"When I look back and think of him, I always recall that night he said that he wasn't made of the stuff that makes a martyr and patriot. He could never have been more wrong. My abiding memory of Joe is that he never, ever bent." -- Jazz McCann, Blanketman [ Nor Meekly Serve My Time ]

The false hopes raised by the Catholic bishops of the ICJP made Joe McDonnell's death an even more terrible blow. His funeral was a Irish tragedy. His lovely wife, at the same time so strong and so broken with brief, his two children, Bernadette and Joseph, crying touching his coffin. There was also the sadistic horror of everything that Joe grew up hating, fighting against, and dying to remove from his country: the brutality of the RUC and the British army and the government that pulled their strings.

The Tories huffed and puffed over their evening clarets, so appalled were they whenever the television showed IRA color guards firing volleys over the coffins at hunger strikers' funerals. The coffins were jolly good, but the bloody terrorists mustn't be allowed to honor or bury their dead. The order went down from Thatcher and her boys: get Joe McDonnell's firing party. The RUC/Brit army were delighted to comply; at they very least, they would terrorize the mourners.

It took the funeral procession four hours to reach Milltown cemetery; a journey that should have taken a half hour.

Brits fire live rounds indiscriminately into mourners

The Irish Times : "It appears that the firing party was trapped by an Army helicopter carrying telescopic equipment. When the first shots were fired and people in the funeral procession realized what was happening, youths broke away and bombarded the soldiers with stones. Troops and police [sic] reinforcements fired dozens of plastic bullets in return. Some observers believe that they also fired live rounds. The RUC deny this."

That live rounds were fired into the crowd is indisputable.

The Times article continued:

"Women holding young children ran screaming into the nearby church, while others crouched on the footpath and in the doorway of the Busy Bee shopping centre. Troop reinforcements sped in armoured vehicles into the middle of the crowd which scattered into side streets. A local priest, the Reverend Dan O'Rawe, said soldiers and police fired indiscriminately.

"For some time afterwards the procession was seriously disrupted and took nearly four hours in all to reach Milltown cemetery, where a Provisional Sinn Fein speaker told the crowd that they were there ‘despite British Army terror, profanity and sacrilege.'"

Live and plastic bullets

Oistin McBride, who photographed the funeral, described the scene in his about to be published book of photographs and commentary about the past twenty years of conflict in the north, Family, Friends and Neighbors . Once British army fire was heard coming from a nearby house where the IRA color party was believed to be retreating from "some of the tens of thousands of mourners were attempting through sheer force of numbers to reach the house where the shooting was taking place in an effort to aid the IRA firing party."

"They were beaten back by volleys of plastic bullets and the realization that live ammunition was also being fired. I watched groups of soldiers charge down St. Agnes Drive firing plastics, regrouping, firing and charging again. Some bumped into me as they ran. I followed the running battle back to the Falls road where the funeral cortege had disappeared in disarray. RUC and Brit Landrovers drove wildly onto the main road scattering anyone in their way."

He recalled how Brit soldiers established a position in St John's Church carpark from which they fired volley after volley of deadly plastic bullets at mourners trapped behind low walls on the street.

Soldier of the Queen

Important insights into the mind-set of a typical British army soldier at the time of the hunger strike are to be found in a personal memoir by Bernard O'Mahoney, an Englishman of Irish Catholic decent. He has no love for the IRA, but he reveals some interesting truths in his book, A Soldier of The Queen . When his regiment arrived in Co. Fermanagh from Germany, they were briefed by a sergeant that they would never have to worry about legal ramifications from killing a suspect, "Just shoot the fucker dead and we'll made it up from here." To lighten up the atmosphere, the men were told there would be a crate of beer for the first one to "kill a Paddy."

O'Mahoney, a rough and crude soldier when it came to the rights of citizens, nevertheless often wasn't happy about what was going on. He was particularly appalled by the house searches that he found served only one purpose: to harass a targeted family. His insights into the deaths of the hunger strikers are important.

The hunger strikers were treated as figures of hatred or disdain. "Soldiers tried to hide their anxiety by making a joke of it." They put captions like "slimmer of the year" under hunger strikers' newspaper photos. They had a running Hunger Strike Sweepstakes: on a board in the operations room were listed the names of all those on hunger strike. Soldiers would guess the number of days a particular hunger striker "would take to die." They would get drunk and party in the bar at the base after a death, but the UDR men were the worst, being essentially anti-Catholic bigots. The Brits hated the IRA and perhaps even the Irish generally [including the unionists/loyalists!], but the UDR men would grow venomous at the death of a hunger striker. They particularly enjoyed the death of Raymond McCreesh, all the more because his bother was a Catholic priest.

"Kill all Catholics. Let God sort them out"

O'Mahoney says that they didn't believe these men would follow through at first. When Bobby died, they were mostly concerned for their safety as IRA attacks increased and the hostility of the people on the ground grew. As hunger strikers continued to die, he said that the soldiers came to believe that all Catholics were closet republicans and abuse was handled out to all. O'Mahoney recalls shouts of "Kill all Catholics. Let God sort them out" in the base canteen.

When a hunger striker would die, the local people would come out into the streets to bang bin lids to announce the loss. The Brit army actually considered confiscating the bin lids in nationalist areas!

But O'Mahoney says, "Behind the bravado, I could smell fear -- fear of the growing strength of the IRA, both on the ground and in terms of the international support the Hunger Strike was attracting for the republican movement. some UDR people seemed to be anticipation the day when they and their families would be slaughtered in their beds by the rampaging Fenian hordes." The soldiers all supported Ian Paisley's call for squaddies to all carry shotguns. But not all standard weaponry was official according to O'Mahoney, who wrote about the common practice of loading plastic bullet rifles with the equivalent of D-size batteries.

He recalls being puzzled by the black mourning flags on homes and lampposts: "I thought people were foolish to advertise their loyalty to the IRA in that way." Indeed the patrols did take note with the intention of coming back to make them pay for it. Often Brit or UDR soldiers would shoot the flags down, being afraid to pull them down least they be booby trapped. "Yet at the same time part of me admired what I saw as the flag-wavers' come-and-get-me defiance of the authorities." When it came down to it, he hated his experience in the north of Ireland because "I had met full-on a real badness within myself." Enough said.

Martin Hurson losses ground quickly

Martin had gone on the hunger strike on 29th of May, twenty days after Joe McDonnell, seven days after Kieran Doherty, and six days after Kevin Lynch. Michael Gorman, a Blanketman who was sent to the prison hospital for treatment for an injured foot towards the end of June, got to meet with Joe and Kieran, who he knew were in the hospital. During his stay there, he was disturbed by hollow coughing sounds coming from somewhere on the ward. He couldn't help but shudder each time it rang out.

At the mass that Fr. Toner said in the hospital ward's TV room on a makeshift altar, Michael walked in to greet Joe and "Big Doc". What happened next he tells in Nor Meekly serve My Time :

"...to my left I saw what looked like a pile of blankets on a wheelchair. As I passed by, a slight coughing sound came from the blankets, stopping me dead in my tracks. I cast a puzzled glance towards Joe and Doc. Joe told me it was Martin Hurson and that he was very ill.

"I searched for Martin's face. Reaching out I touched it -- he was warm and looked peaceful and at ease...

"I watched as the communion was lifted and touched to Martin's lips. Lowering my head, I felt a deep sadness sweep over me at the sight."

As Michael was talking to Fr. Toner after mass, a harsh coughing filled the room: "It was Martin. On their knees one on each side of the wheelchair were Joe and Doc, talking to him, their voices seeking to soothe him. What a sorry, pitiful, moving and heart-breaking sight. I felt humbled at it, yet so proud of them for their loving and comradely gesture."