraid of one another. Anyone who violated the credo of silence could be branded a ‘tout’, as informers were known. And touts got killed. Militants tend to be clannish, and deeply suspicious of outsiders. But perhaps, Moloney thought, you could work out a way to interview people now, with a promise that their testimony would not be released until after they were dead. That way, you could reach the players who were at the cutting edge of the conflict while they were still alive and their memories were fresh, but then assure them that their confidentiality would be protected, because the archive would be sealed up, like a time capsule, until they were no longer around to be prosecuted by the government or chastised by their peers. Paul Bew was enthusiastic about this idea. He talked about ‘laying down the tapes’ as if they were bottles of claret.

The academics at Boston College may have been prepared to make assurances that such interviews would be used only for posterity, but why would anyone believe them? In fact, it seemed unlikely that any team of notebook-toting PhD students would get very far at all in persuading hardened gunmen to open up. So Moloney proposed a decidedly unorthodox, but possibly ingenious, solution: if ex-paramilitaries wouldn’t spill their secrets to a grad student, perhaps they would talk to another former paramilitary.

One evening in the summer of 2000, Moloney and the librarian from Boston College, Bob O’Neill, went to dinner at Deanes, a sleek, upmarket seafood restaurant in central Belfast. Founded by a local chef who had cooked at Claridge’s, in London, before returning home in the 1990s, Deanes was a very New Belfast establishment, a snapshot of the kind of cosmopolitan future that peace might bring. The men were there to meet Anthony McIntyre. A hulking man with an unkempt goatee and forearms that were thickly tattooed, McIntyre was known, to everyone, by his nickname, Mackers. He had grown up in South Belfast. At sixteen, he lied about his age and joined the Provos, then served seventeen years in prison for the murder of a loyalist paramilitary. Mackers had never finished secondary school before he was locked up, but in prison he got sick of reading the Bible and developed an interest in education. He did this in part to appease his mother, who had always been disappointed that he’d abandoned his studies. But it was also a good way to spend the evenings. Mackers grew to cherish those quiet hours late at night when other prisoners went to sleep and he was left to read in solitude.

Released from prison in 1992, Mackers ended up obtaining an honours undergraduate degree at Queen’s, then enrolling in a PhD programme, where his adviser was Paul Bew. After writing a dissertation about the republican movement, he received his doctorate. But the degree did not provide him with any steady work. When he initially got out of prison, he had been reduced, for a time, to shoplifting. In 2000, he met a young American woman named Carrie Twomey, a freckled brunette with big blue eyes who was studying in Belfast. They fell in love, married, and had two children.

Ed Moloney had first met Mackers at a republican funeral in 1993, and the ex-IRA man had subsequently become one of his sources. Mackers spoke the language of both the academy and the street, and Moloney felt that he would be an ideal interviewer for the Boston College project. Bew endorsed the idea of enlisting his former advisee, and was comforted to think that the university might put some money in Mackers’s pocket. In 2001, Boston College received a grant of $200,000 from a wealthy Irish American businessman who was willing to support the initiative. The plan was to interview former paramilitaries from both the republican and loyalist sides. (Originally, Moloney had wanted to include testimony from members of the police force as well, but that idea was eventually abandoned.) For the loyalist interviews, Moloney recruited an East Belfast man named Wilson McArthur, who had strong connections in loyalist circles and had also obtained a degree from Queen’s. Before they finished dinner at Deanes, Moloney, O’Neill and Mackers agreed that, because of the great sensitivity of the subject matter, it was of paramount importance that this whole undertaking remain secret.

The Belfast Project, as it became known, seemed to address an obvious shortcoming in the Good Friday Agreement. In their effort to bring about peace, the negotiators had focused on the future rather than the past. The accord provided for the release of paramilitary prisoners, many of whom had committed atrocious acts of violence. But there was no provision for the creation of any sort of truth-and-reconciliation mechanism that might allow the people of Northern Ireland to address the sometimes murky and often painful history of what had befallen their country over the previous three decades. After apartheid ended in South Africa, there had been such a process, in which people came forward and told their stories. The explicit understanding in that case was that there was an exchange: if you told the truth, then you could receive legal immunity. The South African model had flaws: critics claimed that the accounting was incomplete, and often political. But at least there was some effort at an accounting.

Part of the reason that such a process may have been feasible in South Africa was that in the aftermath of apartheid, there was an obvious winner. The Troubles, by contrast, concluded in a stalemate. The Good Friday Agreement envisioned a ‘power sharing’ arrangement. But there was a sense in which neither side had really emerged triumphant. There were some cosmetic changes: the RUC was rebranded the Police Service of Northern Ireland; the structural discrimination that the civil rights protests sought to challenge had mostly gone away. Northern Ireland had always been devoted to the theatre of historical commemoration. But there was no formal process for attempting to figure out how to commemorate, or even to understand, the Troubles.

This queasy sense of irresolution was only complicated by Gerry Adams’s refusal to acknowledge that he was ever in the IRA. If people in Northern Ireland were wondering whether it was safe, yet, to come clean about their own roles in the conflict, the continued denials by Adams would suggest that it most definitely wasn’t. ‘O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,’ Seamus Heaney wrote in a poem about the Troubles called ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’. There was a sense that, even as people greeted the new day with great enthusiasm, the sulphurous intrigue of the past would continue to linger.

In 2001, Martin McGuinness broke the IRA’s code of silence when he acknowledged that he had been a member of the Provos, serving as the second-in-command in Derry during the early 1970s. But McGuinness did so in the context of an inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday – a circumstance in which he would receive immunity from prosecution. As a political party, Sinn Féin was now on the ascendant, more powerful than ever. The IRA had ostensibly been sidelined by the peace process, going so far as to agree to decommission its weapons. But it could seem, even so, that, having cast such a profound shadow over Irish life for such a long time, the paramilitary army was unlikely to simply fade away. Once, in the summer of 1995, Adams gave a speech at a rally in Belfast. He looked like a politician, in a crisp summer suit, consulting his cue cards. But during a pause in his prepared remarks, someone in the crowd shouted, ‘Bring back the IRA!’

As the audience cheered, Adams chuckled and smiled. Then he leaned into the microphone and said, ‘They haven’t gone away, you know.’

To the small cohort who knew about the Belfast Project, the penumbra of silence and innuendo that still hung over Northern Ireland only added urgency to the need to establish a space in which people could talk candidly about their experiences. Tom Hachey, a professor of Irish studies at Boston College who became involved in the project, said that the ambition of the archive was not traditional scholarship, but an effort to create a corpus of material that future generations could ponder; a study, as he rather grandly put it, of ‘the phenomenology of sectarian violence’.

But in order for such an endeavour to be carried out, conditions of absolute secrecy would have to prevail. People who agreed to tell their own stories would be provided with a contract stipulating that their testimony would not be publicly released without their consent until after they had died. It wasn’t just the interviews themselves that would remain under wraps: the very existence of the project was sub rosa. The participants would be describing crimes in which they had participated. If the authorities knew that such confessions existed, they might make an effort to seize them. This was part of what made Boston College so attractive as a repository for the oral history, Ed Moloney believed: on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, it stood at a great remove, both physically and legally, from the police in Britain and Ireland. The United States was neutral ground. Even if the authorities did somehow learn about the existence of the project, the protections of the First Amendment – and the institutional clout of Boston College – would render any effort to obtain the interviews a non-starter.

In the spring of 2001, Mackers started conducting interviews. He had many friends in republican circles. But even so, he needed to be careful. For a clandestine outfit, the IRA was prone to gossip. In truth, it wasn’t that nobody talked. Everybody talked. They just tended to do so only among themselves. The author of some notorious crime might be widely known in West Belfast, but breathe a word to an outsider about it – to a journalist, or to the Brits – and you were a tout. Interviewers from Boston College were outsiders, whatever their previous bona fides. If word got out that ex-gunmen were unburdening themselves to anyone in possession of a tape recorder, people were liable to get killed.

Mackers was also an outsider in another critical respect. Like many Provo foot soldiers, he was disillusioned by the Good Friday Agreement. Patrick Pearse once wrote that ‘the man who in the name of Ireland accepts as a “final settlement” anything less by one iota than separation from England is guilty of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime against the Irish nation … that it were better that he had not been born’. This kind of absolutism formed the marrow of republican mythology: the notion that any acceptance of incremental change was tantamount to betrayal. In Mackers’s view, Sinn Féin had settled for too little when it acceded to a scenario in which British dominion over Ireland would continue. Adams, Mackers believed, had sold out on the armed struggle.

The Sinn Féin leadership was well aware of this strain of opinion and had taken to discrediting critics like Mackers as ‘dissident’ republicans or ‘opponents of the peace process’. The IRA had always excelled at internal discipline and, as an emerging political party, Sinn Féin was heavily invested in preserving a particular narrative about the Troubles and the peace process. No Sinn Féin official ever seemed to be off message. In this manner, the party maintained what one scholar described as a ‘monopoly over the memory of republican armed struggle’.

Given Mackers’s position as a Sinn Féin critic, what this meant in practice was that neither Gerry Adams nor anyone aligned with him was likely to agree to sit down and record an oral history. In fact, Mackers was reluctant even to ask them, because if the leadership had any inkling of the project’s existence, they would almost certainly shut it down, putting the word out that anyone who participated would be punished.

So for the next several years, Mackers sought out republicans who, for one reason or another, were no longer close to Adams. As he did so, he was at pains to avoid detection. He used encrypted email to communicate with Moloney and tried to minimise any paper trail associated with the project. He would tuck a digital MiniDisc recorder into his backpack and venture out into Belfast and beyond, conducting interviews. He met his subjects multiple times, spending ten hours or more with each person, spread out over several sittings. When his interviews with a particular individual were complete, Mackers would have them transcribed by a trusted typist. Then he would post both the recordings and the transcripts to Boston College, where Bob O’Neill would store them in the most secure part of the Burns Library, the Treasure Room. O’Neill was an expert on ‘archival security’. He had published a book on the subject. ‘To be responsible custodians of the treasures that have been entrusted to their care, all librarians and archivists must look hard and carefully at security,’ he maintained.

As an added precaution, when Mackers sent the interview materials to Boston College, he would withhold the name of the individual who was actually supplying the oral history and substitute a letter of the alphabet. It was only in a separate set of documents – the actual contracts that each individual signed, in which they were assured that their testimony would be kept confidential – that the alphabetical code name for each participant was linked to an actual name.

One day, Mackers went out to see a former IRA man he had known for years, having first met him in prison in 1974. The two of them were close, so these interviews would have an easy-going, intimate quality. Like Mackers, the man had found himself deeply disillusioned with the peace process, and had cut ties with Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin. Now he had a story to tell. In the materials that Mackers would eventually send to Boston College, the man was identified only by his code name, ‘C’. His real name was Brendan Hughes.

21

On the Ledge

By the time Anthony McIntyre started interviewing him in 2001, Brendan Hughes was living in what was left of Divis Flats. In 1993, the block of flats from which Jean McConville had been abducted was demolished, along with all the other low-rise blocks, after an outcry from activists about the appalling conditions in the complex. During the 1980s, a so-called demolition committee had formed – a group of agitators whose mission was to make the place uninhabitable. Each time a flat was vacated, these self-appointed wrecking crews would swoop in with sledgehammers, before another family could move in, and tear out baths, sinks, toilets and electrical fittings, shattering windows and ripping good doors off their hinges. Eventually the government bulldozed the whole place, making way for a new development full of tidy redbrick houses fronted by tiny cement gardens. All that remained of Divis Flats was the twenty-storey tower. The British Army continued to occupy the roof and the top two floors. Below them, on the tenth floor, lived Brendan Hughes.

It was a fitting residence for Hughes, high above the streets of West Belfast, where he was considered a war hero. Even after the bombings had stopped and the Good Friday Agreement brought peace to Northern Ireland, the walls of Belfast still jostled with colourful murals depicting heroes of the armed struggle, and among them was the grinning, dark-eyed visage of a young Brendan Hughes. But in recent years, Hughes’s mood had turned increasingly bleak. ‘Welcome to my cell,’ he would tell visitors when they came to see him. There were times when he wouldn’t leave the flat for days, preferring to stay inside, drinking and smoking in solitude. He was in his fifties now, the famous dark hair gone grey and thinning. He was living on a disability benefit. He had worked various menial jobs on building sites, but, apart from his youthful stint in the merchant navy, he had never held a real civilian job, and he struggled to find steady employment. ‘You never really leave prison,’ he would say.

The flat was decorated with multiple photographs of Hughes’s hero, Che Guevara: pictures of Che laughing, smoking, drinking coffee. Hughes felt warmly towards these iconic images, yet they also functioned as a taunt. Che had had what you might argue was the good fortune of being martyred when he was still young. He was not yet forty when he was executed by the Bolivian army, in 1967, his skin still smooth, his beard untinged by grey. But Hughes was also stuck with the feeling that, whereas Che’s revolution in Cuba had succeeded, the revolution that Hughes and Gerry Adams had undertaken in Northern Ireland had failed.

To Hughes, Good Friday had symbolised the ultimate concession: formal acceptance by the republican movement that the British would remain in Ireland. Hughes had killed people. He had done so with the conviction that he was fighting for a united Ireland. But it now became clear to him that the leadership of the movement may have been prepared to settle for less than absolute victory and had elected – deliberately, in his view – not to inform soldiers like him. For Hughes, this strategic sleight of hand was deeply personal: he placed the blame directly on his dearest comrade, Gerry Adams. A framed photograph hung on one wall in his flat, alongside the tributes to Che. It was an old snapshot, taken at Long Kesh during the 1970s, of Hughes and Adams with their arms around each other. Adams wore a big splayed collar and shaggy locks that hung around his shoulders; Hughes wore a tight white T-shirt that said MELBOURNE IRISH CLUB. Both of them were grinning, against a backdrop of barbed wire. Hughes no longer had any love for Adams, but he kept the picture on the wall, to remind him of the way things had once been. For decades he had shared an intimate bond with Adams, but it was never a relationship of equals. Lately he had taken to joking, darkly, that, like the weapons of the IRA, he had been used and then discarded – ‘decommissioned’.

Hughes was increasingly anxious. The man who had engineered Bloody Friday now avoided crowded areas of central Belfast. He liked Divis Tower because he found comfort in its architecture of parameters: like a prison cell, it was an insular space that he could control. He found a measure of temporary relief in alcohol. His doctor told him to stop drinking, but he couldn’t.

Brendan Hughes in his flat in Divis Tower (Press Eye)

Mackers still remembered when he first met Hughes. At the time, Mackers was only sixteen. Hughes came into Long Kesh as a famous figure. He was a decade older than Mackers, but he took a liking to the younger man, and the two became close friends. In conducting his interviews, Mackers had found that, for former paramilitaries, the experience of speaking after decades of silence could be profoundly cathartic. It was sometimes hard to get his subjects to start talking. But once they started, it was often difficult to get them to stop. Years of war stories and terrifying experiences and hysterical jokes and private grievances came tumbling out. Mackers was a sympathetic listener, murmuring encouragement, rewarding humour with sincere and raucous laughter, and volunteering the occasional personal anecdote of his own. He would punctuate his questions by saying, ‘Could you fill out for the future students of Boston some detail on that for me?’

Just as Ed Moloney had predicted, the fact that Mackers knew so many of the players – had lived alongside them, carried out operations with them, gone to prison with them – endowed him with a particular credibility. Over a series of interviews, Hughes and Mackers would sit in the flat, smoking and talking. At one point Hughes joked that he wanted Boston College to pay for his cigarettes for the rest of his life. Then, when he got cancer, he would turn around and sue the university. They spoke about Hughes’s childhood, about how his father coped after his mother died, about his travels with the merchant navy, his awakening as a socialist, the hundreds of operations he had masterminded, and the long years in prison. They spoke about Bloody Friday. ‘There was no intention to kill people that day,’ Hughes insisted, adding, ‘I have a great deal of regret about that.’

But above all, Hughes talked about Gerry Adams. Mackers had overlapped with Adams at Long Kesh, and he understood the close bond that Adams and Hughes had enjoyed. But now Hughes was filled with anger towards his erstwhile compatriot. Hughes hated the Good Friday Agreement. He joked that GFA, the acronym by which the accord had become known, actually stood for Got Fuck All. ‘What the fuck was it for?’ he would ask. The lives he had taken, the young volunteers he had sent to die: his understanding of those sacrifices had always been that they would ultimately be justified by the emergence of a united Ireland. Instead, Adams had become a well-heeled statesman, a peacemaker; he had positioned himself for a prominent role in a post-conflict Northern Ireland. To his supporters, Adams was a historic figure, a visionary, a plausible candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. But it seemed to Hughes that Gerry Adams might have been duped by his own ambition – or, worse, manipulated by the British. In prison, when the Provos conducted educational workshops on strategy, one fundamental lesson was that a central pillar of Britain’s approach to counterinsurgency was ‘to mould leaderships whom they could deal with’. Hughes believed that in the aftermath of the peace agreement, Adams might have unwittingly allowed himself to be moulded in just this manner.