When the British hanged Tom Williams over half a century ago, they consigned the Irish Republican Army man to romantic ballads and an unmarked grave.
Now his family and old comrades are fighting over the bones of the last IRA man to die by the rope.IRA supporters, who had campaigned for decades to move his grave from Belfast Jail to the IRA's most hallowed burial ground, were ecstatic when they learned last month that the British government had relented.
But Williams' relatives stepped in this week to reclaim their long-lost uncle, arguing that his bones shouldn't be used to score political points.
That has wounded feelings in a hard-line Catholic community that sees Williams as an uncomplicated symbol.
"The family have their rights, but people fought long and hard to get Tom freed from his jail grave. I don't understand," said IRA veteran Joe Cahill, Williams' cellmate 53 years ago.
Williams' execution and anonymous burial became the stuff of legend. "The Ballad of Tom Williams" is a regular sad offering for folk nights in Belfast bars.
"Brave Tom Williams, we salute you," they sing, "and we never will forget those who planned your brutal murder. We vow we'll make them all regret."
Williams was 19 and commanding the C company of the IRA's Belfast brigade. Cahill was one of his sidekicks when their unit fired at a police car on Easter Sunday 1942.
Police chased Williams, Cahill and the others into a house, where one policeman was shot five times and died. Williams was shot in the left arm and thigh.
Williams, who admitted shooting the officer, was hanged and buried inside Belfast Jail on Sept. 2, 1942. Crowds of Protestants outside the jail walls sang "God Save the King" and accused Catholic women kneeling in prayer on the far side of the road of supporting Hitler.
Cahill, one of five IRA associates of Williams whose death sentences were commuted, watched the hanging from his cell window. Cahill rose to become an IRA commander in the early 1970s, was convicted of smuggling arms from Libya and today is national treasurer for the IRA-allied Sinn Fein party.
"Tom was a hero," Cahill says. "He gave his life so that others might live."
The IRA-Sinn Fein plots in Milltown cemetery in west Belfast form the epicenter of a culture steeped in martyrdom.
In 1964, the National Graves Association placed a stone there that reads "reserved for the remains of Lieut. Tom Williams IRA, hanged in Belfast Jail . . . and still interred there."
Queen Elizabeth II, using her royal prerogative of mercy, in August overruled the law condemning Williams to an unconsecrated grave. Britain's chief official in Northern Ireland, Sir Patrick Mayhew, revealed the decision in September, a year after the IRA's cease-fire.
Reburial in Milltown requires family approval, and this week Williams' closest surviving relatives refused. His nephew and namesake, Tom Williams, said the family didn't want his uncle to become a rallying point for IRA supporters.
"We would like as a family to be left to carry out the reburial in a dignified and quiet manner, without any interference from anyone," Williams said in a telephone interview from his home in County Louth, 50 miles south of Belfast across the Irish border.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
`The Ballad of Tom Williams'
Time goes past and years roll onward
Still a memory fresh I'll keep
Of the night in Belfast prison
Unashamed, I saw men weep . . .
Now he's marching to the scaffold
Head erect, he shows no fear.
While standing on that scaffold
Ireland's cross he holds so dear.
Brave Tom Williams, we salute you
And we never will forget
Those who planned your brutal murder
We vow we'll make them all regret.