Divis Tower

Divis Tower was the twenty-storey remnant of the Divis Flats complex in West Belfast, a place where the physical aftermath of urban neglect and the intimate legacy of the conflict converge. By the time Brendan Hughes lived there, its upper levels were still occupied by the British Army, while Hughes remained on the tenth floor. The tower’s significance lies in that unusual arrangement and in its position within the book’s narrative: it is Hughes’s home after the armed campaign and peace agreement, and a landmark passed by Jean McConville’s coffin as her family carries her to burial.

The Tower and the Demolished Estate

The tower survived the demolition of the complex’s low-rise blocks. In 1993, following activists’ protests about the appalling conditions, the blocks were demolished and replaced by redbrick houses with small cement gardens. The account describes the estate’s decline in concrete terms: during the 1980s, a self-appointed demolition committee damaged vacant flats, removing baths, sinks, toilets, electrical fittings and doors, and breaking windows. The government eventually bulldozed the low-rise buildings. The twenty-storey tower alone remained, an isolated vertical fragment of the former development.

That remnant was not yet an ordinary residential building. The British Army occupied its roof and top two floors, while Hughes lived below them on the tenth. The Army did not begin moving out until 2005, as part of a demilitarisation process. The tower therefore held distinct forms of residence and control within the same structure: military presence above, and the former republican fighter’s home below. The narrative does not present the building as a neutral backdrop; its surviving height and divided occupation make the unsettled transition from conflict to peace visible in the cityscape.

Brendan Hughes’s Home and Enclosure

Hughes’s flat placed him high above the streets of West Belfast, where he was remembered as a war hero. Even after bombings had stopped and the Good Friday Agreement had brought peace to Northern Ireland, Belfast’s walls still carried murals of armed-struggle figures, including the young Hughes. His public image and private circumstances had diverged: his hair had gone grey and thin, he lived on disability benefit, and he struggled to find steady work. He had performed menial building-site jobs but had never established a sustained civilian career. His isolation in the tower belonged to this changed life, not simply to the geography of his home.

The building’s enclosed form offered him a kind of refuge. Hughes liked Divis Tower because its boundaries gave him a space he could control, and he found comfort in its resemblance to a prison cell. His bitter greeting to visitors, “Welcome to my cell,” turned the flat into an image of confinement; his observation that “You never really leave prison” extended that image beyond the tower to life after imprisonment. At times he stayed inside for days, drinking and smoking alone. His doctor advised him to stop drinking, but he could not. The tower thus offered temporary containment without resolving the anxiety and bleakness that shaped his life there.

A Landmark of Loss and Memory

The tower’s meaning also emerges through its relation to Jean McConville’s disappearance and the recovery of her body. The low-rise flats had been the place from which McConville was abducted, connecting the history of the estate to the violence that remained unresolved decades later. In 2003, thirty-one years after she vanished, her body was found. When her coffin was reburied that November, her children accompanied it through West Belfast and paused for a moment of silence as they passed Divis Tower, where Hughes still lived.

That pause brings two histories into the same frame without making them equivalent: the family’s public act of mourning and the former IRA commander’s continuing residence in the landscape associated with the abduction. Father Alec Reid attended the funeral, but some people accompanying the coffin found West Belfast strangely quiet, as if local residents had been told to stay away or were again shunning the McConville family. The tower stands in this account as a visible point along the funeral route, while the subdued reception around the procession suggests that the return of the body did not itself end the community’s silence or the family’s isolation.

Narrative Significance

Divis Tower gathers the book’s post-conflict tensions into a single location. Hughes’s tenth-floor flat is a private refuge, but its prison-like boundaries also express his sense of being unable to escape the past. The military occupation above him, continuing until the demilitarisation process of 2005, makes the transition to peace incomplete in material terms. And when McConville’s coffin passes the tower, the site links the present-day landscape to a disappearance whose criminal case remained open. The tower is therefore at once a surviving piece of the demolished estate, a home shaped by Hughes’s isolation, and a landmark through which the unresolved history of West Belfast is carried.