Founding member of Provisional IRA became an embarrassment to Sinn Fein
Short Strand is a republican enclave in loyalist (or pro-British) east Belfast. On the night of June 27, 1970, it was attacked by loyalists. British troops failed to intervene. Desperate residents appealed for help from Billy McKee, commander of the Belfast Brigade of the fledgling Provisional IRA.
McKee and his colleagues moved in with all the weapons they could muster and took up positions around a church. The ensuing gun battle lasted into the early hours of the morning, or so republicans claim. Three people were killed. McKee was shot and badly wounded, but he achieved heroic status and the IRA acquired a standing within the republican community that it had not enjoyed for decades. A plaque from grateful residents adorned McKee’s home for the rest of his life.
McKee, who has died aged 97, was a lifelong republican and believer in armed struggle. He was jailed in each of the four decades from the 1940s to 1970s and was a founding member of the Provisional IRA, which broke away from the Official IRA after the latter’s leadership embraced Marxism and electoral politics in the late 1960s.
A devout Catholic who attended Mass each morning, McKee was nonetheless responsible for some of the bloodiest atrocities of the IRA. Even after the advent of peace, he refused to recant or apologise for his use of violence. To republican purists McKee was a hero. To loyalists and unionists he was a butcher. To Sinn Fein’s present leadership he was an embarrassment. He was ‘‘effectively the last of the old-style physical-force IRA republicans’’, said BBC journalist Peter Taylor, who interviewed him several times.
McKee was born in Belfast, six months after the partition of Ireland that he would spend most of his life fighting to reverse. He joined Na Fianna Eireann, the IRA’s youth wing, at 15 and the IRA three years later.
During World War II, he was imprisoned after taking part in attacks on security forces in Northern Ireland. He spent six years behind bars. In 1956, he was arrested again and interned until 1962. During the 1960s he drifted away from the IRA as Cathal Goulding, its Dublin-based head, led it from armed struggle towards a Marxist political agenda aimed at winning working-class support. ‘‘I was utterly disgusted,’’ McKee said.
By the time the Troubles erupted in the late 1960s, the IRA was emasculated as a fighting force. On August 14, 1969, loyalist mobs attacked and torched dozens of Catholic homes on the Falls Rd in west Belfast. McKee and a few other IRA veterans sought to defend the area with a handful of ancient weapons, but in vain. Graffiti declaring ‘‘IRA – I Ran Away’’ appeared on walls in republican areas.
A week later those veterans and a rising
young activist named Gerry Adams met and decided things had to change. The next month McKee and 15 other armed men burst into a meeting of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade and announced they were taking over. ‘‘I told them they had failed the people, the nationalist people of the North,’’ McKee said.
The IRA split into the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA. Under McKee’s leadership the ‘‘provos’’ rebuilt their military structure and launched a bombing campaign in Belfast, although McKee, according to Taylor, insisted that civilian casualties be avoided.
In 1971 McKee was jailed for possessing a handgun. While in jail, he liaised with loyalist prisoners to keep the peace. He also went on a protracted hunger strike to win political status for paramilitary prisoners. While he was locked up, his nephew, Kevin McKee, was abducted and killed by the IRA for being a British informant.
McKee was released in 1974 and resumed his position as the Belfast Brigade’s commander. In that role he engaged in secret talks with representatives of the British government that led to the IRA ceasefire of February 1975. McKee later claimed that the British had promised to discuss ‘‘withdrawal’’ from Northern Ireland. ‘‘I didn’t want peace at any price. I wanted a guarantee that the British government would withdraw from the [North] and that a 32-county Irish republic would be established,’’ he said. That was never forthcoming, and the ceasefire collapsed.
To many younger republicans, including Adams, the ceasefire was a disastrous mistake that gave the British breathing space and gravely weakened the IRA. Adams was released in 1977 and is is believed to have orchestrated McKee’s removal from the Army Council, and McKee ceased to be an active member of the IRA.
McKee opposed the peace process that led to the Good Friday agreement of 1998. In 2011 he told The Irish News that Adams and Martin McGuinness had ‘‘betrayed the republican movement’’ by agreeing to the decommissioning of the IRA’s weapons, and accused them of ‘‘manipulating and hijacking the republican cause’’. He had ‘‘no regrets’’ about his bloody past, defended some of the IRA’s worst atrocities, and added: ‘‘There’ll never be peace in this country until that Union Jack comes down and the British army gets the hell out and anything connected with Downing Street gets the hell out of this country.’’
Several hundred republicans attended McKee’s funeral, some wearing military-style black berets. He was buried alongside other republican stalwarts, though Sinn Fein scarcely acknowledged his death.
He never married and had no children. –