Brave Tyrone Hunger Striker Remembered1981~ 2006
Martin Hurson
Died July 13th, 1981
A hard-working and extremely likeable republican
IN THE early hours of Tuesday morning, November 9th, 1976, a series of British army and RUC swoops in the Cappagh district of Dungannon in East Tyrone led to the arrest from their homes, under Section 10 of the Emergency Provisions Act, of three young local men: Pat Joe O'Neill, Dermot Boyle and Peter Kane. Two days later, November 11th, in similar dawn swoops in the area, four other men, James Joseph Rafferty, Peter Nugent, Kevin O'Brien and Martin Hurson, were arrested from their homes.
Over the next few days all seven men were held in Omagh RUC barracks, interrogated about IRA operations in East Tyrone since 1972, and systematically tortured by detectives from the newly established Regional Crime Squad. The men had their hair pulled, their ears slapped, they were made to stand for prolonged periods in the 'search position' against a wall, they were kicked and punched and forced to do exercises for lengthy periods.
INJURIES
Finally, two men, Peter Nugent and James Rafferty, were released without charge, Rafferty to Tyrone County Hospital in Omagh where he spent four days recovering from his injuries. The remaining five were charged (and subsequently convicted) on the sole basis of statements made during that interrogation. One of the five is now in the cages of Long Kesh, the other four became blanket men in the H-Blocks. Four-and-a-half years later with revealing ironic insight into the nature of the British judicial system in Ireland, while four RUC detectives involved in those Omagh interrogations were awaiting trial on charges of assaulting James Rafferty during interrogation, in the prison hospital of Long Kesh, one of those convicted on the basis of a tortured 'confession' - Martin Hurson - lay dying on hunger strike for political status.
CAPPAGH
Edward Martin Hurson was born on September 13th, 1956, in the townland of Aughnaskea, Cappagh, near Dungannon, the eighth of nine children: six girls and three boys. Both of his parents, John, aged 74, a small hill farmer, and Mary Ann (whose maiden name was Gillespie) who died in April 1970 after a short illness, came from the Cappagh district, and the whole of their family - including Martin - were born into the white washed farmhouse perched precipitously on top of the thirty hilly acres of rough land that make up the Hurson farm. The Cappagh district is a wholly nationalist area of County Tyrone, composed mainly of farmers, and comprising between two and three hundred closely knit families. The land is infertile, lowland hills, good only for grazing cattle and rearing a few pigs, yet the roots of families like the Hursons stretch back maybe two or three hundred years. The land may not be much but it is theirs. Over by Donaghmore, a few miles away, where the fields are bigger and the grass more lush, most of the farmers are loyalists.
Martin was close to the land as he grew up. Although he went first to Crosscavanagh school in Galbally, and then to St. Patrick's intermediate in Dungannon, when he was not at school he was more often than not helping out about the farm, driving a tractor, helping to rear 'croppy pigs' or looking after cattle. A 'typical' country lad in many ways, part of a very close and good humoured family, Martin was a quiet, very religious, and easy going young man, who nevertheless, before his arrest, enjoyed social pursuits such as dancing and going to the cinema, and enjoyed the company of other people, among whom he had a well-earned reputation for being a practical joker and a bit of a comedian. Like many others, he was capable of being very outgoing and talkative on occasions, while remaining essentially a rather shy and quiet personality. Perhaps because he was one of the youngest of the family, Martin was particularly close to his mother, whose premature death in 1970 when he was only thirteen, came as a deep shock to him. It was Martin who returned home one day to find his mother taken seriously ill and who ran to a neighbouring farm to ring a doctor. That day, a Saturday, Mrs. Hurson was taken to Omagh hospital, and from there to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast where she died the following Thursday, April 30th. Martin was so shocked by the tragedy that he lost his memory completely for a week, only regaining it when a tractor he was driving up a steep slope, with his father, overturned, throwing the pair to the ground, this fresh shock dramatically restoring his memory. That period of his life was also the time when 'the troubles' began to have an impact.
Although the family did not discuss politics, and internment did not affect anyone from the Cappagh area, it was impossible not to be keenly aware of British oppression so close to Dungannon which - spearheading the civil rights campaign through the late sixties - had fostered such a strong current of
republicanism in the process. However, Martin's personal resistance to that British repression and his subsequent intense suffering at the hands of it were not to occur for several years. In his teens his great delight was to play practical jokes on his family and neighbours, particularly on April Fool's Day and on Hallowe'en.
JOKE
He liked a joke and a laugh" remembers a long-time friend of Martin's. "Him and Peter Kane were a comical match". Or, as his brother Francis remembers with a laugh, "If he thought it would make you mad he would do it". Like the time he ran breathless to Paddy Donnelly's to tell him that Sylvie Kane's cows had toppled his milkchurns and the milk was going everywhere. And as Paddy dashed down to save his milk, Martin called out, "Hey Paddy, April Fool" before disappearing through a gap in the hedge. Leaving school, Martin started work as an apprentice fitter welder at Finlay's, and after a stint there he went across to England for a while, living in Manchester with his brother Francis and his wife, and working for McAlpine's. But not long after Francis and his wife returned to Tyrone, Martin too returned when the particular job he was working on had finished at Christmas in 1974, rather than move to another job. He had spent almost a year-and-a half in England but wasn't particular about it, a view confirmed early on after his arrival, when he was forced to spend
two weeks in hospital having been struck by one of McAlpine's mechanical diggers!
Back in the farmhouse at Cappagh, Martin bought himself a car on hire purchase and got himself a job in Dungannon at Powerscreen International. He paid for the car within a year, having always had a gift for scraping money together. As a child, whenever he managed to get hold of a penny or a shilling, here or there, instead of spending it he would take it to a nearby farmer and family friend who put it into a box for him until he had enough to buy, once, a white cob, or a pig to rear. He was 'old fashioned'' in that way, his brother Francis recalls. He also loved to work and was a "great riser" in the morning his father says, never missing a day's work until his arrest.
BERNADETTE
Late in 1975, he met and started going out with Bernadette Donnelly, at the wedding of her sister Mary Rose to a cousin of Martin's, at which he was best man. Bernadette, aged twenty-three, comes from Pomeroy: she was extremely active in the hunger strike campaign, along with members of Martin's family, appearing on rally platforms and taking part in marches and pickets all over the country. Before his arrest, Martin and Bernadette were often both behind the practical jokes he loved playing. His brother Francis was often the victim. On one occasion, Francis, his wife, and their two children, were asleep in a caravan in the Donegal resort of Bundoran. They awoke however to find themselves not on the caravan site but on an adjacent road, Martin and Bernadette having towed it off-site during the night. On another occasion the pair borrowed Francis' almost new cine-camera to film the wedding of a friend, Seamus McGuire, in Donegal. Somewhere along the route back from Donegal they found out they'd lost the camera and lost it remained. Afraid to tell Francis, they kept quiet about the camera for several weeks, before Francis remembered to ask for it back. Instead of owning-up, Martin gave Francis an almost identical replacement hoping he wouldn't notice. But when he did, Martin, not lost for words, just explained: "I left it into a shop for fixing, but they said it wasn't worth fixing."
RUC
But those relatively light-hearted and easy-going days were coming to an end. East Tyrone, like many other areas in the North, was a centre of highly proficient republican operations against the enemy forces. To combat the level of republican military activity, deputy chief constable of the RUC Kenneth Newman (shortly to be promoted to chief constable), was one of those behind the restructuring of the RUC in early 1976, which led to the setting up of what were called Regional Crime Squads. Their primary function was to ensure convictions for all 'unsolved' republican
activity by extracting signed statements, in effect to 'clear the books' of an embarrassing list of unattributable republican operations. Under the torturer Newman, and the then direct-ruler Roy Mason, the Regional Crime Squads only responsibility was to 'get results' (a guarantee of promotion) without undue regard to the methods they employed. One method they did employ was torture.
TORTURE
Martin was arrested and taken to Omagh RUC barracks on November 11th, 1976, along with the six others arrested that day and two days previously. He was badly, and professionally tortured in Omagh for two days, beaten about the head, back and testicles, spread-eagled against a wall and across a table, slapped, punched and kicked. He heard Rafferty's screams as he was tortured in
the adjoining room. To escape the torture Martin signed statements admitting involvement in
republican activity. He was then transferred to Cookstown barracks, but as soon as he arrived he
made a formal complaint of ill-treatment. Back in Omagh barracks, chief inspector Farr, realising this could prejudice the admissibility of Martin's statements at his trial, got the Cookstown detectives to re-interrogate Martin and extract the same statements, which they did by threatening to 'send him
back to Omagh'. On Saturday night, November 13th, Martin was charged, along with Kevin O'Brien and Peter Kane. Dermot Boyle and Pat Joe O'Neill had been charged the day before. Martin was charged with a landmine explosion at Galbally in November 1975. This charge was later dropped, but he was then further charged with IRA membership, possession of the Galbally landmine, conspiracy to kill members of the enemy forces, causing an explosion at Cappagh in September 1975, and possession of a landmine at Reclain in February 1976 which exploded near a passing UDR landrover.
STATEMENTS
Even though the alleged speciality of the East Tyrone active service unit operating around Cappagh was explosives, the RUC offered not one shred of forensic evidence, against any of the five men, merely signed statements extracted by torture. These statements, however, were good enough for Judge Rowland at the trial of the five men in November 1977, after a year on remand in Crumlin Road and in the remand H-Block of Long Kesh. Admitting as evidence the statements Martin made in Omagh, and dismissing doctor's evidence about the extent of Martin's injuries, Judge Rowland
sentenced Martin to twenty years for possession of landmines and conspiracy, as well as two other sentences of fifteen and five years respectively, the sentences to run concurrently. The other four men received sentences ranging from fifteen to twenty years. Martin appealed his conviction on the grounds that the judge had ignored medical evidence about his ill-treatment. The appeal was dismissed but he was granted a retrial.
At the four-day trial in September 1979, before Judge Munray, the Omagh statements were ruled inadmissible, but instead of Martin walking free the judge went on to accept the admissibility of the Cookstown statements, themselves extracted under threat of renewed torture. One of the consequences of the retrial was the further postponement of the enquiry into James Rafferty's allegations of brutality in Omagh, on the grounds that it might prejudice the retrial (to the RUC's detriment!). The enquiry had been reluctantly acceded to by the RUC Police Authority following the persistent endeavours of Authority member, independent Dungannon councillor, Jack Hassard. He, however, later resigned from the Authority, describing it as being "as independent as a sausage without a skin" when the tribunal which was set up failed to begin its enquiries. The tribunal finally collapsed earlier this year when the RUC detectives from Omagh refused to give evidence to it on the grounds that they might incriminate themselves! Subsequently, four of the detectives who tortured James Rafferty, Martin Hurson and the others at Omagh that November: chief inspector Harold Colgan, and constables Michael O Neil, Kenneth Hassan, and Robert McAdore were charged with
assaulting Rafferty. Those four torturers, however, are only convenient scape-goats representing the
tip of the iceberg in what was an orchestrated and widespread attempt during the Roy Mason era to jail republicans on the flimsiest of pretexts by means of torture extracted statements. Such men make up a substantial proportion of those political prisoners in Britain's Northern and English jails today.
Martin Hurson went straight on the blanket after his first trial, and following his retrial he appealed once again against conviction, challenging the admissibility of the Cookstown statements, but his appeal was disallowed in June 1980.
HUNGER STRIKE
On May 29th, this year, Martin joined the hunger strike, replacing South Derryman Brendan McLoughlin who was forced to drop out because of a burst stomach ulcer. In the Free State general election in June, Martin was a candidate in Longford/Westmeath, and although missing election, obtained almost four-and-a-half thousand first preference votes, and over a thousand transfers, before being eliminated at the end of the sixth count, outlasting two Labour candidates and a Fine Gael contender. Barely one month after election the Free State government's bolstering of Britain's barbaric intransigence led to the death of Martin Hurson, the sixth hunger striker, at that stage, to die. Having seriously deteriorated after forty days on hunger strike, he was unable to hold down water and died a horrifically agonising death after only forty-four days on hunger strike, at 4.30 a m. on Monday, July 13th.
Published in IRIS, Vol. 1, No. 2, November 1981. IRIS was a publication of the Sinn Fein Foreign Affairs Bureau.
Sean McCaughey Tyrones forgoten Hungerstriker
East Tyrone Hunger-Striker
Sean McCaughey Aughnocloy, Co Tyrone
Died on Hunger Strike 11/5/46
Portlaoise Prison
60
Years Ago
AT 3am on May 11, 1946 the secretary to the
26-County Cabinet, Maurice Moynihan, telephoned Seán Mac Bride to say that Seán
McCaughy was dead.
Mac Bride told Seán Cronin in the course of
a conversation at the United Nations in June 1982: "he (Moynihan) said the
Chief (sic) had told him to phone me. It may have been moral anxiety. I never
understood why."
Earlier Mac Bride had appealed to de Valera
"on a personal basis" not to let the hunger and thirst striker die.
"I said it would worsen matters in
During the hunger and thirst strike a
prison warder sat by McCaughey's bedside in his Portlaoise prison cell. His
task was to hold a teaspoon in the prisoner's mouth on top of his tongue.
This was to prevent the tongue from
sticking to the roof of his mouth due to the dehydration caused by the thirst
strike. Such an eventuality would cut off breathing and cause him to choke.
Coogan says: "Seventeen days (of
thirst strike) later Seán McCaughey died with his body in a condition better
imagined than described.
"Patrick Mc Hogan, who saw the body
after death, said McCaughey's tongue has shrunken 'to the size of a threepenny
bit'." Those who remember the tiny size of that pre-decimal coin can use
their imaginations as to the sufferings McCaughey endured.
"On the heels of what seemed the
totally unnecessary death of a man who had long since expiated his supposed
crimes were revelations as to the exact conditions in the prison.
"The Ministry of Justice had refused
to concede political treatment and Republicans had refused to compromise,
preferring years in solitary, naked rather than wearing common criminals'
clothes, cut off from the outside world rather than accept a prison number on
correspondence.
"These were men -- like McCaughey,
Liam Rice, Jim Crofton, Tomás Mac Curtain -- whom the de Valera government
apparently wanted to break. Even to the disinterested this treatment seemed
mean and vindictive.
"Then, in the same month that
McCaughey died, the Stormont government unconditionally released David Fleming,
a Kerryman, who had been on hunger strike. The contrast with
"For the latter part of April and into
May a news item about the size of a death notice would appear each day in the
newspapers saying McCaughey had now completed so many days on hunger, or on
hunger and thirst strike.
A similar notice would be carried each day
regarding Fleming in Crumlin Road Jail,
Outside the prisons on the streets of
On the night of May 10, such a meeting was
taking place in College Green when an Aiseírí organiser, Gearóid Ó Broin,
grabbed the microphone and shouted: "The man could well be dead. March on
This the crowd proceeded to do with
alacrity until it met a cordon of the centre city Riot Squad of the 26-County
police at the Nassau Street end of Kildare Street where Leinster House is
situated. The inevitable clashes took place and the crowd was eventually
dispersed.
The Republican Movement gained many new
adherents those days and nights, including the idealist Gearóid Ó Brion who was
later to spend time in the Curragh Concentration Camp 1957-59.
A new and super-active Cumann of Sinn Féin
was formed named the Seán Mc Caughey Cumann which among other undertakings published a new Republican
monthly paper RESURGENCE -- the
first since WWII.
McCaughey was given a hero's funeral. It
marched through
Brendan Behan, then serving his sentence in
the Curragh Glasshouse, captured the atmosphere in the poem in Irish he wrote
at the time Filleadh Mhic Eachaidh.
Colbert Kearney in his Writings of
Brendan Behan published in
"Entitled The Return of McCaughey it concentrates not on the physical death
but on the spiritual triumph as seen in the return of the remains to
(
"I had expected to witness a funeral
With pipes of condolence droning their
been,
Had thought that the sound of guns would be
mournful,
But, like the victorious host of O'Neill,
Come from the Pale having crushed the
invader,
The Gaels are delighted to carry their
trophy,
To welcome McCaughey back home to
For pride is eventually stronger than
woe."
He concludes his appreciation of Behan's
poem thus: "As the work of a beginner it is remarkably fluent in movement
and sound pattern, an 'amhrán' rather than a translation."
"Bhí píob is gunnaí á laímhseáil go schéipeach."
At this conclusion of the
At Carrickearnon on the Louth side of the
Six-County border, a similar tribute was paid but when the cortege passed into
the Occupied-Zone the "black police" as the British forces were
called, tore the Tricolour forcibly from the coffin.
"Inniu beidh an turas go Baile an
Mhuilinn
A muintir ina thimpeall, na mílte in ómós,
ís geall le turas taoisigh sheanaimsir ár
saoirse
á shló go réidh, rióga, mall, maorga tríd
an slógh."
Back in
The youth did not forget. Inspired by
McCaughey's noble sacrifice, he went on to join Óglaigh na h-Éireann a few
years later and inside a decade become Adjutant-General -- the same position
that the deceased hunger striker has held.
And the ballad-makers went to work with a
will: "Oh, McCaughey died / And the banshee cried . . ."
"Seán Glynn pined sadly in prison.
Seán
McNeela, Tony Darcy, John
McGaughey (sic) died on hunger strike,
Wasting in the ribbed light of dawn."
Behan, of course, writing in English The Dead March Past in honour of Seán
Russell's men from 1938 to 1946 penned the lines:
"Perry and Malone from Parkhurst come
To march beside McCaughey and greet the
Easter dawn."
Brian O'Higgins, Brian na Banban, in his widely read Wolfe Tone Annual wrote in the
1950 issue: "Some of them, like Seán McCaughey of
In later issues he would write of all who
died for Irish freedom "ó Bhrian Bóraimhe go Seán Mac Eochaidh" (from
Brian Boru to Seán McCaughey) -- spanning over 1,000 years.
Humbler scribes were at work too. In
Swinford,
***
"O Seán McCaughey, your hell on earth
is over;
Your body lies in holy Antrim's soil,
Your spirit to your heavenly home has
flown,
And you are free from suffering and from
toil.
***
They jailed you for you loved your country,
They kept you from God's sun and God's free
air,
Their devilish tortures drove you near to
madness
Within your cell and your poor body bare.
***
Your comrades too are treated worse than
animals
And Irish traitors blaspheme their fair
name,
Because they seek with Tone and Pearse and
D'Arcy
To fee
***
But though you have gone and joined the
martyred heroes,
We will not forget -- you have not died in
vain
And when we're free of
We'll honour and we'll keep green your
name."
What was gained by the loss of a splendid
life? Brian O'Higgins' answer in the 1940s is relevant: "The youth of
"It
is that there will be no peace, no progress, no friendship between us and our
neighbours in England . . . until every sod of Irish soil is one, united,
independent land, free of British occupation . . .
"Until that perfectly reasonable,
sensible, understandable state of affairs comes about there will always be
unrest, there will always be war, there will always be coercion and suppression
and tyranny, there will always be suffering and sacrifices and heroism and
martyrdom, because 'you cannot turn back the current of tradition', and all the
censorship and slander and brute force in the world cannot fight to final
victory against the inspiration of the patriot dead."
Yes, due to the self-sacrifice of Seán
McCaughey and his comrades in Portlaoise Prison in the 1940s and Seán's own
hunger and thirst strike to death, the Republican struggle of 1936-46 went out
with a bang, not a whimper!
In Mac Swiney's words, "those who
endure most . . . will ultimately conquer" and McCaughey's endurance was a
blow which resounded through the generations, summoning successive waves of
youth to the flag to struggle for human dignity and freedom.
Tomás Mac Curtáin may have started the
strip strike in response to the 26-County criminalisation policy but Seán McCaughey
laid his life on the line and defeated that policy by great endurance and great
suffering.
We salute the brave!
.
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