Fifty Dead Men Walking Read online

  The deadly Saracens, which were invulnerable to the type of attacks the rioters mounted against their formidable armour, did suffer from one weak point; if the rioters could find a way of lifting the driving wheels off the ground, they could be slowed to a halt and become easy targets for republican petrol bombers.

  Stopping the Saracens became one of our favourite sports. The stronger boys would steal aluminium beer kegs from the pubs and wait for the Saracens to come through the estate, usually travelling at speeds in excess of 50 miles an hour. The young men would wait on either side of the road, holding the kegs above their heads, ready to hurl them into the path of the oncoming vehicles. When the Saracens were a few yards away, they would all hurl the kegs at the same time.

  The kegs would usually bounce off harmlessly, but sometimes the Saracens would be brought to a halt, their driving wheels spinning helplessly in the air. Then, like ants, we would swarm all over them, cheering and shouting, some of us dancing on top of the vehicle, others trying to torch the tyres before reinforcements came to the soldiers’ aid. There was no way of getting inside the vehicle as the doors were locked securely from the inside. Stopping a Saracen would be one of the most exhilarating sights for us young lads and would be the talk of the school playground for days.

  We would, however, only have a few minutes to rejoice before having to scramble from the vehicle and run for our lives when we saw the reinforcements arriving, called up by the Saracen’s radio operator. Sometimes the vehicle would turn turtle, hurling the occupants around inside and causing us to cheer even louder at what we saw as a major victory over the hated enemy. As I reached double figures and became more adventurous and mischievous, attracting trouble and taking risks would occasionally bring me face to face with various authorities – the Army, the RUC, the IRA and, more importantly, my mother.

  Only once did I find myself in trouble with the British Army and that was through no fault of mine. With half a dozen of my friends from on the estate, including my best mates, Sean O’Halloran, Stevie McCann, Micky McMullan and Dee Daley, we would sometimes take long walks across Black Mountain, spending most of the day away from home.

  Our house was situated on the edge of the Ballymurphy estate, on one side the drab, grey terraced houses that are forever Belfast; on the other stands the magnificent Black Mountain, a hundred shades of green, touched by the soft rains which fall across the country throughout most of the year, but which through the winter months is lashed by the gales and storms that pelt across the land from the Atlantic.

  During one walk we came across an army firing range about seven miles from home, and we began stuffing as many spent rounds as possible into our pockets. At school, the spent bullets had become a symbol of bravery for we would polish them with Brasso, drill a hole through the base of the round and then thread them on to a bootlace, wearing them as a pendant round our necks.

  On this occasion, however, unbeknown to us, we had also picked up some live rounds which had been accidentally left behind on the shooting range.

  As we returned home, exhausted, we saw some armed soldiers patrolling our estate and we began throwing the rounds at them, teasing them. Suddenly, three soldiers came rushing over to us, grabbing us as one of them shouted into his radio, ‘Get the RUC, fast; there’s kids here with live rounds.’

  We were made to empty our pockets and stand still. Within ten minutes, five or six RUC Land Rovers came racing towards us and the police jumped out of the vehicles. I was frightened, not knowing what we had done wrong, wondering what my mother would say if she found me in trouble.

  ‘We were only throwing bullets at the soldiers for fun.’ We protested, ‘we didn’t mean any trouble.’

  ‘Where did you find these?’ one of the senior police officers asked, picking up one of the rounds.

  ‘On the firing range,’ we answered in chorus.

  ‘On the firing range?’ he asked incredulously. ‘That’s miles away.’

  ‘We know,’ one of us replied, ‘we’ve just walked there and back.’

  Then the officer picked up two rounds, showed them to us and explained that they were different; one bullet had been fired, but the other was live and very, very dangerous. We looked blank, not realising the difference, unsure how one could be dangerous and the other of no use whatsoever.

  The officers told us to empty our pockets and place everything on the ground. Then they picked up the live rounds and kept asking us, ‘Have you any more of these at home? Are you sure?’

  We all shook our heads, protesting our innocence. We told the officer that we had never been to the firing range before and the only bullets we had at home were ones we had found on the streets from time to time, which some children had made into pendants to wear round their necks.

  As we waited patiently, fearing our mothers would give us hell, other army units arrived and began scouring drains and searching gardens to check if any other live bullets were lying around. Fortunately for us they found none, and 30 minutes later we were allowed to go home. I ran home as fast as possible, fearful that my mother might catch me and give me a hiding for stealing the bullets. She never knew of that incident until I confessed many years later and, by then, she could enjoy the joke.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AS EACH YEAR PASSED, I began to realise that the troubles were no longer fun but deadly serious. I began taking an interest in the early evening news bulletins, even though I was little more than ten years old. One of the effects of the troubles would be to make young people like me grow up before our time.

  I would watch television pictures of the devastation caused by explosives and bombings which wrecked the centre of Belfast and other towns and villages; I would see the remains of dead bodies, barely covered by blankets, as soldiers and police officers scoured the area fearing booby-trap devices; and I would see fires raging as hijacked cars, buses and lorries were torched.

  On other occasions, I would see Catholics and Protestants at loggerheads, building burning barricades, throwing stones, bricks and petrol bombs at each other, and I would notice the ferocity of their anger and the hatred in their eyes. Some of these TV pictures would capture my imagination and I would become mesmerised, desperate to understand what was happening and why.

  But much of what I saw on television passed way over my head. I understood the action and the violence which gripped my attention but had no idea whatsoever of the political arguments which bored me. My innocence, however, would not last long. I was an ambitious young lad and I wanted to earn better money than I ever could slaving away on Paddy Brady’s milk round all year. In 1981, however, at the age of 11, Fate intervened and I began earning really good money. My sister’s husband, Joseph Lindsay, a happy-go-lucky, good-natured young man who drifted into petty crime because he couldn’t find a regular job, asked me if I wanted to go into business with him, legitimate business. Twenty-one-year-old ‘Jo-Jo’, as we called him, and my sister, Elizabeth, who was 17, had been dating for a year.

  Jo-Jo would go to a Belfast wholesale store and buy £200 worth of household goods which I would sell door to door. We would make a quick, small profit and divide the proceeds. I generally earned between £30 and £40 a time and we would repeat the operation perhaps twice a week. I felt like a millionaire.

  But Jo-Jo wanted to earn more so he began stealing pairs of jeans from shops all over Belfast and selling them door to door. He was earning a small fortune, but his luck would not continue. In Belfast at around this time, the local IRA commanders wanted to show the entire Catholic population that they not only organised the lives of the people and protected them from loyalist mobs, but also took over the role of local policing from the RUC. They heard about Jo-Jo’s maverick escapades and decided to make an example of him.

  One night, as he walked along the Falls Road, an IRA punishment gang wearing balaclavas waylaid him, took him into a back street and kneecapped him, shooting him with a single bullet from a handgun. It smashed his kneecap, and left hi writh
ing in pain. After a couple of months, Jo-Jo recovered the use of his leg and his good nature but he would never walk again without a slight limp.

  Jo-Jo’s kneecapping was allegedly carried out as an example to others thinking of becoming involved in petty crime, but such a cowardly attack not only frightened me but angered me as well. I would go and visit Jo-Jo in the Royal Hospital while he was recovering and would see him in great pain. I would never forget what the IRA did to him, nor would I forgive.

  I respected Jo-Jo because he would talk to me like a grown-up and explain that he stole things from shops to make some money for Elizabeth and the kids. ‘If I could find a job,’ he would say, ‘I would work as hard as the next man. But if I can’t get a job I’ll steal things, because your sister and the boys are important.’

  I loved visiting Jo-Jo and Elizabeth at their home and felt happy for them and their two young sons, Joseph and Barry, when they moved to a brand new council house in the Turf Lodge district of Belfast in the spring of 1983. Within weeks, Elizabeth announced that she was pregnant once more but, soon after, their happiness would be brutally shattered.

  Out drinking one night in August 1983, Jo-Jo was persuaded by some mates to join them in a break-in somewhere in Belfast’s city centre. Jo-Jo had never been involved in such serious criminal activity before, but, with a skinful of beer, he went along with their plan. As they walked across a roof together he lost his footing, fell 40 feet to the ground and died from his injuries. He was 23.

  The violence of Belfast would touch my life again 15 months later. My first employer, the milkman Paddy Brady, was shot dead in cold blood by an assassination squad of the loyalist Ulster Freedom Fighters as he parked his car outside Kennedy’s Dairies early one morning. What I had not known, however, was that Paddy had been a member of Sinn Fein for many years, carrying out menial tasks for the organisation.

  Like every young Catholic boy, I had edged towards total support of the IRA during the hunger-strikes of the late 1970s and 1980s when republican prisoners demanded the status of prisoners of war rather than ordinary criminals, as had been the case before 1976. In those days, republican prisoners had been permitted to wear their own uniforms. The policy had been changed, much to the anger and annoyance of genuine Republicans and two years later, IRA prisoners began their ‘dirty protest’, refusing to wear regulation clothing, wrapping themselves in blankets instead.

  Throughout their campaign for the return of political status and privileges, hundreds of Republicans chose to stay in their cells, covering the walls with their own excreta. The willingness of prisoners to subject themselves to these conditions 24 hours a day caught the attention of the world’s media and triggered an emotional upsurge throughout the Catholic community.

  In 1981, a new hunger-strike began, led by Bobby Sands, who had become the leader of the prisoners in the ‘H’-block. Every few days, more prisoners joined him, so that the authorities would be faced by a stream of prisoners nearing death, one after another.

  In March 1981, the Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone died and Bobby Sands was entered as a candidate. Sands won a narrow victory after an 87 per cent poll in what was seen as a massive boost for the hunger-strike campaign.

  I was awoken in the early hours of 5 May, 1981, by the most fearful noise – the banging of dustbin lids and the constant blasting of car horns. I ran down stairs and the entire street was crowded with people; virtually every resident, including most of the children, were shouting and banging anything that would make a noise.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked my mum.

  ‘Bobby Sands has died,’ she shouted back above the din.

  Anger, fury and frustration gripped the whole estate that night. I watched in awe, desperate to help, as people began ripping up paving stones with their bare hands to build barricades; others collected bottles from around the estate, while teenagers went from car to car siphoning fuel to make the petrol bombs. To cheers from the residents, young men would return in triumph to our streets driving diggers and JCBs stolen from around Belfast, and they knocked down lampposts and dug up roads in a desperate effort to secure the barricades against the expected attack from the Army and the police.

  The entire street would erupt in cheers and clapping and the residents would resume banging their dustbin lids whenever a Belfast bus was driven on to the estate to form part of a barricade before being torched, all in a bid to keep the Army away from the Catholic Ballymurphy estate.

  During the following few nights in that early May of 1981, riots and bombings would spread across the north with major disturbances in Londonderry and Belfast and riots in Dublin. I felt excited by all the violence and action I had witnessed first-hand and on the television news, and I wanted to be a part of it.

  A few nights later, I witnessed an IRA Active Service Unit in action and felt thrilled by their courage and daring.

  At about 5.00pm all the boys and a few girls from the estate were in the streets watching what was going on, waiting with excitement and anticipation for dusk to fall and the rioting and petrol bombing to begin. To us, at that age, it all seemed like a game, but I was beginning to realise that there was also something serious happening.

  We were hiding behind barricades of burned-out buses, dodging the rubber bullets that were being fired towards us by ‘peelers’ (police officers) sheltering behind their RUC Land Rovers. The vehicles were parked side-on as the officers would use them as barricades to protect themselves from the bombs and stones we were throwing. Suddenly, I noticed everyone moving back.

  ‘Come back, Marty,’ someone yelled at me and I looked to see that I was standing almost alone by the barricade. I obeyed and withdrew and, within a few minutes, we heard the rattle of machine-gun fire coming from our side. We realised that the IRA was retaliating, firing machine-gun bullets at the Land Rovers in a bid to force the RUC to withdraw. We screamed with delight, cheering like any football crowd whose side had just scored a goal.

  I was too young to understand fully, but the anger throughout the community was almost tangible. With the death of Bobby Sands, the Irish people’s respect for martyrdom had been resurrected, so passionate and bitter had people become about the hunger-strikers. Bobby Sands, however, would not be the only man to die. In the following four months, nine more hunger-strikers would die and tens of thousands of people would attend their funerals. Finally, in October 1981 the British Government relented, permitting prisoners to wear their own clothes. Ten Republicans had died in jail, but in the streets a total of 61 people had been killed in retaliation, including 30 members of the security forces.

  I watched the funerals on TV, as well as the riots that flared across the north after every single hunger-striker died. I felt for all of them, as did all the young boys I knew. I had become confused, knowing I totally supported the men who died in prison for their beliefs, but realising that other Catholics who supported the hunger-strikers could also become brutal and violent, kneecapping innocent Catholics like Jo-Jo, for no reason at all. At the age of 11, I had left primary school and moved to St Thomas’s Secondary School on the Whiterock Road, a 15-minute walk from home. I never liked school and never wanted to study, but I would never play truant like most of my friends, because I was always fearful of what my mother would do if she ever found out that I had skipped lessons.

  But that fear didn’t stop me spending most of the lessons fooling around, doing as little work as possible and frequently being cheeky to teachers. Sometimes, however, I overstepped the mark. Angry at being given a public ticking-off for messing around in class, I decided to seek revenge, so during one lunch break I nipped back into the classroom and set light to the curtains. As the flames leapt up the curtains I fled from the scene, realising that I had gone too far this time. There was an inquest and the headmaster was determined to discover the culprit, but I said nothing, feigning innocence. I was never caught, and I never repeated the offence.

  One of the few thrills at St Thomas
’s during the 1980s was watching the teachers who had stolen cars from all over the city, practise their driving skills on the school football pitch. We would run out of lessons to watch them racing around the pitch, skidding and sliding the vehicles, ramming the goal posts, racing each other before fleeing the area as soon as the RUC arrived. But it was always good fun. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to drive stolen cars. I knew for certain that I would not wait until the statutory age of 17 and vowed to have a go when I was tall enough to sit in the driving seat and reach the pedals.

  In fact I was 13 when I first drove a car, a maroon Vauxhall Cavalier that a friend of mine had stolen. I begged him to let me have a drive. I had a rough idea what to do, knowing I had to push the clutch down before changing gear. The accelerator and the brake were straightforward, but I still managed to crash the Cavalier after driving around a field for only five minutes.

  I had been trying to be smart. I had watched, mesmerised, as other, older teenagers with some experience had driven the cars fast, making hand-brake turns, swinging the cars 180 degrees by snatching at the hand-brake while suddenly turning the wheel. I drove to the edge of the field and accelerated hard, pulled on the hand-brake and immediately lost control, the car hitting a rut in the field and flipping over a number of times before coming to rest upside-down against some railings. I clambered out, my head fuzzy, and saw the car wheels still spinning madly.

  The lads who had let me drive had all run away, afraid that I had seriously injured myself or even died in the crash, and they feared that they would be in trouble for permitting a youngster to drive the stolen vehicle.

  Sometime later, when I asked the lad who had let me drive the car why he had run off, he replied, ‘I wasn’t frightened of the RUC, Marty, it was your mum that terrified me!’

  That night I had learned a lesson. I had terrified myself and resolved never to steal a car. I never did.