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Independence, losing his arm, throwing a hand grenade at an armoured car somewhere in County Louth. The grenade went off and blew his arm off. I believe my [grand] father was involved in Raglan Street, even though he never told me that, but I know he was there and abouts. It was one of the famous ambushes in the Falls area, and, I mean, Raglan Street has drifted into oblivion because of all the other gun battles that have taken place since. The Raglan Street Ambush was small fry compared to some of the stuff that happened afterwards .
     
    These were the influences that shaped Brendan Hughes as he reached adulthood, and in that regard he was not very different from hundreds of other young working-class Catholics in Belfast at that time whose parents and grandparents could tell equally chilling stories about the violence of the 1920s and 1930s. In his and their lives the IRA was an organic part of their community, even if not all would approve or adopt their methods. The IRA was made up of neighbours, friends and even relatives, people they knew and respected and to whom they would naturally turn for protection from the worst excesses of Orange extremists. Distrust and dislike of the police, a feature of working-class life the world over, was so much more intense in such communities because, for Republicans and Nationalists, the RUC was seen as the political enemy, the force that imposed their second-class status and upheld Unionist rule and with whom co-operation was frowned upon.
    … we never had money to buy bikes when we were growing up so we would go to the scrapyard and buy scrap pieces and so forth to build an old bike and ride about the place. Four or five times I was arrested, for not having brakes, for not having lights, for playing football on the street … We used to play cards at the bottom of the street which was illegal as well … we’d have people out watching for the cops coming. But, as a Catholic family in the area, we were constantly singled out for special attention. I mean, I was arrested, God knows how many times, taken to court and fined five shillings or ten shillings for not having lights on the bike, for not having brakes on the bike, for playing cards on the street, for playing football on the street. But there was one time, we were playing cards on the street and the cops came and everybody bolted, but I was caught, and I was taken to the barracks and I was interrogated. I think I must have been thirteen, maybe fourteen. And I gave the names of the people who were in the card school with me and the cops brought me back to the house and left me there. They then came back and gave me a summons to go to court. My father asked me what did I say, and I told him and I got a powerful smack on the face, not for playing cards but for giving the names of the other people who were involved with me … Right through my early years, I had plenty of run-ins with the RUC, over petty little things, but I can’t remember anyone else, any of my other Protestant friends, being arrested as often as I was. And I think there was a great understanding there with my father, that he knew that there was a certain amount of discrimination going on here and that I was being picked on .
     
    Going to sea with the Merchant Navy was the next major influence on Brendan Hughes’s political journey. In South Africa he witnessed the cruel consequences of apartheid for that country’s black population and it hardened his hatred of injustice. His travels away from Belfast also brought his first brush with the British Army, albeit in very different circumstances than would be the case a few years later – although the reason for that encounter, his swarthy looks, would later give him his IRA nickname, ‘The Dark’. British troops first gave him that soubriquet, and it was later adopted by all who knew him, because they had no photographs of him, just an idea of what he looked like and the nickname stuck. His father had