Mallie And McGuinness

One response to “Mallie And McGuinness”

1. The Broken Elbow | January 26, 2017 at 4:37 pm | Reply

   From Mick McGovern, co-author of ‘Killing Rage’, the story of Eamon Collins’s life in the IRA

   You asked me some months ago, Ed, if, beyond the unpublished Ewins chapter, I had any other material that had failed to make the final version of Killing Rage.

   Nothing sprang to mind immediately, but your link to Eamonn Mallie’s nostalgic reflections on Martin McGuinness triggered some nostalgic reflections of my own today on what is the eve of the 18th anniversary of Eamon Collins’s murder.

   Collins told me a story indirectly connected to Eamonn Mallie that wasn’t included in the book. According to Collins, Mallie had a close male relative who entered PIRA’s ‘South Down Command’ when Collins was still active in the early to mid eighties. Let’s call this relative ‘X’.

   According to Collins, from the very beginning of his PIRA career, ‘X’ had, for various reasons, not been highly regarded by his fellow volunteers, who had used him mostly for relatively minor functions. For this reason, so far as Collins knew, ‘X’ had not been personally involved in shootings or bombings (except perhaps peripherally as part of the support chain).

   Collins had nothing to do with ‘X’ personally, but he became aware at one point that ‘X’, through his own incompetence, had caused the loss of a few weapons. I can’t remember the details of the story.

   However, as you know, the loss of weapons did not tend to go down well with the republican family, who invited ‘X’ to Dundalk to explain himself. This meeting turned into a brutal and intimidating interrogation, because, as always in such cases, the suspicion that ‘X’ might be a tout hung in the air.

   By the end of the interrogation, according to Collins (who’d been told the story by his then OC, a Belfast exile nicknamed ‘Monty’), ‘X’ had been left howling for mercy. Fortunately for ‘X’, his comrades acquitted him of being a tout, although they never properly trusted him again.

   In a passing reference to Eamonn Mallie, Monty said later to Collins something along the lines of, ‘I can’t hear that cunt’s squealing voice on the radio without thinking of his prick of a relative begging for mercy.’

   Ah, yes, the good old days

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