screaming. But the Provos would not let anyone summon an ambulance, for fear of attracting the authorities. For fifteen long minutes, they all stayed inside the Cracked Cup while Desmond Mackin bled to death on the floor.
The press would characterise the shooting that night as a ‘power struggle’ between the Officials and the Provos, and, at a glance, that certainly appeared to be the case. One newspaper suggested that the incident might spark an ‘all out war’. But, really, Desmond Mackin was just an innocent bystander, collateral damage in a badly botched operation. And when Hughes continued his enquiries into who it was that shot Joe Russell, he made an alarming discovery. It hadn’t been the Officials at all. On the contrary, it was one of his own men.
Of all the social conventions the Troubles upended, one that was seldom discussed was romantic relationships. With its combination of Catholic and Scots Presbyterian cultures, Belfast could be an oppressively prudish society. But as the violence warped everyday life, long-established social mores began to loosen. The omnipresence of mortal danger drove some people to live their lives with a newfound, and sometimes reckless, intensity.
The Mad Monk, Joe Lynskey, had entered the monastery when he was only sixteen years old. When he left the order, in his twenties, and returned to Belfast, he found a job at a silk and rayon factory in the Clonard area and began to reclaim the youth he had lost to his years of prayer and pious contemplation. He was, in the words of one relative, ‘very much into running after women and doing the normal things that young people would have done’. In the monastery, Lynskey had received a solid education. He studied history and, in particular, the matter of the injustices suffered by working-class Catholics in Ireland. He did not come from a republican family: his father was a timid man who would not have wanted his children to become involved in that sort of activity; his older brother was in the Royal Navy. But Lynskey eventually decided to join the IRA. He grew close to Dolours Price, who was fond of his awkward but gentle manner. ‘He was a mature man but he was in many ways immature in the ways of the world,’ she observed. Brendan Hughes had always seen Lynskey as ‘a strange fella’, an odd artefact of the older generation. He was smart and erudite, a chain smoker, and he carried in his pocket a book about his hero, the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins. But he could be a bit aloof. What Hughes did not know about Joe Lynskey was that he was having an affair with Joe Russell’s wife.
After the shooting at the Cracked Cup, the Provos conducted an internal inquiry and discovered that Lynskey had ordered a younger IRA gunman to murder his fellow volunteer – his lover’s husband. The gunman undertook this mission assuming, because Lynskey told him so, that Joe Russell had become an informant to the authorities. But when Russell came to the door, the gunman, losing his nerve, shot him in the stomach, then ran off. In the initial hunt for the shooter, when Hughes and his men started asking around, they consulted the brigade intelligence officer, Joe Lynskey. Rather than confess that he had tried to murder his love rival, Lynskey placed the blame on the Stickies.
For a group with an alarming tendency to kill people by accident, the IRA had an elaborate internal mechanism for determining whether to kill people on purpose. Lynskey would have to face a court-martial for having endeavoured to murder one of his fellow volunteers, and for having sought to cover up his crime in such a manner that another innocent man lost his life. This was a choreographed process designed to provide a form of internal accountability that was putatively less arbitrary than a quick bullet in the back of the head. But IRA court-martials were not exactly known for acquitting people. And given the gravity of Lynskey’s crimes, his fate looked dire.
Inside the Provisionals, a new squad had recently been established. Like some black-ops government programme, it was a unit that ostensibly did not exist – a tiny, elite cell called the ‘Unknowns’. The commander of the Unknowns was a diminutive, serious-minded operator named Pat McClure, a man Brendan Hughes called ‘Wee Pat’. McClure was in his thirties, which made him fairly old by the standards of the Provos at the time. He had actual military experience (and