Missing in Action (26 page)

John O’Mahony photographed with his Irish United Nations Veterans Association (IUNVA) beret and blazer (photo J O’Mahony)

The Mullins family photographed at a family celebration in the 1990s. Front row, left to right, are Mary Kent, Catherine Mullins (Pat’s mother) and Theresa Healy. Back row, left to right, are Dinny Mullins, Peggy Dwane, Tom Mullins and Nelly Kelly. (Photo: Mullins family)

JOHN O’MAHONY

John returned from the Congo heartbroken at the loss of his friend, Pat Mullins. He decided that a career in the army was no longer for him and he transferred to the Defence Forces reserve list in 1962 and remained there until 1972. His last service in uniform came in August 1969 when he was called up as part of the Republic’s response to the outbreak of ‘The Troubles
’
in Northern Ireland.

After a brief period working in London, John returned to his native west Waterford and pursued a career in farming. A keen student of modern technology and foreign farming developments, he was at the forefront of the revolution within the Irish agri-sector, which was underpinned by mechanisation and crop growing technology. He successfully switched the focus of his parents’ farm from dairy to tillage.

John rose to become chairman of the Irish Farmers Association’s (IFA) powerful National Grain Committee and took part in major EU farm negotiations in France and Belgium. An avid student of nature, he also began compiling data on Irish weather conditions in the 1980s and is now one of Ireland’s most respected ‘self taught’ meteorologists, regularly featuring on programmes including RTÉ’s
Pat Kenny Show
.

John became active in the Irish United Nations Veterans Association (IUNVA) on its foundation and he has made it his life-mission to highlight the case of his friend Pat Mullins.

He has donated all his royalties from
Missing In Action
to IUNVA’s Post 25 Fermoy branch.

Married to Sheila (née Healy), John has two sons, Brian and Desmond. Brian is based in Tulsa in the United States while Des lives in Tipperary and is a senior executive with Musgraves. John and Sheila have one grandchild, Maeve. John continues to farm at Kilmore outside Tallow, County Waterford.

ART MAGENNIS

A native of Ardglass, County Down, Art Magennis served two tours of UN duty in the Congo as a captain, eventually commanding the Armoured Car Group of the final Irish detachment in the Congo at Kolwezi. He went on to serve on UN peacekeeping missions in Cyprus. He retired from the army in 1979 just as Ireland’s UNIFIL deployment to Lebanon was escalating. Art retired with the rank of commandant after forty years loyal and dedicated service. To those who served with him, he remains an officer of rare ability and extraordinary loyalty. He has devoted his time since retirement to helping to highlight the courage shown by Tpr Pat Mullins that day in September 1961 and to the fact that the Mullins family deserved closure in terms of a renewed effort to locate his remains. Despite his years, Art Magennis annually attends all the ceremonies for Tpr Mullins, including the memorial Mass in the trooper’s native Kilbehenny. Art Magennis’ remarkable memoirs were an invaluable aid to this book. Art has five daughters, Carmel, Mary, Barbara, Maeve and Fiona. Maeve followed her father into the Defence Forces and, after serving on UNIFIL peacekeeping missions in Lebanon, retired with full military honours.

TIM CAREY

The Skibbereen-born soldier successfully recovered from his wounds and returned to Ireland a hero for his actions in the Congo. Having joined the army in 1952, he decided to retire in 1967 and founded a successful windows and joinery business in Fermoy where he made his home after being based at Fitzgerald Camp for most of his army career. The business is still run by his family. Tim Carey eventually decided to enter politics and ran for election to Fermoy town council. He was elected and served as Mayor of Fermoy in 2006. He remains a regular attendee of Post 25 (Fermoy) Irish United Nations Veterans Association (IUNVA) functions and memorials. Along with Art Magennis, Tim Carey was instrumental in piecing together the true sequence of events of 14/15 September 1961. On 10 October 2009, Tim was amongst a huge crowd attending the unveiling of a special memorial wall by the Queen of Peace Church in Fermoy – the old Fitzgerald Camp barrack chapel – which commemorates all those associated with the former base who died while serving with the United Nations or the Defence Forces. A total of 114 names are inscribed on the memorial covering Ireland’s UN operations from the Congo to Cyprus and from Lebanon to East Timor, Bosnia and Liberia. Trooper Pat Mullins is the sixteenth name on the list. Fittingly, the memorial faces out towards the now-vanished sports field where Pat Mullins once starred as a young army hurler.

DES KEEGAN

A native of Dublin, Des joined the Defence Forces in February 1959 on his sixteenth birthday. After transferring to the 1st Motor Squadron in Fermoy, County Cork, he served in the army for twenty-one years before retiring with the rank of Squadron Sergeant. His career included three tours in the Congo, two tours in Cyprus and one tour in Lebanon. Having retired from the army, he was briefly employed in the private security sector before working for twelve years with electronics firm SCI in Fermoy and then retiring again – this time for good. He is one of the founder members of IUNVA’s Post 25 in Fermoy and devotes a lot of his time to assisting retired soldiers. His son is currently serving in the Defence Forces and has undertaken tours of Lebanon, Chad and Liberia.

THE MULLINS FAMILY

Denis (Dinny) Mullins took over the running of the family farm at Boher on the Cork-Limerick border. The farmhouse is much the same as the last day Pat saw it in 1961 – save for such modern ‘innovations’ as electricity and running water. As with all other Irish farms, the horse and plough is now a fast-fading memory and the entire holding is highly mechanised. Dinny married Marie and the couple have one son, Ned.

Tom Mullins, like Pat, worked for several farmers in the Kilbehenny area before getting a job with Mitchelstown Co-op. He married Mary and they have two children, Pat and Siobhan.

Mary and Tom Kent still live at Caherdrinna, midway between Kilworth and Mitchelstown, in the house where John O’Mahony and Pat Mullins enjoyed welcome breaks from training at nearby Lynch Camp in early 1961. Mary’s son, Eamon, who Pat never met, has taken a keen interest in his uncle and the Congo. Mary and Tom have two other children, Joan and Pat.

Margaret Mullins married Jim Dwane (RIP). The couple were blessed with seven children, Patricia, Donie, Mary, Margaret, James, Catherine and Eamon.

Nelly Mullins married Mike Kelly (RIP). They were blessed with two children, Eamon and Anthony.

Theresa Mullins married Pat Healy and they have one son, Patrick.

PATRICE LUMUMBA

The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s first post-independence prime minister was dead within six months of making his inflammatory speech in front of King Baudouin in June 1960. Lumumba’s fate echoed that of the Congolese people both past and future. Hunted like an animal, captured, tortured, humiliated, ignored by UN troops who could have helped him and finally handed over to his hated enemies in Katanga, Lumumba’s killing still haunts modern Belgium.

Research by investigative reporter Ludo de Witte in the 1990s revealed that Belgium was deeply complicit in Lumumba’s death and had the tacit support of the United States who viewed Lumumba as leaning dangerously towards Communism. His revelations prompted a parliamentary inquiry in Brussels – although four decades after the event, there was little left but rhetoric.

Even back in January 1961, Lumumba’s killers realised that absolutely no trace of the prime minister’s corpse could be allowed to remain after the execution. After the application of mining acid and funeral pyres, not a single physical trace was left of the Congo’s charismatic leader. Yet rumours still swirled around the Congo that his killers – before destroying his body and those of two friends also executed – insisted on digging the bullets out of his brain to keep as grisly souvenirs. Lumumba’s political career may have lasted just over two years, but he remains to this day one of Africa’s most fascinating – and studied – post-colonial leaders.

Elisabethville, the city where he was flown to meet his brutal death, was eventually renamed ‘Lubumbashi’. The city remains a wealthy mining outpost in a country still torn apart by poverty, bloodshed, corruption and tribal strife.

CONOR CRUISE O’BRIEN

Just months after the vicious fighting involving Ireland’s 35th Battalion at Elisabethville and Jadotville, Conor Cruise O’Brien resigned from his position with the United Nations in Katanga. To this day, debate rages over his role in the UN’s switch from peacekeeping to peace-enforcing operations.

In 1962, O’Brien wrote
To Katanga and Back
, a book which offers a fascinating insight into both UN and African politics at the time – though it also justifies O’Brien’s own position and actions. Throughout his life, O’Brien remained sensitive to comments about his role in the Congo – even using the letters page of
The Irish Times
to challenge some writings about Katanga and UN actions.

After a brief stint in academia in Ghana and then New York, O’Brien decided to return to Ireland and was elected a TD in 1969 for the Labour Party. He was later appointed as a cabinet minister in Liam Cosgrave’s 1973–77 administration. O’Brien – who quickly earned the nickname ‘The Cruiser’ – proved a talented, effective, if controversial politician, who was always willing to speak his mind on issues, sometimes to the dismay of both his Labour and Fine Gael colleagues. He was particularly noted for his visceral opposition to the IRA and the growth of militant republicanism. It was ironic that, despite a family background in journalism, O’Brien was a trenchant supporter of the use of censorship to tackle republicanism in the 1970s.

Having left full-time politics, after losing his Dáil seat in 1977 following Jack Lynch’s landslide Fianna Fáil victory, he burnished his reputation with an outstanding career in journalism both in Ireland and Britain where, for two years, he served as editor of
The Observer
.

His razor-sharp assessment of current affairs included coining the legendary Irish phrase GUBU (Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented) when a murder suspect was discovered in the Dublin flat of Charles Haughey’s then attorney general.

O’Brien – a columnist with the
Irish Independent
– also found time to write several critically acclaimed books including a biography of Edmund Burke and his own best-selling memoirs.

However, in later life O’Brien shocked friends and contemporaries alike by publicly embracing Unionism and joining the UK Unionist Party. He would later resign. Three years before his death in 2008 at the ripe old age of ninety-one, he rejoined the Labour Party. O’Brien was also an ardent supporter of Israel’s right to exist and defend herself from attack.

JOSEPH MOBUTU

The former Christian Brothers student was the true winner of the brutal events of 1960–1964. Mobutu knew that the Force Publique or Congolese army was the key to the country’s future – and he used it to sideline all the country’s leading pre-independence politicians. His Katangan rival, Tshombe, did him a huge inadvertent favour by killing Patrice Lumumba. As Mobutu well grasped, the blood of the prime minister’s assassination would forever stain Tshombe’s rule.

On the withdrawal of the UN from the Congo in 1964, Mobutu allowed a brief interval before moving against Tshombe who fled into exile where he died.

Mobutu milked the Congo’s riches for all they were worth and turned the country into his personal fiefdom. He knew that the key to the survival of his regime was proving a staunch ally of the West during the Cold War.

Mobutu sought to give the Congo a new start by renaming the country ‘Zaire’ and even funding the lavish, if gaudy, staging of the World Heavyweight Championship bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in 1974. The fight went down in sporting legend as ‘the Rumble in the Jungle’. All Mobutu actually managed to achieve was a lingering sense of exploitation thanks to his son who sped around the centre of Kinshasa in front of the world media in a series of expensive Italian and German sports cars.

The end of the Cold War spelled the end for Mobutu, though he managed to cling on to power until May 1997. However, his desperate attempts to bolster his regime are now blamed for helping trigger the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda.

Mobutu died just four months after fleeing to Morocco. He is buried in Rabat and the Congo has shown no desire for his remains to be repatriated.

MOISE TSHOMBE

The execution of Patrice Lumumba tainted Tshombe’s regime in Katanga, which from that point, was doomed. With Belgium and other pro-Katanga countries unwilling to fund mercenaries in a war against UN troops, the secession was effectively over.

Reinforced UN troops captured Katanga in 1963 and Tshombe fled into exile in northern Rhodesia. By 1964, when an all-inclusive political deal had been hammered out to settle the Congo’s problems, Tshombe returned from exile in Spain. He quickly discovered that Mobutu and the Congo’s titular head, Joseph Kasavubu, had no intention of allowing his long-term involvement in Congolese politics.

Tshombe was dismissed from the government within months and fled the country a second time after realising that Mobutu was about to charge him with high treason. In 1967, a Congo court imposed the death penalty on Tshombe. Two years later, Tshombe hit the headlines again when the plane he was travelling on was hijacked and diverted to Algeria. Tshombe was arrested and later placed under house arrest in Algiers. The Algerian government briefly considered deporting him to the Congo. But fear of western displeasure at such an effective death sentence stayed their hand and Tshombe remained under house arrest.

Tshombe died in 1969, reportedly from a cardiac condition that triggered a massive stroke. Belgium – where the authorities never forgot that he was a loyal ally – later agreed to have his body flown to Brussels for burial. Mobutu’s regime maintained that Tshombe was en route to Africa, intending to take part in a military insurrection, when his plane was hijacked. Two earlier insurrections were brutally put down.

BOB DENARD

After his exploits with the Katangan gendarmerie, the French mercenary continued to ply his trade throughout other war-torn parts of Africa.