Free Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland by Ed Moloney

Moya. She and Mundo were very close and after the gun battle had settled down and the British troops had pulled out, we assembled back in the call house in Sultan Street. Moya was really upset; she was crying uncontrollably, and I took her by the shoulder, gave her a rifle – a Garrand rifle it was – and brought her outside. And there was a helicopter hovering above and I just ordered her to fire at the helicopter and while she was doing this she was crying uncontrollably, but she kept firing at the helicopter. Not that it was going to do any good, she wasn’t going to bring the helicopter down, but it helped her to control her emotions …
     
    While D Company fatalities were relatively few during Brendan Hughes’s time, IRA members were often wounded or injured during attacks, sometimes badly. Taking such casualties to a local hospital such as the nearby Royal Victoria Hospital risked the victims being arrested and so, unless the injuries were life-threatening and required urgent treatment, the IRA preferred to spirit such people across the border to a hospital in the Republic. One early attack on a British Army base in Mulhouse Street Mill in the Grosvenor Road area would set the pattern for the future.
    We organised an ambush, throwing blast bombs and nail bombs over [the walls] trying to pinpoint Brits coming out on patrols. So five or six nail bombs were thrown. Bang! Bang! And ——, his nail bomb bounced off the corrugated-iron wall onto the Grosvenor Road, blew up, and one of the nails went into his spine. He was lying in the middle of the Grosvenor Road but we had all bolted off. Big Fra McCullough was driving one of the cars, he did a U-turn, a handbraker, pulled up in the middle of the Grosvenor Road; the Brits were firing at us now, and he pulls —— into the passenger seat and we get him into the call house in Gibson Street. We put him on a mattress on the floor, under the windowsill; he couldn’t move, he was in agony. Everything was quiet. The Brits were patrolling the areas. We could hear their voices over the radio. And ——’s lying under the windowsill in agony, and we’re trying to keep him quiet. I went over the yard wall, over to Divis, made contact with his da. I thought he was going to die and I told him the situation. We kept him all night. There was a doctor’s surgery at the corner of the street and the next morning I went in, held a gun to the doctor’s head, and said, ‘We need you down here’, and the doctor says, ‘There’s no need for the gun, I’ll come.’ So I put the gun back in my belt and brought him down to ——. This is only a couple of hundred yards from the barracks we tried to blow up. The doctor examined him and said, ‘If you move him, he’s dead; get him to the Royal, phone an ambulance and get him there.’ I said, ‘What chance has he if we try to move him?’ He replied, ‘You’re risking his life cause that nail can kill him.’ So I sent for his da and I said to him, ‘We can get him to the Royal, it’s only across the street, or we can get him across the border. If we move him we may kill him, but if we send him to the Royal, he’s going to jail for twenty years’, and his father said he’d leave it up to me to make the decision. It was the last thing I wanted. So, I decided, ‘Fuck it, I’m not giving the man up’, and I organised a van with a mattress in the back and a medic out of the St John’s Ambulance Brigade who was prepared to travel, and fair play to him, he did. So, the Brits had pulled out of the area by this time and remember we were only forty yards away at most from the place we tried to blow up. The van pulled up and we got a stretcher in and got —— onto the stretcher. I explained to —— what was happening and he agreed to go along with whatever I said. We’d already made contact with the South Armagh people, and they arranged a route for us. And we got him across the border and into Dundalk Hospital. I’d a