Joe Lynskey

Joe Lynskey, the Irish Republican Army volunteer known as the “Mad Monk,” was at once an unlikely gentle figure and a man implicated in a killing ordered out of private jealousy. His story turns on that contradiction: the former monk whom younger volunteers regarded as an oddball became an intelligence officer who concealed his own role in an attempted murder, and the friend who later drove him away did not tell him that he was being taken to his execution. His disappearance remained unresolved even after the search for his remains led investigators to two other men buried in the same grave.

Background and Character

Lynskey grew up on Cavendish Street, off the Falls Road, and, as he approached forty, still lived with his parents and sister. During the 1950s he trained as a monk at an abbey in Portglenone. He took a vow of silence and rose before dawn to pray, but eventually left the order and joined the Irish Republican Army. The monastery had, in the book’s account, left him out of step with younger volunteers: they saw him as an oddball and called him the “Mad Monk.”

That nickname captured only part of him. Dolours Price became fond of his kind eyes and gentle, awkward manner. She described him as mature but immature in the ways of the world. Brendan Hughes, by contrast, thought of him as “a strange fella,” an odd artefact of an older generation. Lynskey was smart and erudite, a chain smoker who carried a book about his hero, the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins. He could also be aloof. His mildness and eccentricity were not evidence that he stood outside the movement’s violence: he served as a Provisional IRA intelligence officer, and the account of his private conduct makes that contrast central to his portrayal.

The Cracked Cup Shooting

The secret that changed the meaning of Lynskey’s place in the movement was his affair with Joe Russell’s wife. After Russell was shot at his home, the identity of the gunman remained uncertain. Russell had been at home when a man came to his front door, shot him, and fled. Russell told Hughes that he believed the attacker belonged to the Stickies, the Official IRA; Lynskey, a soft-featured intelligence officer, endorsed that explanation.

An internal inquiry by the Provisional IRA uncovered a different account. Lynskey had ordered a younger gunman to kill Russell, his fellow volunteer and romantic rival. Lynskey told the gunman that Russell had become an informant, and the gunman undertook the mission on that stated basis. At the door, however, he lost his nerve: he shot Russell in the stomach and ran away rather than carrying out the killing as ordered. When Hughes and his men began asking about the attacker, they consulted Lynskey in his capacity as brigade intelligence officer. Rather than disclose his own involvement, he blamed the Stickies. The false explanation therefore came not from an uninformed bystander but from the officer consulted to help investigate the attack he had instigated.

The shooting led to Lynskey’s court-martial. The book identifies him as the first person disappeared during the Troubles after being court-martialled for ordering a hit on his love rival. That sequence does not erase the difference between the intended killing and the gunman’s failed execution of it; it does show how a personal affair, a claim of informing, and the movement’s internal machinery became entangled in the same case.

Price, Friendship, and Disappearance

Price’s affection for Lynskey gives his disappearance an intimate, rather than merely organizational, dimension. When she arrived at his sister’s house, she told him that there was a meeting in the Republic of Ireland that he needed to attend. She did not tell him he was being summoned to his execution. The journey was thus both an act of friendship and a deception that carried him towards death. The account leaves the moral weight of that combination unresolved: she was the friend who came for him, but she could not, or did not, warn him what the journey meant.

The book later places this episode beside Price’s other journeys as a driver for the Unknowns. In the 1992 film The Crying Game, Stephen Rea played an Irish Republican Army gunman who guards a doomed British soldier and ultimately cannot pull the trigger. The scenario recalled the work Price had done two decades earlier: she had driven her friend Lynskey to his death, and had also taken Kevin McKee to a house in County Monaghan. The comparison does not make the situations identical; it draws attention to the gap between intimacy in a car and the lethal task assigned to the person at the wheel.

Years later, Lynskey remained an intrusive presence in Price’s memory. While driving with her sons in the back seat, she sometimes glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her dead comrade in place of them. She told Allison Morris that Lynskey was “a gentleman” and said she should not have allowed him to go to his death; she should have helped him flee the country. “It devastated me, it still does,” she said. “I should have done more.” Her words make clear that the journey had not become a settled episode for her. The act she remembered as a failure to save a friend continued to shape how she spoke about the disappeared.

Public Acknowledgment and the Missing Name

Lynskey’s absence from the public record became conspicuous when the Irish Republican Army acknowledged in 1999 that it had disappeared people and released a list of names. That list included Seamus Wright, Kevin McKee, and Jean McConville, but not Lynskey. Before publishing the story in Voices from the Grave, Ed Moloney had informed the Lynskey family that Joe had been disappeared by the Irish Republican Army. The family’s knowledge of his fate therefore came not from the organization’s list but from an outside journalist.

In February 2010, shortly before Voices from the Grave appeared, Gerry Adams was asked about Lynskey in a long interview with the Irish News. Adams called him “a neighbour of mine.” Asked whether he had been friends with Lynskey, he replied, “Oh, yeah. I knew him and he disappeared.” He also encouraged anyone with information about the disappearance to come forward. Price reacted angrily to what she heard as a casual account of an atrocity, as if Lynskey’s disappearance had simply happened rather than been ordered. Her anger was sharpened by her belief that Adams himself had ordered it. The contrast between Adams’s brief public description and Price’s enduring sense of personal responsibility shows how a single disappearance could be recounted in radically different registers: as a neighbour’s fate, an organizational secret, and a friend’s unanswerable regret.

The Search and Its Reversal

In autumn 2014, the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains received a tip that Lynskey’s remains might be in a particular area of County Meath. A team led by retired Manchester detective Geoff Knupfer searched with a sniffer dog, a forensic anthropologist, and ground-penetrating radar. Lynskey’s niece Maria expressed cautious hope that he would be found and given a proper burial. The search continued for months without locating him.

The following summer, investigators clearing earth by hand after finding bones discovered a second set of human remains beneath the first. The two bodies had been buried together, one above the other. The searchers had been looking for Lynskey; instead, they found Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, the young triple agents whom Price had driven to their deaths. Maria was devastated by the discovery, while also feeling happiness for the families of Wright and McKee. At a requiem Mass for Wright, his sister Breige appealed for information about Lynskey and the other victims still missing. The reversal gave physical form to the way the disappearances remained connected: the search for one absent man uncovered two others, while Lynskey’s own burial place remained unknown in the evidence presented.