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Wednesday, February 23, 2005
The rebel with a cause…
By: Marion Harrison
With the IRA’s commitment to the Northern Ireland Peace Process under intense scrutiny, Marian Harrison traces the extraordinary life of the Mayo-born gun-runner, George Harrison, who died in the US last year.
Overlooking Shammer Lake sits a decrepit, deserted cottage, steeped in IRA history. The roof of the Harrison homestead has fallen in, the windows are rotten but inside you can still make out the shell of a fireplace. It was here that the villagers gathered a couple of nights a week for a game of cards and to swap republican stories. The older generation would talk about the famine, loved ones overseas and their commitment to a thirty-two county Republic. It was here that George Harrison got his first glimpse of an Ireland torn apart by political violence.
In the early 1900s every second family in Shammer, on the outskirts of Kilkelly, were members of the IRA committed to the fight. The war against the British was raging and all of Ireland seemed up in arms.
Secret meetings were held in kitchens around the village and youngsters were given the honour of looking out for the enemy. Any blue shirts were spied on and reports of their movements were sent back to the branch.
“Members of the IRA in Shammer at the time passed on messages and reported back on Blueshirts in the village. Underground bunkers were spotted around the countryside with one in Shammerbawn,” noted one local.
George’s parents, Tom ‘Yank’ and Winnie McDermott, a native of the bordering village of Barnacogue had returned from America to a plot of land on the banks of the Siuleen River, donated by Tom’s sister. Tom was a stonecutter and Winnie ran the village shop, rearing ten children. The shop was something of a landmark in Shammer, where people from both sides of the river, Shammer Ban and Shammer Dubh met to play cards and talk politics. While the youngsters played handball against the gable wall, held boxing matches in a nearby field or tied up a couple of old socks as a football. Like many houses of its time the Harrison homestead was overlooked by the tricolour, which proudly flew from a post along the riverside. A Sinn Féin banner also flew in the village, with the words The Thomas Ashe Cumman, Sinn Féin and United We Stand. In 1916 Thomas Ashe led the rebels and was one of the last to surrender. He was deemed a hero after his arrest and conviction when he went on hunger strike. In later years Harrison became close friends with Paddy Logan, a comrade who had been on hunger strike with Ashe.
Republicanism was rife in the small village. A company of the IRA was founded, commanded by Martin Casey, a native of the area and a Sinn Féin cooperative was organised, of which Tom Harrison, George’s father, was a member. But George’s first hands-on experience of the War of Independence was late one night when his home was raided by the Black and Tans. Butter was taken from his mother before the soldiers threw George into a corner for wearing a green jumper. This experience stayed with him throughout his life and further increased his hatred for the British.
When Martin Casey led an attack against the Black and Tans in Kilkelly and burnt their station to the ground he was captured but efforts to negotiate between the British and the IRA led to his release. Harrison stood along the bonfires, as Casey was welcomed back into the village as a hero. This accompanied with the fact that the Civil War claimed a Shammer native, Michael Duffy, a cousin of Harrison, when he sustained gun wounds fighting with Irish Government troops led to Harrison’s growing republicanism. The environment in which he was reared was one raging with the republican movement and those who fought for their country were deemed to be heroes. Harrison’s own role in the republican movement first began when he delivered copies of An Phoblacht to homes around the village. Rarely did a week pass that George’s views on the affairs of the world did not appear in some publication or other and no later than the morning of the day he died, he penned the following sentiment for the inclusion in the newspaper ‘Saoirse’, of which he was a founding member.
May the spirit of those who suffered in the torture chambers
Of the Empire of Hell animate us with enough strength to
Free the land of our heart’s desire.
In dedication to all my comrades, the living and the dead
It was tradition that youngsters would join the army and at the age of 16 George Harrison joined the IRA, he was attending weekly meeting and running messages between local IRA units. He was trained to use a rifle in derelict buildings before being taken out to a nearby bog to fire two rounds of ammunition.
But the hopes of the Shammer unit were never fulfilled and the East Mayo Brigade never saw any real action. In the mid-30’s Harrison crossed the Irish sea where he did ‘pick and shovel’ work and at harvest time he, like many other Irish, picked potatoes on the English farms. Money was scarce at the time and while the Harrisons were reasonably well off, the few pounds sent home by George were welcomed.
George set foot on Shammer soil in 1938 before leaving his homestead for the last time to emigrate to the supposed land of opportunity. The Kilkelly man served in the US army from April 1944 to February 1946 attaining the rank of corporal and in the 1940’s he became active in numerous Irish-American organisations. He was an avid member of the James Connolly Club and it was during this time that he became friendly with Liam Cotter. The Kerry native, a seasoned member of the IRA, shared Harrison’s goal for a united Ireland disconnected from British rule.
Cotter and Harrison were close comrades, always anxious for news from the home front. Until his death, three months ago, Harrison was in contact with home at least once a week. Kathleen Knowles McGuirk, former General Secretary of Sinn Féin, received a phone call from Harrison every Sunday looking for an update on the Northern situation. He was also in contact with friends from Shammer with every conversation ending with the expression ‘Up Shammer’. Harrison never forgot his home place and when he and Cotter were approached by the IRA to supply weapons to his native country, they agreed but not without some hesitation. It was the death of Paddy McLogan, a friend of George’s that spurred the two men on. Suicide was suggested at the time but Harrison was suspicious and feared the M15 was behind his death.
It was in the 1950’s that his role in the IRA deepened and he began to supply guns to the IRA. When the troubles began in the North of Ireland he became the IRA’s main gunrunner supplying more than 3,000 weapons and one million rounds of ammunition to the IRA over three decades. Handguns, Armalites and Bazookas were all sent to Ireland but George Harrison was unrepentant to the end.
“We got everything we could lay our hands on and sent them to Ireland. It wasn’t easy, you had to rely on people coming over.”
George De Meo, an Italian neighbour of Harrison family, George had moved his parents and brother to Brooklyn in 1949, appeared to have strong mafia connections and was interested in guns, running a gun store outside the city. With De Meo connected to arms shipments for Cuban rebels, it wasn’t long before he became a crucial link in the Chain, supplying Harrison with arms for the IRA.
Despite having close encounters with the law, thousands of weapons were brought to the hands of IRA members in Ireland, all passing through George Harrison. However, the Harrison network was brought to a sudden halt in 1981 in an FBI sting operation, known as Operation Bushmill. The charge was gunrunning, the cast of characters might have come straight out of a film and the plot gimmick would have made the most experienced directors proud. It seemed like a cast- iron case against the IRA supporters but Harrison and four others were acquitted of illegal gunrunning. In defending the five, their attorneys had put the CIA on trial. The five Irish-born defendants could not be guilty of crimes against the United States Government, they claimed, because for 25 years the silent partner in their gunrunning operations had been the Government, specifically the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Thanks to evidence provided by a source connected to the CIA the five men had a simple defence and it worked.
When it was suggested during the court hearing that he had only been running guns for six months, Harrison was outraged. So much so in fact that his lawyer, shrewd, silver-tongued Mayo born Frank Durkan, told the Judge: “Your honour, the prosecutor has just charged my client with running guns for six months. My client feels somewhat insulted. Because as the Government well knows, he had aided and abetted and supplied arms to the rebels in Northern Ireland for a quarter of a century.”
Harrison and the other four IRA gunrunners were described as terrorists but to the end they argued that they were not terrorists but patriots, Irish patriots and patriotic Americans as well. They claimed that they had served the US in World War 11, Korea and Vietnam but they insisted that they would never turn their backs on the land of their birth.
The trial made for interesting viewing with a number of interesting character witnesses. 86-year-old Samuel P. O’Reilly took to the stand. The freedom fighter had been among the people in the GPO during the Easter Rising. Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, who sent a message from Ireland to be read at Harrison’s memorial, described Harrison and Falvay as among “the finest people living in this country, people who would never do anything that would dishonour either the country they were born in or the country they live in”. Her sentiments had two jurors in tears as she left the stand.
The jury accepted their unsubstantiated claim that the CIA was backing them.
“Up the IRA” declared George Harrison as he raised his arm like a victorious boxer after the trial, unrepentant to the end.
It was the cause of Irish freedom that fuelled his zeal; he fought for Ireland’s Independence from Britain all his life referring to Britain only as “the British Empire from Hell”.
Speaking at George Harrison’s memorial service in Manhattan, Frank Durkan spoke of Harrison’s charitable nature outside his usual activism.
“Harrison’s passion for the cause of the underdog was exceeded only by his dedication to the relief of their suffering. He was a soft touch”.
In spite of his avowed antipathy to many of the policies of organised religion, he gave generously, whether it was his new coat to a homeless man on the streets or a committee working to restore a church in his native village. Today people across the country enjoy the fruits of his labour. The church in Kilkelly was repaired with help from Harrison. Ballintubber Abbey and the stone to the Spanish Civil War Martyr Tommy Patton on Achill Island also received funding from the Mayo man.
Times have changed since Harrison set foot on Irish soil and so has political opinion. A lot of people on the island changed their political opinions but not George Harrison. He didn’t change one whit and what’s more he was proud of it. There was a time when being an IRA gunrunner was enough to get you a medal and a postage stamp with your name on it but that Ireland that Harrison left in the 1930’s has changed dramatically. Guns have been swapped for debates and bombs for peace talks, something George Harrison and his compatriots hadn’t in mind and he made his feeling on Northern Ireland clear. He described electoral politics as a dangerous distraction and believed that physical force was a means “to drive the Brits out, lock, stock and barrel”. As far as George Harrison was concerned the peace process was a “sell-out”.
Despite your political opinion one must agree that Harrison was determined in his cause to the end. He had survived a hail of bullets fired on him in a subway and was the victim of several muggings. He threw in his lot with Republican Sinn Féin and the Continuity IRA in 2004, when RSF was put on the US State Department foreign terrorist list. He promised to increase his donations to the party and was reported to say, “If the Bush administration want to jail me, I’m ready.” Harrison’s nurse, Priscilla McLean, was in Manhattan on the day he died ensuring that he had an absentee ballot to vote for John Kerry in the election for President in November. One message from Ireland, recited at Harrison’s memorial service summed up his shrewdness. He was always one step ahead.
“For 70 years of his adult life he led them a merry dance and lived and died on his own terms.” George Harrison died in New York at the age of 89, never having returned to his family cottage in Shammer for 66 years. Some believe that he made a vow never to return to the hearth of his home place until a united Ireland had been carved out.
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