Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland by Moloney Ed

Author:Moloney, Ed [Moloney, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780571253203
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

The very real threat of violence between Republican and Loyalists prisoners eventually persuaded the prison authorities to separate them but before that happened, Hughes struck up an extraordinary relationship with one Loyalist prisoner. Robert ‘Basher’ Bates was a leading member of one of the most bloodthirsty and violent gangs spawned by the Troubles. Known as ‘the Shankill Butchers’, the UVF gang terrorised Catholic Belfast in the mid-1970s. Their speciality was to snatch victims from the streets in Catholic districts, take them to garages and the back rooms of bars in Loyalist areas and then torture them for hours, cutting and mutilating them with knives. Others they beat to death in back alleys. Hughes found himself in the same H-block as Bates and discovered they had domestic problems in common. They became so close that Bates actually saved Hughes’s life, stopping a UVF plot to kill him.

Basher Bates … was not the leader of the Shankill Butchers, but he was certainly one of them. The Shankill Butchers cut people up, cut women’s breasts off, cut men’s testicles off and shoved them in their mouths. After I came off the blanket, they put us into a wing with people like that. I wanted to understand what made people [kill like] that because I have no recollection of any Republican ever engaging in that sort of bestiality or brutality … We were in a wing together and I was a well-known IRA man. Basher Bates was going through a bad period with his wife, as a lot of prisoners do, you know, jealousy or loneliness or whatever. I happened to bump into him in the wing one day and he mentioned something to me about his wife and at that period I had gone through the same; my wife left me when I was in prison so I had an idea what he was going through. And you have to remember this as well: I mean, I was never sectarian, I was never a bigot. All my life I was brought up and lived with Protestants and ran about with Protestants; I had very few Catholic friends. So I was never a bigot. He mentioned this to me and I said, ‘Right, come on, talk about it.’ And we had periods at that stage where you could associate freely. We had a conflict going on between Republicans and Loyalists – we wanted segregation but at one time I actually suggested that we shouldn’t push for segregation, if we were the organisation that we claimed to be, nonsectarian and trying to bring about a united Ireland that involved everybody. I saw a certain contradiction there. If that’s what we stand for, if we’re fighting for a united Ireland, Gaelic and free and for Protestant and dissenter, why are we pushing for segregation? This was the frame of mind I was in when I talked to Basher Bates … [There was] total opposition [from fellow IRA prisoners] to it. I can’t remember any person in favour.

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