Thousands mourn ex-IRA chief Brendan Hughes
February 20, 2008

DUBLIN - Brendan "The Dark" Hughes, a one-time Irish Republican Army commander who broke with former comrades when they pursued peace in Northern Ireland, was cremated yesterday after a funeral that briefly unified both sides of the split.

Hughes, 59, died Saturday. He had spent his final years criticizing Sinn Fein leaders for accepting Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord and said that while the IRA should not return to violence, its political leaders made people suffer needlessly for decades when the British government had offered similar peace terms as long ago as 1975.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, a longtime comrade inside and outside prison, helped carry Hughes' coffin outside St. Peter's Cathedral in Catholic West Belfast, where both men joined the IRA as teenagers. Adams declined to comment yesterday but issued a statement after Hughes' death calling him "a very good friend and comrade over many years of struggle."

Veterans of the IRA and dissident groups were among more than 2,000 mourners. Sinn Fein officials appealed successfully for no politically divisive comments during the funeral.

Hughes, who was known by the nicknames "The Dark" and "Darkie" because of his Mediterranean appearance and to distinguish himself from other Belfast men with the same name, specified before dying that he wanted to be cremated rather than buried in the IRA's roll of honor section in Milltown Cemetery, West Belfast, where dozens of his comrades lie. The cause of death was not disclosed, but his family said he never recovered fully from the effects of a 1980 hunger strike.

Hughes and Adams were arrested together in July 1973 and jailed without trial. Hughes, reputed to be one of the IRA's most determined gunmen and bank robbers, escaped six months later. He returned to Belfast and directed IRA operations there. Police arrested him in May 1974 and seized weapons and ammunition.

Hughes became the IRA's commanding officer inside the Maze prison, where he oversaw a six-year campaign to force British authorities to concede them status as "political prisoners." The protest involved going naked rather than wearing prison uniforms, smearing their own excrement on cell walls - and finally mounting a 1980 hunger strike. Hughes and six others refused food for 53 days before he ordered the hunger strike to end in disputed circumstances.

Hughes was replaced as IRA commander in the prison by Bobby Sands, who starved to death with nine other inmates in a 1981 hunger strike that also failed to achieve their demands.

Hughes resumed IRA activity after his 1986 parole, but grew disillusioned when former colleagues turned full time to politics and pursued compromise after the 1997 IRA cease-fire. He said Sinn Fein leaders had turned their backs on the working class, preferring to take good-paying government jobs in a Northern Ireland that remained British territory.

Hughes said colleagues with political ambitions should have said so far sooner, and called the IRA's 1975 cease-fire an opportunity lost. "Think of all the lives that could have been saved had we accepted the 1975 truce," he said in 2000. "That alone would have justified acceptance. We fought on and for what? What we rejected in 1975."

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS