A tribute to Michael Gaughan

Michael Gaughan died on hunger strike in Parkhurst Prison in London, fifty years ago this week. On the day he died, he prepared a statement which read: “My loyalty and confidence is to the IRA and let those of you who are left carry on the work and finish the fight.” A tribute by his comrade Danny ‘Jack’ McElduff, who died in September last year. (for bobbysandstrust.com).

I’d put practically nine years into becoming a priest when the Dean of Discipline told me I’d have to get a dispensation because I’d two brothers in prison. I’d a brother Joe who was interned in the Curragh and another James was interned in Crumlin Road. That was in the 1950s.

‘But they are not criminals and internment is an unjust law’, I said to him. ‘Well it’s a very grey area,’ said the Dean, ‘and we’re safer getting a dispensation for you.’

So I left the seminary. That was a long period of time lost to me. I was twenty-three then and I went to work in England on the buildings in Colchester in East Anglia, about seventy miles from London.

Then when the Civil Rights Movement started up in the North in 1969 I returned home to see what was happening. Sometime after that I was approached by Seán Mac Stíofáin, who was IRA Chief of Staff in 1970, to go back to England. I went back. I was thirty-one then. Brendan Magill had been the OC of England but then he and Jim Monaghan got arrested and Mac Stiofáin asked me to take over as OC. I didn’t really want to do it but I agreed and I recruited a few new Volunteers.

And that’s where Michael Gaughan came in.

He came from Manchester to see me about getting involved. Michael was a Mayo man and if you know anything about Mayo people you’ll know they are very loyal and staunch when it comes to their republicanism. Michael was a cheerful, laughing man but a very serious-minded republican who wanted to go the full hog at things. The first thing that was needed in order to operate in England was money. We did a job in Manchester to get money and I then gave them another one to do—a payroll—and it wasn’t a success so rather than accept defeat the boys decided to do a bank job and of course the preparation wasn’t as thorough as it would normally be.

I was back in Colchester at that time and they brought the money to me and went to go back to London but they were scooped up on the train and I was lifted the next morning. My house was surrounded by Special Branch.

So four of us, including Michael and I, landed in Brixton. That was in 1971. Then we went on trial. I got three years for ‘receiving stolen money’ and Michael and one of the other two got seven years for robbery and the other got a year for arms offence.

We were sentenced the day before Christmas Eve and we were being taken by van through London for the court hearing. We could see all the people going about with their Christmas shopping and Michael, who had only a middling voice, bursts into the song, Twenty One Years. For the uninitiated or those too young to remember, the song described the most likely prospects for a republican Volunteer upon arrest—twenty years-to-life in jail!

Michael was very calm about the arrest and sentence. He always knew imprisonment was part of the risk. I’ll never forget the first night we landed in Brixton. In the block opposite the one we were in there was a boy with the best Mayo accent I ever heard and he kept shouting all night. I was tired and sick and wanted to sleep so I got up to the window and shouted over to him to shut up. He heard the northern accent, my country accent, and you know how news gets round a jail very quick. He shouts, ‘I knew the IRA were in the prison tonight! It’ll be a long time before you clean your arse with grass again!’

We all laughed. After Brixton we were moved to Wormwood Scrubs and then to Albany.

I remember there were Jamaican prisoners who were getting assaulted by some of the other prisoners and Michael said we’d have to side with the Jamaicans no matter what happened to us. So I went to one of the Kray brothers [notorious East End gangsters] who happened to hold the IRA in esteem and told him the story. Kray listened and finally responded, and ordered, ‘All that “cutting” of the Jamaicans will have to stop.’ That was lucky for us because there were so few of us and Kray had a lot of men with him.

Michael refused to sew overalls for the British Ministry for Defence and was given solitary. Michael was still in solitary when I was released some weeks later. He was eventually transferred to Parkhurst which was a short distance away but a much tougher regime.

Michael was the sort of person who would see a thing through to the bitter end, even if the force feeding hadn’t killed him he’d have stayed on the fast to the end. Even while in jail he always wanted to get the news from home and I remember him asking for a copy of the Western People, he wanted to get the football results.

As a Volunteer Michael was a one-off even though he’d no background in the Republican Movement. His father had been in the British Air Force but Michael just had it in him—an Irish thing—the desire to free Ireland. Michael would have been brilliant operating in rural Ireland. As republicans we’ve been brought up with big names, leadership figures, but there’s a saying, ‘Watch the little man on the side of a hill with a gun in his hand—that’s the revolutionary.’ Michael wasn’t highly educated but he was very clever. He was very political—a revolutionary.

When I was being released after the three-year sentence, Michael told me there’d better be a place for him in the IRA when he’d get out. I was well gone by the time Michael was on hunger strike. The emphasis was on the Price sisters at the time because they had been on hunger strike much longer so there was great concern about them and when Michael died so quickly from the force-feeding it was a huge shock. I was shocked because even though I knew he was on hunger strike we never thought of him dying so early on. There was no time to get my head around it. When I heard it on the news I nearly dropped.

I went to Dublin for the funeral, which was routed to go through Roscommon so we drove ahead of the cortege and onto Mayo. It was very touching, very moving. Once you got out into the country—especially from Roscommon on—there were people waiting in the towns and nearly every boreen you passed there were people waiting at the end of it. It was amazing.

Michael and his likes are a terrible loss to this country. You’re not going to get people as selfless as Michael Gaughan, Frank Stagg and the ten H-Block hungers strikers.

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