Tributes to Bik McFarlane

The funeral took place of Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane on Tuesday, 25 February. Mourners, including many former prisoners, Sinn Féin TDs and MPs and Belfast City Councillors, and others who had travelled great distances, gathered outside his home just off the Cliftonville Road in North Belfast. There, Father Gary Donegan conducted prayers and a blessing. Matt Molloy (formerly of Planxty, The Bothy Band and The Chieftains) played an extremely moving lament as the patriot’s coffin was draped in the national flag.

Bik’s daughter Tina, who has Down syndrome and who was regularly to be seen in the company of her father, told mourners that she ‘loved her daddy and will miss her daddy so much.’ Bik and Lene’s other daughter Emma played the guitar and sang ‘Caledonia’. Thomas, the eldest, comforted Lene throughout, although there was a light moment when one of the married couple’s favourite pop songs, ‘Happy Together’ by The Turtles, blasted out along the street. Another favourites of Bik’s, ‘Wish You Were Here’ by Pink Floyd, played on speakers as the cortege moved off.

On the Falls Road a crowd of several thousand mourners had gathered at the gates of Milltown Cemetery. Bik’s Tricolour-draped coffin was removed from the hearse and was carried to his resting place, shouldered by many former comrades, and accompanied by a guard of honour of ex-prisoners.

At the carpark, just below the Republican Plot where hunger strikers Bobby Sands, Joe McDonnell and Kieran Doherty are buried, the procession paused for a minute’s silence before journeying to the far end of the cemetery where Carál Ní Chuilín chaired proceedings and introduced Bik’s close friend and long-standing comrade, Gerry Kelly, who gave the oration. Both men had escaped from the H-Blocks in the mass breakout in September 1983 and had later been captured together in Amsterdam and extradited back to the North. Gerry became very emotional towards the end of his speech as he spoke about his friend.

Among the many tributes were those from former life prisoner Nigel McDermott, a Sinn Féin constituency officer from Strabane; and from Aodhán Ó’Adhmaill, former chair of Ógra Shinn Féin.

Nigel McDermott
Like thousands from across Ireland I attended Bik’s  funeral yesterday. What a very sad but powerful day it was.  At times it was deeply emotional. Whose heart wasn’t breaking when they heard Tina’s speech? Gerry Kelly’s eulogy touched us all. Who will ever be able to hear ‘Wish you were here’ by Pink Floyd again without thinking of Bik?

But what struck me most about yesterday was the level of respect for the man that brought thousands out to accompany him on his last journey. It was a measure of Bik’s humanity and leadership that so many old comrades came together to pay their respects. Everywhere you looked you saw men and women tapping each other on the shoulder, a slight pause, and then a big smile, a hearty handshake and a genuine and spontaneous hug as recognition dawned for old comrades they haven’t seen in twenty, thirty or even forty years.

These were friendships that were forged in the heat of battle where they shared near-death experiences; on prison landings and cells where they shared deprivation and beatings. Bonds formed when they dug in the dark, clautrophobic tunnels or hid under floorboards living on their nerves whilst on the run after the big escape.

We are all slowly advancing in years and many carried walking sticks and were slow on their feet as time cruelly taunts us. Some still bore physical scars from the war. But for those two or three hours yesterday we were all in our teens and early twenties again as we slagged each other about grey hair, bald heads, expanding bellies and everything else. Everybody was wondering how Ned Flynn’s hair is still so black!

At times, old eyes, misted with cataracts, or memory blunted by time, struggled to make connecttions or muster names. However, once the penny dropped those old eyes became full of bedevilment, the head became clear as a bell and old buried memories came rushing back.

There were enquiries about such and such and did he ‘weigh’ back or what’s she at now. There was all sorts of loose talk and reminiscences about those who hadn’t made it this far. If the Brits had bugged the Felons yesterday afternoon what stories they would have heard!

And inevitably Bik was remembered in many of these yarns.

Of course many were at the funeral who did not share or support Bik’s (or indeed Sinn Féin’s) analysis and strategy but they too wanted to salute a great leader who, whilst defending strongly his own beliefs, never fell out with anyone. To their credit they even stood to respectfully listen to Gerry’s oration, just in the spirit of Bik. He would have loved that they did that. That was the mark of the man.

Thankfully, missing yesterday were all the so called ‘Patriots’ who have popped up on social media, in Coolock and in communities across Ireland spouting their poisionous anti-people and anti-republican nonsense, that is the opposite of everything Bik believed and struggled for.

The real patriots of ireland thronged Linden Gardens and Milltown yesterday. In their youth, with everything to lose, and after only a weekend’s rudimentary training in an isolated camp or a few hours in a back bedroom, went out and faced down an Empire.

Bik was one of the leaders on the frontline of this fight and all of us will miss him sorely.

I never heard as much laughter at a funeral as I did yesterday and the bold Brendan wouldn’t have had it any other way. He loved people and he loved the craic and slagging. He would have been delighted that so many old warriors had the chance to come together. He would have been humbled at the young people who were there who have been inspired by his life well-lived.

We all came away sad yesterday as we felt his loss and we knew that in our hearts the next time we will meet again will almost certainly be at a funeral and there will be one less. However, we came away thankful to Bik for giving us the chance to meet again but above all else we came away thankful to Bik for leading us and giving a lifetime of struggle for a better day for us all.

How he will be missed.

Aodhán Ó’Adhmaill
We often write that we are saddened to hear of the death of someone, though hearing the news of the death of Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane, who passed away on Friday 21 February after a short illness, felt like a gut punch. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way: as I write through teary eyes, with his voice playing through my stereo, my phone is buzzing, notifying me of messages from friends who also loved him, and are also grieving profoundly.

I first met Bik in summer 2013, not long after I took the step to become actively involved in the Republican Movement. Like other newcomers to the Movement, I knew who he was: his lifelong involvement in the struggle for Irish freedom, the heroic role he played during the 1981 hunger strikes, and his famous 1983 escape from Long Kesh – previously considered the most secure prison in Europe – the story of which he was recalling the night we met. Yet despite this historic track record, Bik was as humble as they come – an absolute gentleman.

Like many of his generation, Bik was an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Born in Belfast’s Ardoyne to an ardently religious working-class family, it was initially the priesthood which attracted him. But the weight of being brought up in an apartheid state, and the desire to rise up and resist, swept eighteen-year-old Bik into the Irish Republican Army in 1969.

Finding himself imprisoned in Long Kesh in 1976, Bik refused to be broken by the British authorities, joining the no wash protests in 1978 and taking an active part in prison life. When Bobby Sands stepped down from his role as Officer Commanding (OC) of republican prisoners in the Kesh, it was to be Bik who replaced him. ‘I didn’t want the job,’ he once recalled, about the pressure of having to ‘make the call’ if a potential deal from British authorities came through. But he knew that this feeling ‘paled into insignificance’ compared to his comrades on hunger strike and their suffering families: ‘I steeled myself to do the necessary.’

Bik also rose to the occasion in September 1983, when, alongside Bobby Storey and Gerry Kelly, he helped mastermind the escape of thirty-eight republican prisoners through the front gates of Long Kesh, an event that Margaret Thatcher stated was ‘the gravest breakout in our present history’. Resuming his place in the struggle outside, he was recaptured in 1986, and by 1993 was Long Kesh’s longest-serving prisoner.

Had he not been brought up in a racist state that defended deprivation and inequality with violence, Bik may well have started off as a musician. But having learnt to play guitar after Bobby Sands was no longer there to perform and maintain morale, Bik carried his musical talents out from incarceration, quickly becoming one of the Irish rebel music circuit’s most recognisable faces until his illness.

Irish republicans are not very well known for writing or recording our own history, often conceding that ground to political opponents or a hostile media. In this light, it is all the more commendable that Bik not only penned a number of songs but played constantly across Ireland – performances made all the more powerful because of his republican credentials.

When Bik would play ‘Song for Marcella’, a beautiful tribute to his friend Bobby Sands (Marcella being not only Bobby’s pen name in jail, but the name of his little sister), the world seemed to stand still. Entire rooms fell quiet – it felt like Sands was in the room, and Bik speaking to him.

Bik also penned ‘Terrorist or a Dreamer’, which fiercely criticises the indifference of successive Dublin governments to the national question, promoting the aspirations of Irish republicans, and recognising the plight of working-class English people who often found themselves in the British Army as a way of sustenance and no more.

In September 2015, I headed to Paris with a group of Sinn Féin members to attend the Fête de l’Humanite, the legendary music festival organised by the newspaper of the French Communist Party. We had a tent in the festival complete with bar, merchandise stall and stage for live music, and Bik was flying-in to provide the tunes.

I was a bartender at the time, so my job was to look after that side of things. I did, however, have a more important task at hand – on the orders of Bik, I was to not let his pint drop beneath a certain level before I pulled him another.

I will never forget him playing ‘Wish You Were Here’ by Pink Floyd and thinking that the choice was somewhat random. Having finished, Bik must have felt the need to explain himself: ‘This isn’t a rebel song, but it fucking should be’. Looking from the bar at him, and noticing the poster of Bobby Sands behind him, I realised who he was thinking of as he sung it. A fucking rebel song indeed.

After the festival, we travelled into Paris proper. None of us had been before, and were a bit overwhelmed at first. Recognising this, Bik took us on the inaugural – perhaps only! – ‘on the run’ tour of Paris, walking us round the places he frequented after his escape, where sympathetic figures and veterans of the French Resistance were aiding and assisting various republicans evading the authorities.

A few weeks after getting back from Paris, I got a text – ‘Bik Thursdays?’ Bik was playing in the Felons Club in West Belfast that night, so we went down to see him. Enjoying the pints and the music, I heard Bik play the first notes of ‘Viva la Quinta Brigada’, Christy Moore’s classic tribute to those Irishmen who joined the ranks of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Introducing the song, Bik explained that a few weeks beforehand, he and I had sung it in a field in Paris with 500,000 communists, inviting me up to the stage to sing with him.

The internationalism was front and centre at his gigs, often hanging a Palestinian keffiyeh around his mic wherever he went. He especially loved meeting international comrades when they came to visit Belfast to give them the welcome he thought they deserved, and loved hearing of his music getting around. In 2022, a group of us (including Tribune’s Marcus Barnett) were in New York City celebrating St Patrick’s Day. We were in Jack Dempsey’s, at the foot of the Empire State Building, watching the Celtic match. Afterwards, the bartender fired the music on – lo and behold, on comes Bik and ‘Song for Marcella’. Obviously, I sent him a voice note, to which he shot back, ‘Great to hear that I’m also infamous in that neck of the woods!’

Most importantly for my generation, Bik was always a friendly face for young republicans. The nights where he, Bobby Storey and Gerry Kelly recounted the stories of the Great Escape were always great craic, and he would always make time for a yarn or a photo with younger comrades in attendance. He would never refuse when asked to come to speak to young republicans about his experiences of republican struggle and was always on hand to give advice and offer encouragement where needed.

In many ways, Bik McFarlane was the archetype of what a republican should be. Heroic yet humble, ordinary yet extraordinary, playing his part without fear and with fervour. I am fortunate to have known him, grateful to have called him a comrade, and to have spent time with him. Rest in power comrade, agus go raibh maith agat for the memories. I measc laochra na nGael go raibh a anam dílis.