On-the-run status

On-the-run status was the Irish Republican Army’s term for living underground while evading capture or assassination. For Brendan Hughes, commander of D Company in the Provisional IRA Belfast Brigade, it meant staying within a city where his identity and whereabouts were difficult to conceal, while facing threats from loyalist paramilitaries, the police, the British Army, and the Official Irish Republican Army. His experience makes the status more than a matter of hiding: it was a precarious way of remaining in the conflict and among the people who depended on him.

Meaning and Conditions

Hughes had joined the Provisional IRA in early 1970 and succeeded his cousin as D Company’s officer commanding after his predecessor was killed by the Official Irish Republican Army. At twenty-four, Hughes was a wanted figure to multiple armed organizations. He lived underground, moving from house to house and seldom sleeping in the same bed two nights in succession. The book contrasts this urban existence with the relative possibility of staying hidden for years in the countryside: in Belfast, where people knew one another, a person on the run might be fortunate to last six months before being found.

The danger was not abstract. Soldiers repeatedly went to Hughes’s father’s house looking for him, and once took his father for questioning. After two days of interrogation, his father was made to walk home barefoot. Hughes was also told that the soldiers did not intend to arrest him but to kill him. The account of Official Irish Republican Army leader Joe McCann, shot by British troops despite being unarmed, makes that threat concrete: after the first shots wounded him, the soldiers fired again to finish the job.

The 1972 Ambush and Its Aftermath

On 2 September 1972, Hughes stood with associates from D Company opposite a derelict house on Leeson Street, in the heart of his territory. A green van approached, passed close enough for him to glimpse an unfamiliar, nervous-looking driver, and continued down McDonnell Street towards Grosvenor Road. Hughes was unarmed: an associate had borrowed his usual handgun to steal a car. He sent a runner to fetch another weapon. Five minutes later, the same van returned. It drove past again, then stopped; its rear doors opened and men in civilian clothes sprang out. One carried two .45s, and two others had rifles. They opened fire as Hughes ran, pursuing him onto Cyprus Street while bullets struck the houses. He escaped by zigzagging through the maze of small streets.

Hughes reached a call house on Sultan Street, but the danger followed him inside. As he crashed through its front window, broken glass severed an artery in his wrist. The house was no longer safe, so colleagues hurried him to another nearby building. A hospital was out of the question: the British Army had sent men to kill him, and no sanctuary there could be relied upon. With Saracens patrolling the neighbourhood, Hughes was trapped indoors and losing blood while his comrades tried to find medical help.

After half an hour, Gerry Adams arrived with a local heart surgeon. The doctor had come in such haste that he had no equipment; those present fetched a needle, thread and tweezers. Working without anaesthetic, the surgeon searched blindly in the wound, caught the severed vessel and stitched it. Hughes could not cry out, because soldiers were still looking for him. During the procedure, a Saracen stopped outside the house and lingered, its engine rumbling as those inside waited to see whether armed men would break through the door. Adams’s personal arrival was itself risky: he was a marked figure who, according to the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch, had held senior Provisional IRA commands in Belfast.

The attack revealed that the British Army had been watching Hughes from much closer than he knew. Soldiers in civilian dress had spent the night inside the abandoned house across from the street, using it as a covert observation post. A later-declassified army account described the operation as a “snatch attempt,” rather than an attempt to assassinate him. The soldiers had failed to kill or capture Hughes, but they had learned what he looked like. Until then, his father had destroyed family photographs that might identify him, and Hughes had sometimes walked past sandbagged military posts without being recognized. The episode ended that protection: the army now had his face.

Staying in Belfast

Going underground did not mean withdrawing from the community or the operations that made Hughes a target. He could have crossed the border to Dundalk, where republicans in hiding found refuge, but he remained in Belfast among his D Company men and maintained the unit’s relentless pace. Gerry Adams later emphasized the effect of that choice: “Local people knew he was there.” Hughes’s presence on the streets, despite the danger, gave those around him an incentive to persist.

After the ambush and emergency treatment, Adams insisted that Hughes leave Belfast because another attempt on his life was likely. Hughes went to Dundalk and booked into a bed-and-breakfast, but the respite lasted only a week. He was impatient to return to the city; a brief absence felt like an eternity amid the rapid succession of events. The episode exposed the tension built into his status: survival called for distance, while his authority and sense of responsibility drew him back to the people and work from which distance might protect him.

That ability to anticipate danger also shaped Hughes’s response to the coming mass internment raids. In late July, a preliminary round of searches and arrests struck him as an effort to update the authorities’ intelligence. The construction of a large prison camp at a former air force base further suggested that a mass roundup was approaching. Hughes recognized the signs and went underground with his men before the sweep. When the raids ended, the IRA announced that the operation had captured hardly any members of the Provisional IRA. For Hughes, being on the run was therefore not simply a condition imposed by pursuit: it also became a way to evade a state operation he had seen coming and keep his unit beyond its reach.

The Paradox of Remaining Visible

Hughes’s underground life coexisted with an unusually public role in D Company’s work. He moved between safe houses and avoided sleeping in the same bed on consecutive nights, yet he did not direct operations from a distance. Guided by his father’s principle that a person seeking others’ effort should work alongside them, Hughes went on missions himself. The account describes D Company carrying out as many as four or five operations a day, ranging from bank and post-office robberies to planting bombs and shooting at soldiers. Hiding kept him beyond immediate reach, but his participation repeatedly brought him into the streets and the risks that made concealment necessary.

That operational tempo also helped sustain the organization around him. Hughes regarded successive operations as momentum for the armed struggle: each success could draw new followers. In this sense, remaining in Belfast was not only a refusal to abandon his men; it kept the commander visibly involved in the activity through which D Company recruited and maintained its presence. His status therefore held together two opposing demands: to disappear from the authorities’ sight, and to remain present enough to lead.