4

Law and Disorder

Out of the Ashes

In December 1969, IRA members gathered in secret for an Army Convention, the movement’s highest decision-making body. The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to discuss a motion calling for republicans to take their seats in Stormont, Westminster and Dublin’s Leinster House.¹ But the summer’s dramatic events cast a heavy shadow over the debate. After leading a rearguard action against the new policy, Seán Mac Stíofáin and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh broke away to form a rival organization, accusing the IRA leadership of rigging the vote and betraying fundamental principles.

The new group called itself the Provisional Army Council and laid exclusive claim to the republican tradition. By the time that claim was fully established, the movement led by Mac Stíofáin and Ó Brádaigh had become known as the Provisionals, or ‘Provos’ for short. Cathal Goulding’s faction went down in history as the Officials.

For many traditional republicans, the dropping of abstention was reason enough for a split with Goulding.² However, the Provisionals also accused the Official IRA of neglecting its duty to protect northern Catholics from attack. In the immediate wake of the violence in Belfast, this argument carried a tremendous emotional charge and supplied the Provos with their foundation myth.

Ruairí Ó Brádaigh claimed that Goulding had opposed the defence of nationalist areas because it conflicted with the movement’s desire to promote working-class unity across the sectarian divide.3 However, there is little evidence that the republican leadership had any principled objection to the defence of Catholic neighbourhoods. According to Gerry Adams, the two Belfast IRA commanders who were closest to Goulding, Billy McMillen and Jim Sullivan, moved quickly to organize ‘defensive operations for nationalist areas’ as best they could when the violence erupted in August 1969.⁴

The truth was more complicated than Provisional rhetoric suggested. Military operations of any kind required weapons. The IRA had not been making any substantial preparations for a new offensive campaign, and in any case it did not have the cash needed to purchase arms. By Goulding’s account, traditional sources of funding in Irish-America had dried up after Operation Harvest, because supporters would only contribute if the IRA was visibly engaged in military action.⁵

Billy McMillen reported that the Belfast Brigade had already come under pressure to use its weapons earlier in the year: ‘This we were reluctant to do as we realized that the meagre armaments at our disposal were hopelessly inadequate to meet the requirements of the situation.’⁶ By one estimate, the IRA was able to put together a grand total of ninety-six weapons to be sent north after the August violence, from pistols and shotguns to automatic rifles.⁷

McMillen gave a second reason for the IRA’s reluctance to bring out its guns in the early summer: ‘The use of firearms by us would only serve to justify the use of greater force against the people by the forces of the Establishment and increase the danger of sectarian pogroms.’⁸ This consideration also weighed upon the republican leadership. The use of live ammunition by IRA Volunteers might simply have precipitated greater violence, making things worse for the people republicans were hoping to defend.

Goulding believed that this had been the case in Derry, where the RUC relied on CS gas and water cannon against the stones and petrol bombs of the Bogsiders. If the IRA had brought guns into the equation, the police would have responded in kind, with disastrous results.9 In Belfast, he argued, the RUC’s behaviour had left republicans with no choice: ‘The only defence was an armed defence.’¹⁰ However, Gerry Adams recalled opposing the use of weapons there when McMillen summoned him to an emergency meeting, on much the same grounds that Goulding cited for Derry: ‘Any attempt to militarize the situation, to bring the IRA into it and to engage the RUC on their own terms would take it out of the hands of the people and bring the entire situation down to a gunfight, which the RUC would surely win. Anyway the discussion was to some degree academic, since the Belfast IRA had hardly any weapons.’¹¹

There was another factor that contributed to the IRA’s limited response in August. Cathal Goulding, Seán Garland and Roy Johnston were all Dubliners, while Tomás Mac Giolla had made his home there and Seamus Costello’s Wicklow base was a short distance from the southern capital. It was hardly surprising that Dublin often loomed larger than Belfast in the thinking of Goulding’s leadership team. One symptom of that was their insistence on pressing ahead with the debate over abstention immediately after the crisis in the North. It was tactically unwise to conduct the vote at such a fraught moment, but leading southern activists like Costello were impatient for the policy to be changed as soon as possible.

Seán Mac Stíofáin made great play of the fact that Goulding could not be located for some time when the violence erupted in Belfast, because he was helping a British TV crew film a documentary about the IRA.¹² That would hardly have been the case if Goulding had anticipated what was going to happen, which suggests a good deal of naivety on his part about the danger of sectarian conflict. Mac Stíofáin naturally gave himself the best lines in his account of these exchanges, but his own priority appears not to have been the defence of Catholic areas as such. Right from the start, the Provisional leader wanted to exploit the crisis triggered by the civil rights protests to launch an offensive campaign against British rule.¹³

Whether or not the accusations levelled at Cathal Goulding were justified, they certainly helped the Provos to carve out a foothold in Belfast, which would be vital for any fresh insurgency. A group of northern veterans, most of whom had drifted away from Goulding’s movement in the preceding years, joined the Provisional IRA as soon as it was founded. One of those veterans, Billy McKee, took charge of the Belfast Brigade. McKee won over some of the city’s younger activists, including Martin Meehan in Ardoyne and Ballymurphy’s Gerry Adams, who hesitated for a while before lining up with the Provos. The defection of Adams came as a bitter disappointment to Billy McMillen, who saw him as one of the brightest talents in the movement.14

While the question of armed struggle was fundamental to the split between Official and Provisional IRAs, it was not a straightforward division between ‘soldiers’ and ‘politicians’. A number of leading Officials saw no contradiction between political engagement and the use of force. Seamus Costello and Belfast’s Joe McCann were two prime examples. Some of those who joined the Provos had a similar attitude. Looking back on the period, Gerry Adams spoke with palpable enthusiasm about his own experience of agitational work in the late 1960s alongside Belfast republicans such as McCann.¹⁵ Adams opted for the new movement, not because he rejected ‘politics’ as such, but because he believed there would have to be a military struggle against British rule and saw it as a better bet from that perspective.¹⁶

The adherence of men like Adams, who believed that armed struggle should be combined with political action, later proved to be of great importance for the evolution of the Provisionals. But in the short term, many Provos were suspicious of such arguments, which they associated with their estranged comrades in the Official IRA.¹⁷ Seán Mac Stíofáin expressed this militarist outlook with characteristic bluntness: ‘The Officials say unless you have mass involvement of the people you haven’t got a revolution. We say, the armed struggle comes first and then you politicize.’¹⁸

The new Provisional mouthpiece, An Phoblacht, claimed that ‘Red infiltrators’ had forced out ‘traditional and militant republicans’ before proceeding to brainwash the movement’s young supporters with their doctrine.¹⁹ As evidence of this conspiracy, the Provos pointed to a proposal to establish a National Liberation Front (NLF) in alliance with the Communist Party. Mac Stíofáin described the NLF concept as one of the main factors contributing to the split.20

Much of the hostile commentary focused on Roy Johnston, a convenient lightning rod for criticism since Goulding had appointed him as the IRA’s director of education despite his lack of a military record. Johnston had indeed been a member of the communist Irish Workers’ Party before he joined the republican movement, and his ideas owed much to the historian Desmond Greaves – not only a communist, but a British one to boot.²¹ However, the lurid claims made by An Phoblacht wildly overstated the case.

If Johnston had wanted to guide republicans further to the left, he was pushing at an open door. Goulding and his comrades were already moving in that direction by the mid 1960s, and they had a strong indigenous heritage to draw upon, from James Connolly to the Republican Congress. Moreover, there was a perfectly rational basis for the alliance proposal. Small as their organization was, the Irish communists still had more experience of trade union work than republicans, and their modest but tangible support base among Belfast’s Protestant working class was not something that the IRA could boast.

Indeed, far from using their ‘infiltrators’ to impose the NLF on republicans, the communists turned out to be the ones who were hesitant about a formalized relationship, fearing it might jeopardize their standing among Protestant workers.²² In any case, the version of left-wing politics favoured by the Officials at the time did not stem from Soviet orthodoxy. Tomás Mac Giolla argued for a non-aligned policy in world affairs – ‘we condemn equally American interference in Vietnam and Russian interference in Czechoslovakia’ – and stressed that the system his movement wanted to build ‘will not be totalitarian, will not be bureaucratic in any way’.²³

Facing a barrage of criticism, the Officials gave as good as they got. Refusing to dignify their rivals with the name ‘IRA’, they denounced the ‘Provisional Alliance’ as a tool of right-wing politicians in the South, and published a detailed summary of contacts between the IRA and the Irish government in support of this charge.24 According to this account, Fianna Fáil representatives had approached the republican movement and offered to supply money and weapons for the defence of Catholics in the North. This offer came with political conditions attached: the IRA would have to cease its agitation south of the border and form a separate northern command. Fianna Fáil’s intervention had, the Officials insisted, been crucial in paving the way for the split.²⁵

The controversy had a sensational impact on politics in the South: the Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Jack Lynch sacked two members of his cabinet, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, who then stood trial for conspiracy to import weapons in 1970, only to be acquitted by the jury. There is no doubt that people acting on behalf of the Irish government made promises of money to IRA leaders. The only question is how far knowledge of the scheme reached up the chain of command, and to what extent Lynch himself was implicated.²⁶ But that doesn’t mean an initiative from this quarter supplied the motivation for a split. Mac Stíofáin and his allies already wanted to break with Goulding over abstention. The August violence gave the dissidents a rallying cry and the chance to win over republicans in Belfast. Their new movement had strong roots in the austere republican orthodoxy that had taken shape after the defeats of the 1920s. It was the interaction between that orthodoxy and conditions in the northern Catholic ghettoes that created the Provos, not the machinations of Fianna Fáil.

Part of the Problem

It was some time before the Provisionals began to make their mark. Their leadership team always intended to launch an offensive against British rule in the North, but they were in no position to do so by the time the split became public knowledge at Sinn Féin’s Ard Fheis (party conference) in January 1970. According to Martin Meehan, Billy McKee told him to prepare for the long haul when he joined the new organization: ‘People have to be trained. People have to be motivated. People have to be equipped. All this won’t just happen overnight.’27 Most importantly, there would have to be a dramatic shift in the mood of the Catholic ghettoes if British soldiers were to be seen as legitimate targets for the IRA.

That shift came sooner than most people could have imagined when Harold Wilson decided to send in troops. In the meantime, however, the transformation of the political environment after the August disturbances seemed to offer the civil rights movement fresh opportunities to press for reform. After all, one of their main goals had been to force Westminster to intervene over the heads of the local government. The British political elite was now plainly involved in the affairs of Northern Ireland – not under circumstances that NICRA would have wished for, but involved nonetheless. The movement was now in a position to demand change from those at the summit of the British state, by-passing its Unionist foothills altogether.

This was not lost on the Officials. As the new decade began, they called for renewed agitation in support of the civil rights programme: ‘Demand it, not from Stormont, but from the British Government and Parliament which is wholly responsible for the area.’ However, they rejected the idea of direct rule from Westminster, claiming that the British government wanted to regain control over the entire island through an ‘Anglo-Irish Federation’ that would ‘tie the whole country more closely to Britain than ever’. The Officials summed up their reformist platform with the demand for a legally entrenched Bill of Rights that could not be repealed by any local administration. This would make it possible to ‘democratize Stormont, overrule the right-wing Unionists, [and] develop a more Irish-oriented framework in the Six Counties within which some of those one million Protestants can be won in time to stand for a united Ireland’.²⁸

The end of British rule thus remained a long-term aspiration, not an immediate demand. NICRA endorsed this approach at its AGM in February 1970. In a report on the civil rights gathering, the United Irishman noted the emphasis on ‘forms of protest which would be effective and yet minimize the danger of sectarian tension’. Street marches were thus ‘likely to be a less common tactic than before’.29 The Officials entered into a close alliance with the Communist Party, which also supported the Bill of Rights slogan.³⁰ Over the next two years, the Officials and their Communist allies had the strongest voice in NICRA’s leadership, using it to advance a shared reformist perspective.³¹

The Provos now offered a home for those who considered it futile to seek reform while Northern Ireland was still part of the UK. But NICRA also faced competition on the opposite flank from a new political force, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). The SDLP brought together a group of MPs from Stormont and Westminster who could loosely be described as moderate nationalists. Gerry Fitt was the new party’s leader, with John Hume as his deputy. Some of the SDLP’s founders had carved out a political foothold before NICRA took to the streets, while others rode the civil rights wave into Stormont at the beginning of 1969. Although they had taken part in many of NICRA’s marches over the previous two years, the SDLP leadership now wanted to concentrate on parliamentary politics and establish themselves as the main nationalist interlocutor for the British government.³²

Whatever strategy NICRA or the SDLP decided upon, all future developments in Northern Irish politics hinged on the choices being made in London. When Harold Wilson ordered the deployment of troops in August 1969, he decided not to revoke Stormont’s authority. Shortly before the Apprentice Boys march in Derry, James Callaghan had warned the Unionist leader Chichester-Clark that Westminster would play a bigger role in local affairs if he was forced to send in the British Army.³³ However, after the deployment of troops, Callaghan told his cabinet colleagues that their policy should be to work through the Northern Irish government for as long as possible and avoid assuming direct responsibility.³⁴

The logic that flowed from Callaghan’s choice was very simple. Any conceivable Stormont prime minister would have to come from the Unionist Party, and if they wished to avoid Terence O’Neill’s fate, would have to muster sufficient backing from the party’s MPs. Chichester-Clark was already under pressure from his hard-line opponents, inside and outside the cabinet.³⁵ Ian Paisley had now formed a group of his own, the Protestant Unionist Party – soon rebranded as the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). The only way for the prime minister to satisfy his critics would be through the imposition of tough security policies, directed exclusively against nationalists.

The Army’s General Officer Commanding, Ian Freeland, showed that he understood the sectarian character of such policies perfectly well in remarks for a staff conference in October 1969. Freeland noted that ‘many people, mainly Northern Ireland Protestants’ wanted to know why the Army didn’t ‘restore Law and Order’ when it was brought in. To Freeland, the real meaning of such questions was clear: ‘Why didn’t the Army counter the resistance of the Roman Catholics behind their barricades by force of arms and reduce this minority to their original state of second-class citizenship?’36

According to the Army’s official history of the conflict, junior officers posted to the region were ‘well aware of the discrimination and deprivation, and asked themselves at the time why the Government did not do anything about it’. But there was no chance of any ‘substantive action’ from the power-holders in Belfast: ‘Stormont was part of the problem and could have been so recognized at the time.’³⁷

It took a while for the logic of the British government’s position to work itself out. When troops first arrived, most people believed that their mission was to protect nationalist areas from attack – including the soldiers themselves.³⁸ The well-worn anecdotes about British soldiers receiving endless cups of tea in Catholic neighbourhoods all date from this period. A minority of shrewd observers recognized that the Army’s real mandate was to support the ‘civil power’, which remained wholly Unionist in character.³⁹ When James Callaghan visited the Bogside at the end of August, local nationalists applauded his promises of reform. The radicals who were still distrustful of British intentions could not make their voices heard.⁴⁰ The barricades that had marked out the territory of ‘Free Derry’ were dismantled, and soldiers began to carry out routine patrols.⁴¹

Callaghan’s second visit in October 1969 marked the high point of nationalist goodwill towards his government. Under pressure from London, Chichester-Clark had appointed a new minister for community relations and created the post of complaints commissioner to hear allegations of unfair treatment by local councils. A new central authority was to control the allocation of public housing. However, as long as the ‘Orange State’ and its machinery of government remained intact, such reforms would gradually be drained of their substance in the passage from blueprint to reality.42

By the spring of 1970, relations between Catholics and the Army were already beginning to fray. The use of colonial-style policing methods in Derry, which imposed restrictions on whole communities rather than individual suspects, put an end to the honeymoon period.⁴³ An Irish civil servant, Eamonn Gallagher, visited the city at the end of March to observe the Officials’ Easter parade. He found that the throwing of stones at the Army was ‘becoming almost a routine occurrence’, and that such activity met with ‘a considerable degree of tolerance from residents of the Bogside when feeling runs high’.⁴⁴

It wasn’t just the methodology that the Army had imported from its far-flung colonial wars. Two of its units in Belfast and Derry absent-mindedly held up crowd-control banners taken from a recent campaign in Aden. The text ordering rioters to disperse was in Arabic rather than English.⁴⁵

In April there were violent clashes between soldiers and teenage rioters in Ballymurphy, sparked off by one of the year’s first Orange marches. The Official IRA commander Jim Sullivan tried to contain the violence, but to little avail.⁴⁶ When Chichester-Clark met with the Army commander Ian Freeland a few days later, he blamed his party’s loss of two recent by-elections on ‘a lack of faith in the Government’s ability to maintain law and order’, and demanded ‘firm counter-measures’ if there was any repeat of what happened in Ballymurphy.⁴⁷

The Westminster general election of June 1970 guaranteed there would be no change in British policy. James Callaghan had been toying with the idea of imposing direct rule if his party remained in office, but the unexpected Conservative victory put paid to that, and Stormont remained in place.48 Many Unionists hailed Edward Heath’s accession to power, expecting a more sympathetic hearing from the new government.

Matinee Performances

In a repeat of the previous year’s pattern, it was the summer marching season that brought matters to a head. Stormont had established a Joint Security Committee to coordinate between the Northern Irish government, the Army and the police. The RUC urged Chichester-Clark to ban the Orange marches in Belfast. The prime minister insisted that his party would destroy him if he did. Speaking on behalf of the Army, Freeland recommended following the path of least resistance: ‘It is easier to push them through the [nationalist] Ardoyne than to control the [loyalist] Shankill.’⁴⁹

By the time the June marches commenced, the Provisionals were ready to make their public debut, and they seized the opportunity to present themselves as defenders of the Catholic ghettoes. When sectarian rioting broke out in north Belfast, Provo bullets killed three loyalists. But the main confrontation was in the Short Strand, an isolated nationalist enclave in east Belfast, where a group of Provisionals led by Billy McKee took up position in the grounds of St Matthew’s Church. The ‘Battle of St Matthew’s’ entered Provo mythology as proof that their Volunteers could stop any repetition of what had happened the previous August.⁵⁰ Across Belfast, the weekend of 27–28 June resulted in six deaths and half a million pounds of damage to property.

Worse was to come. In the wake of the violence, the Joint Security Committee decided that the Army would respond to the next outbreak of trouble with a show of force. At the same time, Chichester-Clark’s government approved legislation to impose mandatory six-month jail sentences for all those convicted of ‘riotous behaviour’, ‘disorderly behaviour’ or ‘behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace’.⁵¹

Shortly before the latest disturbances in Belfast, Bernadette Devlin lost her appeal against a prison sentence for her role in the ‘Battle of the Bogside’. When word of Devlin’s arrest filtered through to a meeting in Derry where she had been due to speak, a full-scale riot erupted.52 Eamonn McCann described the motivation of the rioters:

The ‘defence of the area’ in August 1969 had already passed into local folklore. It was a noble episode in which we had all participated when, after decades of second-class citizenship, we had finally risen and asserted in a manner which made the world take notice that we were not going to stand for it any more. The jailing of Miss Devlin was a challenge to the area to stand by that estimation of its own action.⁵³

If the commanders of the British Army had grasped the nature of that sentiment, as widespread in Belfast as it was in Derry, they might have hesitated before launching a search for arms on the Lower Falls Road at the beginning of July.

The Lower Falls was a stronghold of the Officials, and it was their weapons that soldiers took from a house in the area on the afternoon of 3 July. In its propaganda since the split, the Official IRA had projected two very different faces to the outside world. Alongside the reformist civil rights platform, readers of the United Irishman could find a strong case being made for traditional methods: ‘Only an armed, determined people will be listened to with respect. The war against Britain has never been halted and never will be halted as long as Britain claims a right to legislate for Ireland.’⁵⁴ The movement’s Easter message spoke of the ‘necessary and inevitable confrontation in military struggle with the forces of British imperialism’, and issued a challenge to its detractors: ‘Let those who have been so quick with their criticism now help the IRA to equip itself with modern weapons.’⁵⁵

Having endured taunts from their rivals and seen the Provos win plaudits for their action in the Short Strand, the Officials now had to decide on their response to the Army’s challenge. A crowd of local nationalists confronted the soldiers and began throwing stones. When Ian Freeland heard about this limited skirmish, he ordered the show of force that the security committee had mandated, and a full-scale invasion of the area began.56

The Officials decided to take the Army on. Their local commander Jim Sullivan ordered his men to confront the soldiers with every weapon that came to hand.⁵⁷ By nightfall, Freeland had imposed a curfew of doubtful legality on the entire district. It lasted for two days, during which the Army saturated the Falls with CS gas, fired almost 1,500 rounds of live ammunition and killed four civilians without losing a single man.⁵⁸ But their standing among nationalists suffered incalculable damage.

When the Army brought two Unionist cabinet ministers on a provocative tour of the area in Land Rovers, the fiasco was complete. The SDLP’s Paddy Devlin, who observed these developments with horror, later described the impact of the curfew on nationalist opinion: ‘Overnight the population turned from neutral or even sympathetic support for the military to outright hatred of everything related to the security forces.’⁵⁹ The Army’s own history of the conflict picked out two examples of ‘poor military decision-making’ in the whole of the Troubles that had ‘serious operational and even strategic consequences’: the first was the Falls curfew, the second was the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry.⁶⁰

The Officials could now claim to have led the biggest confrontation between republicans and British forces for half a century, with the Provos nowhere to be seen. They were quick to make use of this in their propaganda. Malachy McGurran, one of the leading northern Officials, baited the Provos at Bodenstown the following year for their absence from the ‘Battle of the Falls’.⁶¹ Having taken so much abuse from the Provisionals since the split, the Officials were naturally keen to pay them back in their own coin. Recruitment to the Official IRA soared.⁶² But the Falls Road curfew, and the broader political context of which it was a symptom, held as much danger as promise for the Officials. Unlike the Provisionals, they were not planning to launch a full-scale war against British rule in the North. But they could not simply cash in their chips after winning the first round: once they had started to compete with their rivals as a force that could take on British soldiers, they would have to match them every time the stakes got higher, or else fold. This proved to be a game for which the Provos were much better equipped.

On 17 July, James Chichester-Clark met with Edward Heath and his home secretary, Reginald Maudling. Maudling asked whether ‘firmer action on the law-and-order front’ could be combined with a gesture of some sort to the nationalist minority. Chichester-Clark insisted that a recent bill against incitement to religious hatred had ‘just about exhausted legislative remedies’ on that front.63 Northern Ireland now entered a transitional phase, bridging the demonstrations of 1968–69 and the onset of direct hostilities between republicans and the British Army in the spring of 1971.

Again, Ballymurphy was in the vanguard. During the final months of 1970, there was intense rioting in the area as its teenagers confronted the Army, pelting soldiers with stones, bottles and nail bombs while dodging rubber bullets and gas canisters.⁶⁴ The use of CS by British forces cemented local hostility to their presence: the rioters mostly belonged to a narrow age group, but the gas clouds which hung over Ballymurphy’s estates affected everyone. Brendan Hughes, who became one of the most important Provisional leaders in Belfast, recalled being sent to the district by Billy McKee on a mission to attack British soldiers. The local commander Gerry Adams warned Hughes and his men not to interfere with their enemy while he was making a mistake: ‘He wanted to keep the rioting going. He didn’t want any gunfire.’⁶⁵ That strategic patience helped transform Ballymurphy into a solid base for Adams and his comrades when the street clashes had completed their radicalizing effect.

According to Eamonn McCann, similar confrontations in Derry found their raw material among a layer of unemployed youths who had been ‘briefly elevated into folk-hero status in the heady days of August, praised and patronized by local leaders for their expertise with the stone and the petrol bomb’, before finding themselves ‘dragged back down into the anonymous depression which had hitherto been their constant condition’.⁶⁶ After the Falls curfew, their weekly clashes with British troops on the edge of the Bogside became a regular routine: the ‘Saturday matinee’, in local parlance. Army intelligence identified McCann as the only prominent figure with any influence over the rioters, and the Derry Labour Party even set up a short-lived ‘Young Hooligans Association’ in the hope of directing them towards more constructive political tasks.67 But such efforts were largely unavailing.

McCann noted that sympathy for the rioters was far from unanimous among older residents of the Bogside.⁶⁸ However, the Criminal Justice Act that Stormont had passed in a hurry the previous year proved to be the legislative equivalent of CS gas, striking at random and nurturing communal solidarity against the state. By the end of the year, the authorities had charged 269 people with offences carrying mandatory sentences; 109 of these charges went to court, with a conviction and six-month jail term handed down in every case.⁶⁹ British troops further stoked the fires of nationalist anger by arresting alleged ‘hooligans’ several days after a riot had taken place. The Derry Journal highlighted the case of one teenager who was identified as a rioter by two Army witnesses, when his boss, his timecard and his fellow workers all placed him on the night shift at a local factory.⁷⁰

Sixty-Niners

For the Provisionals, everything was falling into place. There was a steady flow of recruits into their ranks, and the authorities could be relied upon to keep hostility between nationalists and the Army simmering. The vast majority of those new recruits were in their late teens or early twenties, and they came overwhelmingly from the Catholic working class.⁷¹ Republican militants also tended to be male, although there were some high-profile female Volunteers at the time, such as Rita O’Hare and the Price sisters, Dolours and Marion.

One study identified three main pathways into ‘active service’. Some had already joined the IRA before 1969, and opted for the Provos after the split; people in this category usually came from well-established republican families. Others had been active with groups like NICRA or People’s Democracy, before deciding to join the IRA in response to political events. Finally, there was the largest group of recruits, who signed up with a clean organizational slate, known to their comrades as ‘sixty-niners’.72

Gerry Adams, one of the most influential Provos in Belfast, straddled the first two categories: his father, Gerry Sr, was an IRA veteran from the 40s, but Adams had also taken part in NICRA protests and met with PD activists like Michael Farrell before the violence of 1969.⁷³ That hybrid formation gave him a clear advantage. While his family background made it easier for Adams to work with older IRA leaders, he was still young enough to establish a rapport with the new generation of republicans.

As a child, Adams had passed the selective eleven-plus exam and attended a grammar school in Belfast, where he encountered ‘an entirely different crowd of boys from the ones I had previously associated with’, whose parents belonged to the Catholic middle class.⁷⁴ His later comments on the experience suggest an underlying bitterness towards the Catholic establishment: ‘We were being groomed. Certain people finished that grooming, and became bishops, parish priests, leaders of the SDLP – and other “responsible” positions.’ According to Adams, the Church’s hostility towards the Provos owed a great deal to the class background shared by most of his comrades, who hadn’t received the appropriate training for ‘positions of leadership’ in the nationalist community.⁷⁵

One figure Adams clearly had in mind when making that remark was his ally Martin McGuinness. McGuinness, the most senior Provisional in Derry by the age of twenty-one, exemplified the third category of recruit, those with no experience of political activity before the conflict began. Unlike Adams, he had failed the eleven-plus exam and seemed destined for a life of unskilled manual labour before he joined the IRA. His leadership qualities soon became obvious to his peers.⁷⁶ Michael Oatley, an MI6 officer who negotiated with McGuinness on behalf of the British government, compared his instinctive military bearing to that of ‘a middle-ranking Army officer in one of the tougher regiments like the Paras or the SAS’ – a double-edged compliment for a son of the Bogside, as Oatley must have been aware.77

An interview with McGuinness that appeared in 1972 gave a sense of the life experiences that drove so many young men to join the IRA at the time. The Provo leader explained that, in spite of his republican duties, he sometimes liked to fall in with a group of rioters throwing stones at the British Army: ‘It’s a way of being with my mates, the ones who have not joined the movement, and I feel just ordinary again.’⁷⁸

The ‘sixty-niners’ soon rose to prominence, but for now, it was a much older group of republican activists that held the reins. The Officials derided those men as apolitical militarists with a deeply conservative mentality (‘the Rosary Beads Brigade’). Some Provo commanders like Billy McKee certainly fit that stereotype, and the movement’s early rhetoric drew heavily on McCarthyite tropes. Statements from the Provisional leadership denounced the Official IRA as ‘Red Guards’ who were propagating an ‘alien social philosophy’.⁷⁹ The Provos still argued for a certain kind of ‘socialism’, but distinguished it sharply from the Marxism of the Officials, ‘repugnant to the great mass of ordinary Irish people’.⁸⁰ Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, who now led the movement’s political wing, was the main architect of its programme, Éire Nua (New Ireland). Sinn Féin’s ‘democratic socialist republic’ would have a federal structure with four regional parliaments. The banks and major industries were to be taken into state hands, and an upper limit placed on the ownership of land, although private enterprise would still have a place in the economy.⁸¹

It would be a mistake to read too much into the finer details of these blueprints. According to one Provo activist, Kieran Conway, ‘the vast majority of IRA members were so taken up with “military” matters and “politics” was so reviled – not least on account of where it had taken the previous leadership – that those with any interest were simply let run with it.’⁸² A consensus on the need for armed struggle against British rule could bring together conservative Catholics such as McKee with radicals like Conway and Brian Keenan, who held quasi-Marxist views.⁸³

Many Provos were simply agnostic about such questions, believing they could be postponed until a later stage. Martin McGuinness knew that he wanted ‘a united Ireland where everyone has a good job and enough to live on’, but had his doubts about whether socialism could be made to work: ‘Do you not think now that people are just too greedy? Somebody always wants to make a million. Anyway, before you can try, you have to get this country united.’84

It was only a matter of time before the Provos were ready to take the offensive. In February 1971, after more clashes in Belfast, a Provisional sniper killed the first British soldier to die on Irish soil in half a century. James Chichester-Clark responded with a portentous declaration that ‘Northern Ireland is at war with the Irish Republican Army Provisionals’.⁸⁵ The following month he tendered his resignation after Edward Heath refused to support a package of hard-line security measures.

Earlier that year, Chichester-Clark had delivered a speech that combined ideological myopia with real insight into the new republican challenge:

Between 1956 and 1962 the IRA were seeking to achieve by force alone ends which force could never achieve, because in a straight contest of firepower and discipline the forces of the Crown were bound to prevail. But now we face a two-pronged campaign, military and political. It hoped to use not just, as before, the bomb and the gun, but also the resentments, fears and aspirations of whole masses of people.⁸⁶

Chichester-Clark’s error was to assume the existence of an overarching strategic plan behind the disorder. However, he correctly identified ‘the growing militancy of people who were not members of subversive organizations’ as the most important problem facing the authorities.⁸⁷ The new Unionist leader Brian Faulkner paid little heed to his predecessor’s message and began urging Edward Heath to allow internment of suspects without trial. In order to precipitate that decisive trial of strength, the Provos just had to maintain the pressure. Their bombing campaign reinforced the sense that Northern Ireland was becoming ungovernable. In the months leading up to internment day in August 1971, there were an average of two bomb explosions a day, leaving over 100 civilians injured.88

The Official IRA’s Easter message pledged that its members would ‘assist the people with all necessary measures in defence of their homes and their area against jackboot aggression’.⁸⁹ In the months since the ‘Battle of the Falls’, the Officials had been strengthening their armouries and training new recruits. However, the Provisionals had clearly outpaced them in Belfast, with the exception of a few areas like the Markets and the Lower Falls.⁹⁰ In Derry, the competition between the two groups was more evenly balanced, and the Officials’ Easter parade in 1971 was significantly larger. Under the leadership of Johnnie White, the Officials managed to enlist some of Derry’s young rioters, including a teenage Martin McGuinness, who was impatient for action and soon defected to the Provisionals.⁹¹ Partly in the hope of stemming further defections, the OIRA leadership now gave their units permission to launch attacks on the Army. A British security assessment from April 1971 suggested that they had little choice in the matter: ‘If they do not maintain a manifest level of terrorist action much of their “military” membership will either desert to the Provisionals or initiate violence at random.’⁹²

If the reformist civil rights strategy of the Officials was now facing collapse, conditions were even less promising for the approach favoured by People’s Democracy. Its supporters had withdrawn from NICRA at the start of 1970, declaring their intention to campaign around economic issues in the hope of uniting workers across the sectarian divide. Now reduced to a hard core of a few dozen radicals, PD still involved itself in a whole range of campaigns, from bus fares in Belfast to fishing rights on Lough Neagh. Moving beyond its origins as a campus-based organization, the group sought to translate its non-sectarian rhetoric into reality by leafleting outside the shipyards of east Belfast and on the Shankill Road.⁹³ But the physical space for such activity was rapidly shrinking in the face of communal polarization, as it simply became too dangerous to enter Protestant areas.⁹⁴

On the eve of internment, People’s Democracy had been beaten back into the Catholic ghettoes to await Faulkner’s next move along with the other anti-Unionist forces. As the moment approached, its leader Michael Farrell warned that any gains made by the civil rights struggle would be ‘lost for good’ if Britain decided on a policy of coercion: ‘The only thing that will stop the military juggernaut will be a mass movement which can once again bring thousands of people into the streets.’95 While internment would lead to a dramatic escalation of violence, amid scenes unknown in Western Europe since the war, it also inspired fresh attempts to build mass opposition to the Unionist system. The watchword of the earlier period had been civil rights. Now, it would be civil resistance.