PADDY McMenamin reckons he knows about 40 people who lost their lives in the conflict. They include “school friends, informers, hunger strikers... all sorts”.
He recalls poignantly at the end of the 1960s sitting on a wall with three young friends in Turf Lodge as they contemplated their futures.
He’s the only one that survived the Troubles – Norman Campbell was shot dead by UFF in 1972, aged 19, five weeks before he was due to marry his Protestant girlfriend; Michael Kearney was 33 when in 1987 the father-of-five was killed by the IPLO during its feud with the INLA; Paddy's brother-in-law Kevin McCracken was shot by a British soldier in 1988 while preparing to attack an army patrol.
In his newly-published memoir, From Armed Struggle to Academia, the 68-year-old recalls a largely innocent childhood, followed by the turbulence and upheaval of his late teens, then a 20-year period from the 1980s characterised by comparative mundanity and routine – though by no means without incident.
Over the past two decades, he has re-engaged with education, fulfilling academic potential evident from an early age but relegated behind more pressing adolescent priorities.
Today, Co Galway-domiciled Patrick McMenamin BA PGDE MA looks back on a life that began in Tigers Bay in north Belfast, before his family settled in the west of the city.
He was the only one among his mates to get the 11-plus, going to St Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School on the Glen Road.
Paddy was 15 in 1969 and like many of his peers, got involved in rioting.
He was scooped aged 17, incarcerated first on the prison ship Maidstone and then in Long Kesh. The IRA’s 1972 ceasefire saw he and many fellow inmates released, however, after hostilities resumed a matter of months later Paddy was back inside with a conviction for possession of explosives.
He was a model republican prisoner, insofar as he plotted escape and sought to educate himself, devouring the works of Ho Chi Minh, Marx, Michael Collins and James Connolly.
“For me, that was my thing. I’d always loved reading, and I read everything,” he recalls.
He was also editor of the Cage 18 news sheet – An Fuascailteoir.
“I have 12 of them, they survived Long Kesh and were smuggled out into Belfast,” he says.
“Since then they have been to Donegal and are now with me in Galway, and NUI Galway are interested in adding them to the special collection for students to see.”
Through the fences in the exercise yard at Long Kesh, he struck up a relationship with loyalists Gusty Spence and William ‘Plum’ Smith.
“They were in the cage next door and we would talk to them regularly. Smith was an interesting character, someone I’d regard as a socialist, and he was keen to learn Irish,” remembers Paddy.
On his release from prison, he remained active in the IRA but in 1977 retreated across the border into Co Donegal, concluding that paramilitary life was not for him.
“There’s this myth that you can never leave the republican movement but I did. I just said ‘bye’ and walked away,” he says.
“I was tempted to return to the IRA’s ranks during the hunger strikes and was prepared to join the bombing campaign in England before I had second thoughts.”
He raised his three, now adult, sons in Donegal and in his adopted home of Letterkenny found work as a machine operative with German car parts company Kirchhoff’s.
A friend and colleague encouraged him to take computer classes and after volunteering for redundancy in 2003, Paddy later moved to Galway with his new partner and re-entered education.
With an arts degree, a post-graduate diploma and Masters under his belt he has found work subbing as a teacher and more recently been employed as an examiner for the junior leaving certificate.
Paddy has also survived a brain haemorrhage and twice endured open heart surgery – his memoir is suitably reflective.
“It’s my story but it could many people’s story,” he says.
:: From Armed Struggle to Academia published by Rivers Run Free Press will be launched at the Felons Club on Belfast's Falls Road tonight.
