By Jack Holland
On April 15 1972, my girlfriend and I got into York Street railway station at about 11 p.m. after having spent the day in Whitehead, a pretty little seaside town a few miles away on the shores of Belfast Lough.
There were no buses, so we walked along York Street, all the way to the bottom of the Falls Road. The road was blacked out, deserted. No buses. No black taxis. No people. We continued walking up the road to my parents’ house in Andersonstown. Maybe it was because we were in the middle of a heated argument that we did not pay much attention to our surroundings. After all, since about 1971, the city had been in a state of uproar almost on a daily basis. It was not so unusual to find no buses on the road, the lights out, and nobody about.
It was only when we walked in the door did we realize that something had happened. My mother was waiting.
"Thank God you’re back safe," she said. "Joe McCann’s been shot and the whole road is up in arms."
A soldier had been shot dead near the Divis Flats, two others were killed in Derry, and dozens were injured in revenge for the killing of McCann. The Official IRA had been engaged in a series of gun battles with the army that had tied down hundreds of troops for hours.
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Though we lived for a while in the same housing estate, I never actually met Joe McCann but knew him from the legend that had grown up around him. My mother, who came from the Markets area of the city, where McCann had been based, had passed on the tales of how in August 1971 he had taken over Inglis’ Bakery on Eliza Street during the internment riots. With a handful of volunteers McCann had held 600 soldiers at bay.
"He was a great shot," she had told me once. "And he was a lovely lookin’ fella," she’d add.
Though he was a "Sticky" (as Official IRA members were nicknamed), McCann was a popular and respected figure with the Provisionals, as was witnessed three days later at his funeral in Milltown Cemetery. Many of their leading members showed up to pay their last respects. It was the largest republican funeral that Northern Ireland had seen, and would remain so until the deaths of the hunger strikers nine years later.
McCann’s life marked a particular epoch of the Troubles. His death may well have influenced their future course — more than that of any of his contemporaries in the republican movement who were also killed "in action."
McCann was 25 when he was gunned down in the street. He had spent the last seven years in the republican movement. He joined up about the same time as Gerry Adams, and the two were good friends. Adams sprinkles references to McCann throughout his autobiography, "Before The Dawn" (William Morrow 1996). When they met, in 1965 or thereabouts, McCann was an apprentice bricklayer. He had been arrested along with four others in possession of bayonets. The group became known as the Five Silent Men because, according to Adams, they resolutely refused to talk, not even to their priest during confession about what it was they had intended to do with the bayonets.
In the mid-1960s, the IRA was going through a profound change. The Dublin leadership of Cathal Goulding wanted to make it more relevant to the social and economic issues of the day. McCann was part of that change and like Adams was attracted to the more revolutionary aspects of the Goulding program. McCann was among a "core of Sinn Fein activists," wrote Adams, who set up "an Unemployment Action Group in West Belfast, and a Housing Action Committee. . . . Our activism was feeding into a general sense of political movement below the surface; we were few in number, but we were to some extent in tune with the needs and demands of the time."
Later as the situation in Northern Ireland deteriorated, McCann and Adams took part in more traditional republican activities, such as going to training camps.
In 1969 came the split and the formation of the Official and Provisional wings of the IRA and Sinn Fein. McCann stayed with the leadership and soon became a leading member of the Official IRA. Though Adams went into the Provisionals, the two remained friends, even through the first feud, when several members of both groups were shot and one — Charlie Hughes — was killed.
By 1971, McCann was officer commanding the Official IRA’s third Battalion in Belfast, which covered the Market’s area. The legend had begun. In a gun battle in Cromac Square on May 21 that year McCann and his unit ambushed and killed a British soldier, the first to die at the hands of the Officials.
During internment, McCann’s actions gave the Official IRA a hero-figure. The picture of McCann silhouetted against the burning bakery, a Starry Plough flag in one hand and a rifle in the other, became a famous poster, representing perhaps the peak of the modern IRA’s revolutionary romantic appeal.
McCann lived another eight months, during which we know he took part in the attempted assassination of John Taylor, the minister of home affairs at Stormont. By then McCann was one of the most wanted men in Northern Ireland. In spite of this, and against orders from the Official IRA leadership, he went back to the Markets area on the night of April 14, and disdaining disguise as always was seen in a local pub having a pint. The next morning he was spotted by a patrol of paras and gunned down as he ran from door to door down Joy Street trying to find an escape route.
His death in many ways was a turning point for the Official IRA. Though Goulding came north and gave a fiery, revolutionary speech at McCann’s graveside, within weeks he had called a unilateral cease-fire. Some have speculated that had McCann survived the leadership would not have been able to halt the Official IRA campaign so easily. What he would have become, who knows? It is hard to imagine him being anything other than what he was when shot. He was one of those whose legend depends on dying young.