White, Harry

by Patrick Maume

White, Harry (1916–89), IRA activist, was born in Blackwater Street off the Grosvenor Road in west Belfast, one of ten children (five sons and five daughters) of Billy White, water technician with Belfast Corporation, and his wife Kathleen (née McKane). White's paternal grandfather and an uncle served in the British army, and his youngest brother later joined the RAF. White's father, a tough disciplinarian, was anti-British (blaming them for loyalist violence) and disliked Joseph Devlin (qv), but supported the Northern Ireland Labour Party and in particular Harry Midgley (qv). A brother-in-law of White, Hugh Downey, was NILP Stormont MP for Belfast (Dock) (1945–9). White's maternal relatives were more republican in their sympathies and claimed to be related to the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly (1854?–1880). Billy White was also a skilled violinist. His love of music was shared by his wife and all their children. As a boy Harry sang in the choir of Clonard Monastery; he played in a ceili band as a teenager and was a lifelong aficionado of Irish music, and played the banjo and other string instruments (often smuggling guns in their cases). As a young man he was also an active member of Granuailes GAA club, playing hurling and Gaelic football.

The family were expelled from their home by loyalist rioters in 1921 and moved to Ward Street off the Ormeau Road. In 1928 the Whites moved to a larger house in Distillery Street off the Protestant-dominated Donegall Road, but were again expelled by rioters in 1936 and moved to Andersonstown. Harry White was educated at St Paul's national school on the Falls and St Gall's school on the Kashmir Road. After leaving school he worked as a messenger boy and a technician in a film-processing laboratory before becoming a plumber's apprentice in 1933 through his father's influence.

White joined Na Fianna Éireann in the late 1920s and served as a personation agent for a republican candidate opposing Devlin in Belfast Central in 1933. He also took part in the October 1932 outdoor relief riots and in a subsequent protest march through Belfast led by Midgley. He formally joined the IRA in 1934. Harry was the only sibling actively involved in the IRA (though some gave outside assistance); he attributed his views to various influences, including an aunt, two De La Salle brothers who taught him, and admiration for internees released from the prison ship Argenta in the mid 1920s.

In June 1935 White was arrested when the Garda Síochána broke up an IRA training camp at Gyles Quay, Co. Louth (half way between Dundalk and Greenore). It appears that he was one of a number of young men who were arrested while trying to escape with weapons and ammunition, and hence was treated more harshly than other attendees. White was sentenced to two-years' imprisonment but released in December 1935; solitary confinement in Arbour Hill prison cured his previous belief that the southern government of Éamon de Valera (qv) was the natural ally of northern nationalists, and he was further embittered by the belief that the Irish government's publication of his true identity (he had given a false name) contributed to his family's expulsion from their home.

After helping his family to move, White spent eighteen months working in England, then returned to Belfast, where on 8 December 1937 he was arrested for what he maintained was a trumped-up charge of participating in a Fianna demonstration. Sentenced to six-months' hard labour, he was released from Crumlin Road prison in May 1938. In September 1938 he went back to England and became involved in an IRA bombing campaign, at first being trained in bomb making and later teaching classes (his pupils, on a visit to the Dublin area in April 1939, included Brendan Behan (qv)). In May 1939 White was sent to Manchester as operations officer, but went on the run after a newly prepared bomb detonated in his lodgings. In July–August 1939 he ran further training camps in Delgany and in Offaly, where he was arrested in August and sentenced to three-years' imprisonment (mostly served in Arbour Hill). On release at the end of 1941 he was immediately interned at the Curragh camp in Co. Kildare.

The IRA internees in the Curragh split into two factions on the question of whether communists (mostly pro-Allies after the invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941) should be ostracised as untrustworthy, with a minority (including White) trying to remain neutral. Early in 1942, Sean McCool, the IRA quartermaster-general, was interned – potentially disastrous for the IRA since he alone knew the location of many of its arms dumps. McCool persuaded White to memorise the locations of the dumps and then 'sign out' in April 1942 (obtain release by signing a statement accepting the legitimacy of the government), since his status as a malcontent might encourage the camp authorities to believe he was genuinely disillusioned with the IRA. White's doubts about breaching the IRA's prohibition on volunteers signing out were overcome by McCool's telling him that he should resign from the IRA before signing and apply for readmission when he contacted the organisation outside.

With his release, White began a period of violent activity which led to his being seen by IRA sympathisers as a hero – 'the man with six lives' – and by the government as a dangerous and highly wanted killer. After readmission to the IRA, White was appointed to the IRA staff as quartermaster-general by Charles Kerins (qv), and took a leading role in an abortive attack on Northern Ireland in reprisal for the execution of Tom Williams (qv). White attended a public demonstration organised by Fianna Fáil against the execution; when Kathleen Clarke (qv) denounced the Stormont government's action, White called out 'What about George Plant [(qv)]?' (recently executed by the de Valera government).

White was mistakenly believed to have participated in the murder of Detective Sergeant Dinny O'Brien on 9 September 1942 (for which Kerins was later executed; White claimed Archie Doyle, one of the killers of Kevin O'Higgins (qv), was responsible). On 30 September he accompanied another leading IRA man, Paddy Dermody, to the wedding of Dermody's sister near Ballyjamesduff, Co. Cavan; the ceili house was raided by police and in the ensuing gunfight Dermody and a detective were killed while White escaped. On 24 October police fired on White and another IRA man, Maurice O'Neill, as they left a safe house in Donnycarney on the north side of Dublin; in the ensuing exchange of fire, Detective George Mordaunt was killed. White escaped, while O'Neill retreated into the house, was arrested and rapidly tried and hanged for murder. Overcome by rage and desperation, White had to be prevented from giving himself up and taking responsibility in the hope of saving O'Neill, and from firing on a prominent Irish army officer as he drove to work. He was smuggled across the border and took up a position on the staff of the IRA's northern command.

White's fearsome reputation at this time is illustrated by a story told in his own memoirs. He presided over the court martial in a rural location of an IRA man suspected of betraying arms dumps; White always maintained that the man was guilty, though other IRA men entertained serious doubts. The prisoner was convicted and sentenced to death, but at this point White (who had eaten some tinned meat of dubious provenance) was struck down by food poisoning. The other IRA men present flinched from carrying out the sentence, whereupon the prisoner declared that since White would have shown no such hesitation, White's illness represented divine intervention on behalf of an innocent. (It should also be noted, however, that at least one fellow internee from the Curragh remembered him as a gentle and taciturn musician and found it hard to reconcile this with his gunfighting exploits.)

The remnant of IRA activists was ground down by security-force pressure north and south; after the arrests of Eddie McAteer (qv) in Belfast in November 1943 and of Kerins in Dublin (June 1944), White, as the only staff member at large, became nominal chief of staff. With his Belfast safe houses discovered (including one where he had written the clandestine newssheet Republican News), White's only remaining function was to receive clandestine messages from prisoners in Crumlin Road. He moved to Altaghoney, near Claudy in Co. Londonderry, where he posed as a discharged merchant seaman turned farm labourer and played the banjo in the local Magnet Dance Band at various venues including Orange halls. He also worked as a barber, using skills acquired in prison, and succeeded in obtaining gelignite from the police to blast rocks on the farm; after his eventual arrest, the local RUC sergeant and constable were disciplined for failing to recognise him from the 'wanted' poster in their barracks.

As the war came to a close, increasing numbers of IRA internees were released and began to reorganise the movement. It was too dangerous for White to associate with known republicans, so he took no part in this reorganisation and his nominal position as chief of staff was largely disregarded, to his annoyance.

On 20 October 1946 White was arrested at Altaghoney. Three days later he was taken to the border and handed over to the Gardaí, under legally questionable circumstances (an unsuccessful habeas corpus action was undertaken in the hope of saving him from execution by getting him back to Belfast). The military tribunal that tried O'Neill had ceased to exist at the end of the war in Europe, and though the special criminal court sentenced White to death on 18 November 1946 for the murder of Mordaunt, on 5 February 1947 his defence team (Seán MacBride (qv), Con Lehane and Noel Hartnett (qv)) succeeded in persuading the appeal court that his offence should be reduced to manslaughter. Republican sympathisers publicised his case (organising a defence fund) and used it as a rallying point for the regrouping IRA. White was sentenced to twelve-years' imprisonment and joined other IRA prisoners in Portlaoise prison on a blanket protest (refusing to wear prison clothing), but was released with the remaining IRA prisoners in March 1948 as one of MacBride's conditions for the participation of Clann na Poblachta in the first inter-party government.

On release, White settled in Dublin (in later years he lived in Santry) and went back to working as a plumber; he also maintained his lifelong presence on the traditional music scene. Shortly after release he was dismissed from the IRA at the behest of Patrick McLogan (1899–1964) for refusing to participate in a revival of the Sinn Féin party (apparently because he suspected this indicated a move away from militarism). White remained active in the republican movement, but since McLogan was prominent in its leadership his scope for involvement was limited. After the end of the border campaign (1956–62) and the installation of a new leadership, White became more active; in February 1963 he was one of the founding members of the Dublin Wolfe Tone Society, intended as the nucleus of an IRA front organisation.

White's nephew Danny Morrison (b. 1953; a prominent Sinn Féin activist in the 1970s and 1980s, later a writer) stated on White's death that: 'His support was always for the freedom fighters on the ground and though domiciled in Dublin his heart lay in Belfast where his aid in 1969 was crucial to the defence of nationalist ghettoes' (An Phoblacht, 13 April 1989) – possibly indicating involvement in arms procurement. White was subsequently associated with the provisional republican movement. His memoir says almost nothing about his life after 1948; at his funeral a speaker stated 'many other stories and secrets are buried in the clay with him' (Saoirse, May 1989).

White was interviewed by J. Bowyer Bell (qv) and Tim Pat Coogan for their histories of the IRA. In 1985 White's (somewhat disorganised) recollections, as told to and supplemented by Uinseann MacEoin (qv), were published as Harry; they aroused considerable public attention by naming the killers of Kevin O'Higgins.

Harry White died 12 April 1989 in Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, after a sudden illness and is buried in the republican plot in Glasnevin cemetery. He and his wife Kathleen, later a leading member of the National Graves Association, had a son and three daughters.