Would-be taoiseach Mary Lou McDonald's lauding of IRA killer should give us all pause for thought
Matt Malloy of the Chieftains plays the flute as the flag is placed on the coffin of Brendan 'Bik' McFarlane as it leaves his family home on Cliftonville Road, Belfast, on Tuesday. Picture: Niall Carson/PA Wire
Joanne McDowell was 29 when she was having a drink in the Bayardo Bar on Aberdeen Street in Belfast.
A man walked in, threw a bomb and ran away. The bomb exploded killing Ms McDowell. Linda Boyle was pulled from the wreckage alive but she died of her injuries within a week. She was 17. They were murdered because they were Protestants.
As the bomber did his thing, one of his associates sprayed the front of the bar with machine gun fire. He killed doorman William Gracey and his brother-in-law Samuel Gunning, who had just stopped for a chat. They were murdered because they were Protestants. A fifth victim of the bomb and gun attack was Hugh Harris, a 21-year-old member of the UVF.
One of the killers that night, August 13, 1975, was Brendan ‘Bic’ McFarlane. Last Friday, on McFarlane’s death at the age of 74, Mary Lou McDonald described him as “a great patriot who lived his life for the freedom and unity of Ireland”.
McFarlane had a family who are now grieving him. Ordinarily, it would be considerate to allow them space in their bereavement. However, McDonald chose with her nod to retro republican chic to politicise the man’s death.
To categorise Bik McFarlane with patriots, those who died, or lived, for the country, is an obnoxious distortion.
Like others, he was drawn in the late 1960s into defending his community in a sectarian state. But he went much further than any pretence his actions were defensive. He bought into the Provo narrative that their cause demanded people must die, lives must be sacrificed for a warped and unattainable idea.
That cause, which you won’t hear uttered in the retro republican chic narrative, was the violent imposition of a socialist 32-county entity. We know this because anytime they killed somebody they reiterated they would keep killing until that aim was achieved.
At no point did they have the support of the majority of nationalists in the north, and at times even supporters turned away in disgust from some of the Provos’ depravity. Beyond that community, the support was minimal. Yet they claimed to be acting in the name of the Irish people.
McFarlane in many ways summed up the Provo ethic. The Bayardo bar massacre rubbishes the contention the Provos were not sectarian. One credible theory at the time was that the attack was a response to the shocking sectarian murder of three members of the Miami Showband a fortnight earlier. Nobody would attempt to portray the loyalist perpetrators of that outrage as patriots.
In 1981, McFarlane was the leader of the IRA prisoners on the H Block during the hunger strikes. Such an experience was undoubtedly traumatic, irrespective of why he was incarcerated. But even here there are questions that don’t fit comfortably into retro republican chic.
The spokesperson for the prisoners at the time was another IRA man, Richard O’Rawe. Later, he claimed, with a body of supporting evidence, that a deal was on the table after four of the hunger strikers died. This, he says, was rejected by the leadership outside on the basis there was political capital to be gained by continuing. Six other prisoners went on to die.
When O’Rawe revealed this 24 years later, McFarlane disputed it. McFarlane then set out to discredit O’Rawe, who is not a fantasist, had no reason to lie, and knew he would face being ostracised by his former comrades.
The issue remains disputed but if O’Rawe is to be believed, McFarlane followed the line from the leadership, and denied the true fate of his fellow inmates, who are now lauded as martyrs by the very leadership that may well have sacrificed them. And for what did they die? That which McDonald refers to as “freedom” and “unity”?
Two years after the hunger strikes, McFarlane, along with others, escaped from the Maze. A few months later, Don Tidey was kidnapped by the Provisional IRA in Dublin in an operation that was straight out of the Sicilian mafia playbook.
The kidnappers were traced to Derrada woods, outside Ballinamore in Co Leitrim. There is copious evidence McFarlane was at Derrada woods. As the gardaí and Irish Defence Forces closed in, one of the kidnappers shot dead Private Patrick Kelly and Garda recruit Gary Sheehan.
Private Kelly was a member of Óglaigh Na hÉireann, the Irish defence forces, the term McFarlane and his fellow cult followers used for their organisation, as if they were the real inheritors of 1916 and all that flowed from it.
McDonald, and those of her persuasion, cry foul when Sinn Féin’s past as a prop for the Provos is invoked. Yet when it suits, the retro republican chic narrative is wheeled out.
Recently deceased killers are lauded as so-called patriots, while the Provos’ long dead victims are consigned to the status of weather-beaten headstones, collateral damage in the campaign for some warped utopia, or whatever they call it now.
That a would-be Taoiseach appears to have no compunction in demeaning McFarlane’s victims by describing him in the most laudable terms available to a nation should give pause for thought.
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