SAOIRSE32

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Click pic for full view of mural photo by CRAZYFENIAN

Comrades-In Memory of Volunteers Jimmy Quigley, Eamonn McCormick, Teddy O’Neill and Michael Magee

Danny Morrison

IRA Volunteer Jimmy Quigley–2nd Battalion, Belfast Brigade–shot dead on active service on Friday 29 September 1972

In this extract from his book, ‘All The Dead Voices’, Danny Morrison introduces us to IRA Volunteer Jimmy Quigley who became his best friend

**The previous extract concerning Danny can be read >>here

Jimmy Quigley

On sunny afternoons after school my friends and I sat against the gable of the barber’s shop at the corner of Beechmount Avenue, eyeing the girls making their way home. A few times I noticed a tall youth dander through the entry opposite us and I instantly recognised him as the fella who had put the guns in my house back in July. One day I winked at him conspiratorially and he smiled back.
Shortly afterwards I switched to St Peter’s Secondary School and it was there that I again met sixteen-year-old Jimmy Quigley and learnt his name. He was in the class a year below me and was beginning his ‘A’ Levels but because he was in the IRA and I was holding an arms dump we had to be careful about our friendship. It wasn’t until the guitar case with its arms and ammunition was removed in early 1971 that we could begin to openly go around together.
However, almost immediately he disappeared from the scene, having been sentenced to six months in St Patrick’s Boy’s Home for possession of petrol bombs during a riot in Ballymurphy.
Jimmy smoked but had little pocket money and since I was working in a bar I could afford to buy him cigarettes which I brought or sent up to him.
By the time he was released internment had been introduced and though I had moved on from his school to college we began socialising together and he often stayed in our house, especially after we had been to dances. I would throw a single mattress on the floor, parallel to my bed, for him to sleep on, though we spent most of the night talking away into the early hours.
Most of my memories of him are associated with his beautiful smile and his infectious laugh. We had great adventures together and talked mainly of two subjects: love and politics. On one occasion after a dance we persuaded two girls, Pauline and Eileen, to come and stay in my granny’s.
“Of course there are beds in every room,” I lied.
They each told their parents they were staying in the other’s house. They arrived with two teabags and no nightdresses. It was late October, below freezing, and we had no coal or electric fire. When they discovered there was only one double bed they accused me of being “a dirty bastard” and took Jimmy under the sheets between them whilst I lay covered in a coat, shivering on the living room floor. “If only he had told the truth,” I heard Jimmy pronounce smugly to the two schoolgirls with no nightdresses.
The girls left at eight in the morning and Jimmy and I left for school and college. “If only you had told the truth,” he laughed as we departed. A few days later, my mother, who occasionally checked my granny’s, baffled me by asking what had happened to the Sacred Heart picture on the wall. I checked the house and it was true, it had gone, been stolen. When confronted, Eileen confessed that Pauline had put it up her coat on her way out.
“She said its eyes had followed her and that she had never seen one of those pictures before where God watches you as you go past.”
Jimmy and I investigated. We went to Pauline’s house and confronted her but she denied having taken it. In the end, I had to go to the OC of the IRA in the Clonard area. He called to her house and demanded that she hand it back. She again denied having it. But her brother - who had been trying to get into the IRA - confirmed that he had seen a new Sacred Heart up on her bedroom wall. When she was out he stole the picture back - it was his first operation - and was accepted into the IRA.

Though I had held guns for the IRA and would, in a juvenile way, defend their actions against critics whom I thought offered no alternative, I had qualms about many aspects of IRA activity. I plagued Jimmy with various scenarios and asked him to convince me of the morality of this or that act. I think I use to exasperate him. One night in his house, when I was demanding answers (and, simultaneously, worrying that I might be undermining his convictions), he said, “Danny. I volunteered to be led, not to lead.”
As 1971 came to a close Jimmy and I went to a New Year’s Eve ceili in Clonard Hall. It was a great dance but at the stroke of midnight many girls started crying because their boyfriends were in jail and this put us in a sombre mood. Jimmy and I walked up the Falls Road to George’s Shop, which stayed open all night, to get his cigarettes, then on the way back to my house we were stopped and searched by Scottish soldiers. At 3.30 am I wrote in my diary, “sit talking, listening, communicating with Jimmy.”
He asked to write something in my diary and I handed it to him. He wrote:
“I hereby declare that I, Jimmy Quigley, shall from this day forward, the first of January, read as many books, articles and writing as I possibly can. Dated, 1st January 1972.
“I don’t know how 1972 shall take me but I shall make this my year of years, and I hope I shall be able to say at the end of this year that I am satisfied with everything I have done, said, read and thought. I also hope that I will make the same resolution at the beginning of every year…
“I shall make my mark on this earth and I hope I am worthy of this mark.
“Your health! To my improvements and my ambitions. Up the Republic!”
To which I added, “YES”.

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Danny Morrison

IRA Volunteer Jimmy Quigley–2nd Battalion, Belfast Brigade–shot dead on active service on Friday 29 September 1972

In this extract from his book, ‘All The Dead Voices’, Danny Morrison writes about the death of his best friend, IRA Volunteer Jimmy Quigley

The Death of Jimmy

I was downtown sitting in Kieran Meehan’s car whilst he was signing on for the dole. He came back to the car and said, “Somebody told me they heard that the fellah shot dead was Quigley from the Flats.” As we came up Divis Street I stopped a member of the Official IRA who told me that it was Jimmy who had been killed. My stomach turned and I felt sick. I asked Kieran to bring me home. The house was empty.
I went up to the bedroom where he and I had lain for hours talking and laughing and arguing and I lay down and cried convulsively. When I heard my sister Susan and mammy come in I rushed down to tell them. Susan and Jimmy had gone out a few times together earlier that year and Susan burst into tears.
Jimmy and I had been in A Company together but he moved to D Company in the lower Falls to be with Frank, his brother, who had escaped from Musgrave Hospital after being wounded.

On Friday, 29 September 1972, Mrs Quigley had been taken shopping by Jimmy, who had just received a cheque for £70, as part of a school grant. “He bought me a fur coat in Sinclair’s, and he got himself a new sports coat, shoes and shirt. We called into Sawyers’ and bought a load of white fish and cream buns because we were in the money! He left me at a quarter to eleven and I got the bus in Castle Street to go up to the shop of my hairdresser’s, Janet Farrell, to get my hair done for the weekend.”
Frank was the quartermaster of D Company and gave Jimmy the Garand rifle he had asked for. Jimmy, who was almost six foot tall, put the muzzle down one leg of his trousers and tucked the butt under his armpit and covered it with his jacket.

Jimmy had planned to ambush a patrol coming out of Divis Flats. He had chosen a second floor derelict attic above Caulfield’s chemists at the junction of Albert Street and McDonnell Street as his firing position. He was accompanied by a 17-year-old youth who himself had been seriously wounded by British soldiers some months earlier and was still recovering. He carried a .45 Webley revolver.
“We were up in the attic about ten or fifteen minutes and a couple of times Jimmy changed position to have a look out of the window,” he said. “I was sitting at the back of the room. Jimmy was watching the flats opposite and the road, then he said, ‘They’re out of their Saracen!’
“I said, ‘Can you see any, can you take a shot?’
“He looked out and said, ‘Hold on, hold on.’
“We then heard noises and only afterwards did I learn that they were actually beneath us. I said, ‘Fuck! What’s that?’
“He said, ‘Look out the back window and see if you can see anything.’
“I left him and went to the back and pulled open a piece of corrugated iron. I put my head out and a soldier, who was on the flat roof, put a rifle to my head. I was expecting to be whacked at any second. I shouted, ‘British army! What are youse after! What are youse after! I’m only collecting lead!’ hoping to alert Jimmy. There was another soldier, a black soldier, on the roof as well. The soldier pointing his gun at me said, ‘Get out on the roof! Get out on the roof!’
“I still had the Webley in my belt and he shouted, ‘Search! Search!’ for me to open my coat. All of a sudden we heard four large bangs, shots being fired. I think that was when Jimmy was hit. Nothing happened but then within sixty seconds, it could have been longer, it could have been shorter, there were more shots and the other soldier, the black soldier, had looked out to see what was happening and was shot dead.
“The soldier who had been guarding me suddenly took off. I couldn’t believe it. I then escaped across the walls, in through a house, out the front and through a crowd of people rushing up the next street.”
A rumour swept the Lower Falls that the raiding party had desecrated Jimmy’s body and thrown it from the window to the ground, and this fuelled the anger of local people and sparked off widespread rioting. Later that same day in the same area the British army shot dead twenty-year-old Patricia McKay, a member of the Official IRA, who was unarmed at the time of her death.

Two months after Jimmy’s death I was interned. One night he came to me in a wonderful dream, bursting with happiness and laughing. I knew him for but two years and can only explain my great sense of loss by the fondness and love his personality generated in those around him.
Often I think of him in relation to the thousands of things I have done since 1972; the pleasures he has missed - fatherhood, relationships; the music he would have loved; the life he would have led. There is not a day I do not think about him. He can never leave me.
“When people talk about closure I don’t know what that really means,” said Tommy, Jimmy’s younger brother who was in jail and refused parole to attend the funeral. “I don’t think there’s a point in time when you are healed from it. It is still a raw wound and always will be. There’s never been a sense of a ‘normal’ mourning process… It has no ending.”

I spoke to Mrs Quigley when I came to write this. She said, “I often wonder what Jimmy would have ended up working at, how things would have been, if the Troubles hadn’t come along.”
“It’s hard to believe that it is thirty years ago,” I said to her.
“Jimmy’s forty eight this year,” she whispered.