Joe Cahill

Joe Cahill
Born	1920-05-19 Belfast, Ireland
Died	2004-07-23 (Age 84) Belfast, Northern Ireland
Chief of Staff of the PIRA

Joe Cahill ( 19 May 1920 – 23 July 2004) was a prominent Irish republican paramilitary and former Chief of Staff of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA).

Background

On 19 May 1920, Joe Cahill was born above a small printing shop at 60 Divis Street in West Belfast, where his parents had been neighbours of the Scottish-born Irish socialist and Easter Rising leader James Connolly, who co-founded the Irish Citizens Army.

Cahill was the first child in a family of twelve siblings born to Joseph and Josephine Cahill. A younger sister, Tess, was the mother of Siobhán O'Hanlon and Eilis O'Hanlon. Cahill was educated at Belfast's St Mary's Christian Brothers' School, then located on Barrack Street. His father was a printer by trade and an Irish republican who was a former member of the Irish National Volunteers and would produce republican-related material at his print shop. Aged 14, he left school to assist in the print shop after his father had become ill. Soon after, he joined the Catholic Young Men's Society, which campaigned on social issues with a focus on eradicating moneylenders from working-class areas of Belfast, as they often charged usurious interest rates. At the age of seventeen, Cahill then joined Na Fianna Éireann, a republican-orientated scouting movement.

Paramilitary career

The following year in 1938, at the age of 18, Cahill joined the local Clonard-based 'C' Company of the Belfast Brigade of the Irish Republican Army. In the 1940s, he was sentenced to death for killing a Royal Ulster Constabulary police officer during the IRA's Northern Campaign. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, as a result of pressure on the British government by the Irish government. The Vatican also called on the Northern Ireland government to grant clemency. Of the six men sentenced to death for the murder of Constable Patrick Murphy of Clowney Street, the Falls Road, Belfast, only one, Tom Williams, was executed. Cahill was released from prison in 1949. During the 1950s IRA Border Campaign, Cahill was again arrested and interned. He was released in 1962.

Founding the Provisional IRA

In 1969, Cahill was a key figure in founding the Provisional Irish Republican Army. In the Northern Ireland riots of August 1969, Cahill, along with Billy McKee, tried to defend the Catholic Clonard area from attack, but was unable to prevent Bombay Street being burned by Ulster Protestant rioters. When he subsequently tried to organise the defence of the Ballymurphy area, he was initially chased away by its Catholic residents, who were unimpressed with the IRA's response to the events of August 1969.

Angry at the failure of the IRA, led in Belfast by Billy McMillen, to defend Catholic areas during this communal rioting, Cahill and McKee stated in September 1969 that they would no longer be taking orders from the IRA leadership in Dublin, or from McMillen. In December 1969, they declared their allegiance to the Provisional IRA, who split off from the leadership. This action took 9 out of the 13 units of the IRA in Belfast into the Provisional IRA. The remnants of the pre-split IRA became known as the Official IRA. Cahill was a member of the first Provisional IRA Army Council.

Provisional IRA activities

In April 1971, after the arrest and imprisonment of Billy McKee, Cahill became the commander of the Provisional IRA Belfast Brigade. He held this post until the introduction of internment in August of that year. It was during this period that the Provisional IRA campaign got off the ground in the city. Cahill authorised the beginning of the IRA's bombing campaign as well as attacks on British troops and the RUC. He based himself in a house in Andersonstown and toured the city, co-ordinating IRA activity. The day after the British Army mounted Operation Demetrius, designed to arrest the IRA's leaders, Cahill held a press conference in a school in Ballymurphy and stated that the operation had been a failure. He said:

"We have lost one brigade officer, one battalion officer and the rest are volunteers, or as they say in the British Army, privates".

Cahill himself however had to flee to the Republic of Ireland to avoid arrest, temporarily relinquishing his command of the Belfast Brigade.

In March 1972, Cahill was part of an IRA delegation that held direct talks with the British Labour Party leader Harold Wilson. However, although the IRA called a three-day ceasefire for the talks, no permanent end to violence was agreed upon. Upon his return to Ireland, Cahill was arrested in Dublin by the Gardaí and charged with IRA membership. However he went on hunger strike for twenty-three days and was subsequently released due to lack of evidence. In November 1972, Cahill became the IRA's chief of staff, he held this position until his arrest the following year.

Importing arms

Joe Cahill was then put in charge of importing arms for the IRA. He liaised with the NORAID group in America and with the Libyan dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi to this end. In March 1973 he was arrested by the Irish Navy in Waterford, aboard the Claudia, a ship from Libya loaded with five tons of weapons. Cahill was sentenced to three years imprisonment by the Irish Special Criminal Court. Cahill stated at his trial that, "If I am guilty of any crime, it is that I did not succeed in getting the contents of the Claudia into the hands of the freedom fighters in this country".

Upon his release, Cahill again was put in charge of arms importation and to this end went to the United States. He was deported from the United States in 1984 for illegal entry. He served on the IRA Army Council as late as the 1990s.

Peace process

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he argued against proposals for Sinn Féin to stand in elections. However, in 1985, he spoke at the party's Ard Fheis in favour of republicans contesting elections and taking seats in the Dublin parliament, the Dail. In his later years as honorary life vice-president of Sinn Féin he was a strong supporter of Gerry Adams and the Good Friday Agreement. In 1994, a controversial but central aspect of the IRA's ceasefire was the granting of a limited visa by then United States President Bill Clinton to Cahill, in the face of opposition by John Major's government, for the purpose of trying to win support for the new Sinn Féin peace strategy from Irish American IRA supporters.

In 1998 he stood in North Antrim, an area in which he had never resided, in the 1998 Northern Ireland Assembly election but was unsuccessful, finishing in eleventh place in a poll topped by Ian Paisley.

Death

Joe Cahill died at age 84 in Belfast. He had been diagnosed with asbestosis, which he likely developed while working at the Harland & Wolff shipyards in Belfast in his twenties. He and several other former shipyard workers later sued the company for their exposure to the dangerous substances but only won minimal compensation. An Irish republican flute band in Glasgow is named for Cahill.

Posthumous legacy

On 20 October 2014, The Daily Mail published a report, whose specific claims were denied by Gerry Adams, entitled "IRA sex abuse 'kangaroo courts' revealed as former leader’s niece claims she was raped as a teenager – and Gerry Adams covered it up", alleging, among other things, that:
* Cahill was allegedly turned by secret agents after photos of his sexually assailing a 14-year-old girl in the 1970s, for which he was never prosecuted. ("Cahill's alleged role as a British agent was only known to a small number of people but an IRA source told the Mirror there were suspicions he was an informer.")
* Security sources claimed he [Cahill] was a 'prized asset' in Northern Ireland for the British security forces.
* A niece of Cahill, Mairia Cahill, claimed to have been raped at age 16 in 1997 but that the PIRA suppressed her case.

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Bibliography

• Richard English, Armed Struggle - A History of the IRA, MacMillan, London 2003; ISBN 1-4050-0108-9
• Ed Moloney, The Secret History of the IRA:
  Published by Allen Lane (2002), Hardcover: ISBN 071399665X/ISBN 9780713996654
  Published Penguin Books Ltd (2003), Paperback: ISBN 014101041X/ISBN 9780141010410
• Eamonn Mallie and Patrick Bishop, The Provisional IRA, Corgi, London 1988; ISBN 0-552-13337-X
• Brendan O'Brien, The Long War - The IRA and Sinn Féin. O'Brien Press, Dublin 1995; ISBN 0-86278-359-3

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