Knew him vaguely
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Happened to be in bushmills today. The amount of southern reg cars, yanks, tour buses and general foreigners/enemies must have the hardliners driven to distraction, because you wouldn’t see as much bunting on the shankhill. A strange wee mindset.
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I assume that’s a pisstake
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Dearly hope so Massey
But you’d never know
( mount Massey the 
flower of Macroom)
Was an old one when I was growing up
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Poor Sam will be in for an awful telling off the next time he encounters Claire Byrne. A lovely, harmless example though of why Unionism is in the terrible state it is
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Philly McMahon: My Da was shot at 16, interned by 19 and escaped through rusted bars of a bathroom to avoid trial
Irish Independent columnist Philly McMahontalks about his father Philip and his story that led him from west Belfast’s Lenadoon estate to Ballymun, where he had a son who would play for Dublin
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September 16 2023 2:30 AM
Before I wore a Dublin jersey, I played soccer with Belvedere FC. At weekends, myself and my Da got the bus from Ballymun to Fairview Park for matches.
We had a deal, the terms and conditions of which were straight-forward. To make it a return trip, I had to play well. If I didn’t, we’d walk the five or so miles home. Tough love.
It never bothered me, though. If anything, I lapped it up.
Years later, I developed a routine after championship games with Dublin. I’d eat with the lads afterwards and then go home to Ballymun to rewatch the match with my family before heading back out.
It was only after he died of cancer in 2018 that it struck me: the part of the ritual I actually enjoyed was having my own performance analysed, criticised – crucified, mostly – by my Da.
Coarse words. Nothing spared.
I often wondered did he feel some need to drive me so hard because, on a subconscious level, it felt like he’d been given a second shot at fatherhood? Some chance to make amends.
John, my older brother and only sibling, died from heroin addiction in 2012.
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He was on a bad road from an early age and only those who have lived the hell of watching someone they love deteriorate and disappear into addiction will know the feelings of helplessness and desperation that causes.
It affected my Da deeply. And it must have influenced the way our relationship developed.
The other distinctive thing about him was the way he spoke.
He was so at home in Ballymun it never felt as though he was any different from anyone else’s Da.
But there weren’t many people in that part of town at that time with deep, drawly Belfast accents.
Forty plus years he lived in Dublin – some might say deepest, darkest Dublin – and he never picked up so much as a twang from the natives.
Lenadoon, where he grew up, is one of the outermost housing estates in west Belfast, high up on the side of the Black Mountain, not far from Andersonstown.
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Philly McMahon in a t-shirt celebrating his father Philip after the 2018 All-Ireland success
The housing was built on a green-field site on the western edges of Belfast; newer, bigger homes for people moved out of the inner city’s cramped terrace housing.
Effectively, the same dynamic that led to the development of Ballymun on the outskirts of Dublin and many of the same circumstances that led to social problems in the area.
When you drive people from cities into new, densely populated areas with no facilities or infrastructure, you reap what you sow.
If Lenadoon wasn’t the epicentre of the Troubles, it wasn’t far from it.
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The IRA ceasefire of 1972 ended there when the British army blocked Republicans from moving Catholics into the lower end of the estate. The army established billets in houses and apartments around the area.
Edgy sort of place to grow up, then.
One night, the sound of gunfire ripped through the air, and Philip McMahon went down, clutching his stomach.
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Apparently, this amused his mates no end. They’d assumed he’d been sprayed with rubber bullets by the British Army soldiers who patrolled the area and tended not to be particularly judicious about opening fire.
Except that when he pulled his hand away from his midriff, some of his insides came spilling out.
Luckily, those friends dragged him off into the darkness of the night and to safety before the Saracen came past. Only for that, my Dad was convinced they would have left him to die by the side of the road.
He was 16.
“The Plaintiff says that the robbery of which he was found guilty was carried out ‘by order of the Irish Republican Army…’ of which he was then a member.
“He says that, ‘It (the robbery) was carried out for the purpose of raising funds for a campaign which was then being carried on for the liberation of Northern Ireland from British rule’.
“He says that, having come to this jurisdiction, ‘I in due course severed my links with the Irish Republican Army but continue and intend to continue attempting to secure the reunification of the national territory by constitutional means’.”
Philip James McMahon v Governor of Mountjoy Prison and David Leary, 1983
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Philip McMahon with his father
‘Uncle Frank’ was what I’d call my Da on our visits to Belfast. We’d always go on the train.
I loved those trips. And to this day, I love going anywhere on a train because of them. Happy, vivid memories.
He was effectively on the run from 1975, and though the Irish court system denied an extradition request and the Good Friday Agreement took a lot of heat off former IRA members, there was always some risk in him going back across the border.
So ‘Uncle Frank’ it was.
It was amazing to see how people reacted to him in Belfast. How they treated him.
He’d told me about his own experiences growing up but never glorified any of it. He never bigged himself up. He wasn’t telling war stories and he didn’t claim heroism.
But then we’d walk into a Republican pub somewhere in Belfast and he’d get the same sort of reception as Pope John Paul II that time in the Phoenix Park or Bernard Brogan in Copper Face Jacks.
From every corner of the pub, people would be over to shake his hand. To buy him a drink. Even to throw him a few bob.
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The centre of attention. Like a hero returning from some knightly quest.
They’re a tight community. It must be a consequence of being abandoned by the Irish government and persecuted by the British ones. They stick to their own, and they’re hugely supportive of those on the run.
How he ended up on the run is the interesting part of this story.
In the summer of ’71, along with confirmed IRA members, suspected IRA members, and some people who had nothing at all to do with the IRA, he was arrested as part of British Army’s ‘Operation Demetrius’ programme, widely known as Internment.
Shortly after his release, he was convicted of an armed robbery that was ordered by the IRA to raise funds for their campaign and sentenced to eight years.
My Da was 19 when he was sent to the cages of Long Kesh.
Give or take, there were 80 Republican prisoners in Cage 11. Philip McMahon was one. Bobby Sands was another.
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On the night of 16 October 1974, in protest over conditions, the prisoners set fire to a large part of the camp, destroying sentry towers and some of the huts.
That night became known as ‘The Burning of Long Kesh’.
Ronan Bennett, the creator of the TV series Top Boy, wrote an eyewitness account for the Irish Times in 2019.
“Gas grenades explode like a firework 30 feet up, subdividing into pellets which spread out prettily and make a slow, arcing descent.
“Plumes and trails of gas smoke. In the back of my throat there is a catch, at the top my lungs, pain. Bang. The troops on the ground fire a volley of rubber bullets, and we duck and dance a comic dance to avoid these fearsome, blinding things.
“More gas. Another grenade from the helicopter crew. And now there is pandemonium. My eyes are streaming, I cannot see who is next to me, I don’t know in what direction I am facing.”
Official British intelligence documents, released under the Freedom of Information Act, revealed that CR gas, a highly toxic chemical agent, was used by British soldiers that night.
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It was fired from aerosols, water cannons, and dropped from the air.
With good reason, CR gas was outlawed by international agreement.
The effects are similar to the more common CS gas, except that it also induces intense pain to exposed skin. The affected areas remain sensitive for days and become painful again after contact with water.
With hospitality like that, it won’t come as much of a surprise that escape attempts were frequent.
Just a month later, prisoners hatched a plan to tunnel out of the cage late at night to the fields on the camp’s farm close to the perimeter fence, then crawl through barbed wire and scale the outer fences.
There, in the biting cold of a November night, it was arranged that they would meet other volunteers and be taken to safe houses in Belfast.
Like something out of The Shawshank Redemption only this time, nobody crawled to freedom.
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One of the first groups out of the tunnel were spotted by a patrol of British soldiers. They opened fire, killing Hugh Coney, a 24 year-old from Coalisland in Tyrone, and injuring several others.
In all, 33 prisoners tried to escape that night. Like most of the others, my Da was caught.
So the following March, along with 11 others, he stood trial in a courthouse in Newry for attempting to escape Long Kesh.
The story of what happened that day is told in a book: Prison Break: True Stories of the World’s Greatest Prison Escapes.
“There, in the holding cell of the Newry courthouse on 11 March 1975, they discovered that the bars on the toilet window were rusted.
“The ten prisoners broke them and went out into the yard, escaping, though not before scrawling, “Up the IRA” in soap on the mirror…”
It’s hard not to laugh when you think of all the complex, detailed and meticulously planned escape attempts from Long Kesh that never come to any fruition compared to the naked opportunism of the escapees that day in Newry.
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Once out, they set off in different directions. Two were caught. My Da, eventually, ended up in Ballymun.
In all, he spent 43 years there. On the run. Resisting the local accent.
Meanwhile, back in the courthouse, relatives and friends of the prisoners got word of the escape an hour after their loved ones had squeezed through a bathroom window to freedom.
Newspaper reports detail how they cheered as they spilled into the foyer of the courthouse, singing Over The Wall as they went.
There, in the middle of it all, was my Granny. Singing her head off.
“Papers from 1976 released under the government’s freedom of information legislation show that the use of ‘CR’ or Dibenzoxazepine – a skin irritant 10 times more powerful than other tear gases – was permitted from 1973 to be used on prison inmates in the event of an attempted mass breakout.
“More than 50 of the prisoners at Long Kesh who claim to have been sprayed with the chemical have died or have developed cancerous illnesses.”
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The Observer, July 23, 2005
Anyone who has ever had someone close to them die knows one of the toughest stages of grief to get through is anger.
My Da never complained. But he spent a lot of the time hunched or doubled over in pain from his gunshot wound. He was stitched together. A big, garish scar across his midriff.
It affected his health. He wasn’t able to drink. He’d be in bits for days afterwards if he did.
But the hardest part of it to take was in later years, when the pain he had from being shot was vying for attention with the cancer growing in his stomach and he was unable to differentiate.
He’d tell doctors there was something wrong and they’d prescribe pain relief medication. In the end, he developed a complex about doctors. His diagnosis came too late.
Eventually, a doctor saw him, took him at this word and sent him for tests. When the results came back, it was terminal.
When he was diagnosed, the doctors asked him whether he had ever worked with chemicals.
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I don’t know whether it was the CR gas he was sprayed with during the Burning of Long Kesh that brought on his illness, but the numbers, anecdotally at least, are fairly bleak.
The use of chemical weapons and riot gases were limited by international agreement, but official documents show senior officials in Britain’s Ministry of Defence authorised it for use in Long Kesh.
Campaigners were convinced the use of the gas was a ‘field experiment’ designed to test the weapon’s capability and the effects on those it was used on; that the Long Kesh prisoners were effectively human guinea pigs.
In 2005, it was reported that more than 50 of the prisoners at Long Kesh who claim to have been sprayed with the chemical had died or developed cancerous illnesses. Current figures are somewhere over 100.
My Da was diagnosed in 2017. People knew he was sick.
One night, after training with Dublin, Eoghan O’Gara came up to me.
‘How’s your Da? Would it be OK if I went up to see him?’
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My Da loved O’Gara. They had the same tough nut demeanour. The same steely, roughish temperament. The same streak of genuine human decency.
O’Gara was living in Wexford at the time. He was one of the few fellas on the panel with kids.
Eoghan OGara
Now, part of my job in training would be to test O’Gara in every way in training matches, often to the point where things might spill over and we’d be cool enough with each other for a while afterwards.
But there he was. After training. Late on a Thursday night. Calling into my Da in his house in Ballymun on the way back to Wexford.
Energy
That meant the world to him. Chuffed. The energy that it gave him was incredible. That’s the stuff that people don’t see from outside the walls of a dressing-room.
Ultimately, we had success with Dublin. But it also felt like we had a greater collective purpose, too. We were close. We celebrated each other’s triumphs away from football. We felt each other’s pain.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons why we were successful.
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O’Gara was great to my Da. So were his parents. So were many, many of the Dublin players and management and their families.
One night, after a banquet, when he was very sick, exhausted and needed medication for pain, he passed through the lobby of the hotel on his way home. Bernard Brogan and Paul Flynn were there mixing with friends and they called him over. Made a big fuss over him.
Two minutes earlier, he was fit for bed, barely capable of standing up. He was a hunched-over, terminally ill man in his sixties, his body screaming for pain relief and sleep.
But in that moment, Bernard and Flynner made him ten feet tall.
We fought battles and won trophies together, but they’re the memories that will endure; how my team mates enhanced the last months of my Da’s life as he was dying of cancer.
So, why tell his story now?
Well, firstly, because I’m proud. He fought for his own downtrodden people. If nothing else, I got that from him.
And secondly, because contemporary Republican politicians in the South tend not to tell these stories anymore.
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I can understand why. The past is tainted. No one wants to be associated with a time of conflict any more. But that doesn’t make the stories less compelling.
My Da was shot at the age of 16, interned by 19 and escaped through the rusted bars of a bathroom window awaiting trial for trying to escape from Long Kesh.
He wound up in Ballymun, had two sons; one who died from addiction and the other who played for Dublin.
My Da was 64 when he died; not old, but he’d lived a life.
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Francisco Notarantonio’s grandson. Francisco’s son Victor’s fingerprints were found in Denis Donaldson’s house in Donegal after his killing. Also alleged to have been the man to have kneecapped Liam Adams back in the day.
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Yes indeed
Jo Joe was a friend/ comrade
His bro in law is a personal friend n comrade for generations
Adam’s nephew involved directly in his murder,
In charge of the unit that took him out
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Rough. Personal grudges took too many good men to the grave.
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Asams is a cunt
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Google “ Agent Christine”
That’s our boy
Could be things I learned today.
Keir Starmer was one of Lee Cleggs defence team…!!!
He’s a cunt.
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