Pat McClure

Pat McClure, known within the republican movement as Wee Pat, was the head of the Unknowns, a clandestine squad whose operations included escorting Jean McConville to her execution. He appears in the narrative both as a commander who helped shape the IRA’s campaign and as a man who withdrew from it, escaped public notice, and died under a civilian identity in the United States. The gap between those lives becomes part of the book’s larger problem: in a conflict whose participants often kept silent, even a central figure could remain hidden in plain sight.## The Unknowns and the London operation McClure led the Unknowns, a secret unit whose work included the sensitive task of transporting people across the border. The book places him within the IRA’s effort to extend its bombing campaign into England. Dolours Price argued that attacks confined to Northern Ireland were failing to bring the consequences of the conflict home to the British public. After Seán Mac Stíofáin approved her proposal, she worked with McClure and Gerry Adams on an initial plan to firebomb London. The devices failed when acid leaked from them, and Price, already in London, abandoned the mission and disposed of the faulty bombs in the Thames.

The plan shifted from firebombs to car bombs. When volunteers assembled at a call house in the Lower Falls, Adams warned that the mission would be dangerous and that those who joined might face the full force of the state. Around ten people remained after others left, including Price, Marian Price, Hugh Feeney, and Gerry Kelly. McClure wanted capable people leading the operation and selected Dolours Price to take charge. She described herself as its overall officer, with Hugh Feeney and Marian Price as her lieutenants. The recruits had no experience operating behind enemy lines, so McClure arranged for them to receive intensive training in explosives and timers across the border. These details establish his authority and practical role, but do not establish that he personally travelled with the bombing team or took part in placing the bombs.

Years later, Brendan Hughes recalled that McClure’s squad had ultimately belonged to Gerry Adams. When asked who held ultimate authority over the Unknowns, Hughes answered, “They were always Gerry’s squad.” His account distinguishes McClure’s day-to-day command from the larger chain of authorization Hughes attributed to Adams. The distinction matters in a book where operational responsibility and political responsibility are repeatedly contested, and where former participants’ recollections become evidence without removing uncertainty.## McConville and the Unknowns The most consequential account of McClure concerns Jean McConville’s abduction and killing. Brendan Hughes said that Adams knew of and approved the operation, and that the Unknowns, rather than a unit that did not yet exist, were assigned the sensitive task of taking McConville across the border. Hughes identified Dolours Price as one of the volunteers who escorted her. Price’s later account to Ed Moloney supplies details from inside the operation, while leaving some of its participants’ actions—and ultimately the identity of the person who fired the fatal shot—unresolved.

Price said that she had helped disappear people before being ordered to take McConville across the border. She maintained that McConville had admitted to informing for money, and described an alleged transmitter at McConville’s flat and an incident at an IRA barracks on Hastings Street. In Price’s account, volunteers saw McConville concealed behind a blanket with a slit through which she could observe men; one recognized her slippers. These allegations are presented as Price’s justification for the IRA’s decision, not as independently established facts. Price also said that when McConville was taken for questioning, she admitted informing. The book sets those claims beside the reality of what followed: McConville was a widowed mother who asked whether her children would be brought to her, a question that Price said made her realize, for the first time, that McConville had children.

Price recalled that she, McClure, and another volunteer collected McConville from a house in West Belfast and drove toward the border. Price told McConville she was being taken to the Legion of Mary, a Catholic charity, which would bring her to safety. After McConville had been held for four or five days, the group was called back to Dundalk. A local unit had dug a grave but, Price said, its members did not want to carry out the killing, perhaps because McConville was a woman. The three Unknowns were then left with the task.

Price said the three had only one gun and decided that each would fire a shot, so none could be certain of having killed McConville. She deliberately missed. One of the other volunteers fired the shot that caused McConville to collapse, and the local unit sealed the grave after the group left her there. Price’s account places McClure at the graveside, but does not identify him as the shooter. Later, Anthony McIntyre told the author that Price had also recounted the three-person execution to him off tape; like Moloney, he confirmed McClure’s presence but withheld the third participant’s name. According to McIntyre, that third person fired the fatal shot. The shooter remained unidentified in the account, preserving a distinction between what Price’s testimony establishes about McClure’s presence and what it does not establish about his precise action.## Withdrawal and a concealed life McClure’s involvement did not continue openly through the conflict. After the 1978 bombing of the La Mon restaurant, in which a dozen people were killed and thirty others badly burned, he was arrested and held by police for a week. A man interviewed by the author recalled that McClure was badly shaken and worried by what the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch appeared to know about the IRA. McClure announced that he was finished. People in Belfast later said he had left the country for Canada and died there, a version Brendan Hughes also repeated when discussing McClure’s disappearance in the 1980s.

That account proved wrong. The author learned through a friend that McClure had moved not to Canada but to the United States with his wife and children, not long after the La Mon bombing. His family settled in Connecticut. McClure died in 1986, aged forty-six; according to his obituary, his death followed a brief illness. For the five years before he died, he had worked as a guard at the Cheshire Correctional Institution, a high-security prison. The contrast between a former clandestine commander and his later prison job was striking to Hugh Feeney, a fellow member of the Unknowns who had bombed London with the Price sisters and gone on hunger strike. Feeney was quietly appalled at the possibility that the man he had revered had become a prison guard.

The book does not treat McClure’s departure as a simple, fully documented break with the IRA. It offers the arrest, his fear about police knowledge, and his declaration that he was out, while making clear that the subsequent account of his destination circulated inaccurately for years. The correction—from Canada to Connecticut—does not resolve the deeper silences around his activities. It instead shows how easily rumor could stand in for a record, even among people who had known him in Belfast.## A life recovered through testimony McClure’s presence in the story is reconstructed through other people’s memories and the records left behind. Price’s interview with Moloney places him at McConville’s grave. Hughes remembers him as commander of the Unknowns and describes the squad’s connection to Adams. The author also interviewed a man who had seen McClure after the La Mon bombing, then later learned that McClure’s family had lived in the United States. Each account restores a different part of his trajectory, but none offers a complete biography or settles every question about his role.

The uncertainty is especially sharp around the execution. Moloney removed the third participant’s name from his transcript because that person was alive, while McIntyre also declined to identify the individual. McIntyre offered one further clue: Adams had asked the person who fired the fatal shot to become his personal driver, but the person refused. That offer does not identify McClure as the shooter; the account specifically leaves the shooter unnamed. The distinction matters because McClure’s confirmed place beside Price at the grave can easily be blurred, in retelling, into a claim about who fired. The evidence supplied by these accounts does not support that conclusion.

The author approached McClure’s widow, Bridie, and their children, but they did not want to speak. The author wondered whether they had known that the husband and father they loved had also been involved in acts of wartime violence; the book marks this as a suspicion, not something the family confirmed. His obituary noted that he was a parishioner at his local Catholic church, prompting the author to wonder whether he had confessed before his death. That question, too, remains speculation rather than a reported fact. The family’s silence, like the unanswered questions about the third executioner, leaves the private meaning of McClure’s later life inaccessible.## Command, silence, and memory McClure’s role brings together two forms of obscurity. As head of the Unknowns, he helped organize a unit whose purpose and operations depended on secrecy. After leaving Belfast, he lived for years beyond the knowledge of those who believed he had gone to Canada. Even after his death, accounts of his part in the conflict emerged indirectly, through interviews, recollections, and a transcript whose editor had deliberately removed a name. The Unknowns were not simply obscure by accident: their clandestine work made concealment part of their structure, and that concealment shaped the later record.

The book’s account also places McClure within a post-conflict struggle over who may speak, what can be admitted, and how republican history is remembered. The Belfast Project interviews were designed to be sealed until participants died, allowing former combatants to speak with a candour they believed public life did not permit. Hughes connected that candour to his anger at Gerry Adams’s denial of his IRA past and described the denials as a betrayal of those who had died. McClure’s own story reaches the reader through that same fragile system of private testimony: claims are preserved, but sometimes names are withheld, memories conflict, and what a participant knew cannot be separated neatly from what later accounts report.

The epigraph’s observation that wars are fought again in memory gives McClure’s narrative a particular force. The violent campaign belongs to the past, but its interpretation continues through testimony that can accuse, defend, obscure, or fail to settle the record. McClure is not presented as a fully recovered subject whose life resolves the larger mystery. He is a commander whose responsibilities are visible, a participant placed at a grave by multiple accounts, and a man whose later life was misreported for years. His biography makes the book’s central tension concrete: the past can be excavated, but the surviving evidence does not always permit a final account.