5

The Year of Civil Resistance

Looming Realities

Operation Demetrius began in the early hours of 4 August 1971. Throughout Northern Ireland, soldiers fanned out to arrest suspects, kicking down doors and dragging their targets away. They made over 300 arrests in the first wave, with many more to come over the following months. The authorities set up a camp to house the detainees at Long Kesh, where they were kept in prefabricated huts, surrounded by observation towers and barbed wire – a symbolic own goal for the British Army, as it reminded many people of the German POW camps from movies like The Great Escape.

The descriptions of brutal interrogation methods that began filtering out were much more damaging.¹ Detainees reported abuse of various kinds, from beatings to sleep deprivation. Soldiers had thrown some blindfolded men from helicopters that were hovering a few feet above the ground, after telling them they were about to plunge to their deaths. The authorities singled out a group of fourteen prisoners, dubbed the ‘Hooded Men’, for especially brutal treatment, using techniques that had been fine-tuned in colonial wars.²

The most immediate result of internment was a dramatic upsurge in violence across the region. In the first seven months of 1971, there had been thirty-four deaths. Now, seventeen people lost their lives within two days, with 140 to follow by the end of the year. In Ballymurphy, the Army killed ten civilians over the space of thirty-six hours.3 The chaos transformed large parts of Belfast and Derry into battle-zones, with Provos and Officials temporarily forgetting their political differences to fight side by side. Recruitment to both groups skyrocketed.⁴

In contrast to its handling of the two IRAs, Faulkner’s government chose not to arrest any loyalist paramilitaries in August, claiming that the banned Ulster Volunteer Force was not a significant threat.⁵ In November 1971, the UVF bombed a Catholic pub in Belfast, killing fifteen civilians. The security forces falsely presented the bombing as an IRA ‘own goal’, making the refusal to intern loyalists easier to justify.⁶ By then, a new group called the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) had taken its place alongside the UVF. It soon claimed a membership of 40,000.

A civil service briefing, drafted shortly after the arrests began, warned that the region now stood on the brink of disaster: ‘Economic collapse and social chaos are not remote contingencies but are looming realities within a period which is to be measured in weeks or months rather than years.’⁷ Unsurprisingly, most historians have agreed that Demetrius was a fiasco. Many attribute the failure to technical problems: lacking good intelligence, and unable to persuade Jack Lynch’s government to move simultaneously against republicans in the South, the Army enraged nationalist communities by arresting the wrong people while the most important Provo leaders slipped across the border.⁸ Such arguments imply that internment could perhaps have been made to work, if only the Army had possessed a more accurate picture of its enemy, and taken greater care to avoid scooping up blameless citizens in the net. But the real obstacles were political rather than technical.

As Paddy Devlin noted, the intelligence gap was not simply the result of incompetence: ‘The old Catholic informers had disappeared once the Catholic community had been attacked, and the “no go” areas behind the barricades, which excluded the police, killed off any hope they had of cultivating new sources.’⁹ Plotting a delicate course between his wish for good relations with Britain and widespread sympathy for northern nationalists in the South, Jack Lynch could never have assisted Faulkner by arresting known republicans (as Edward Heath grudgingly acknowledged in a message to Lynch).10 Above all, it was the popular mood in the Catholic ghettoes that scuppered Operation Demetrius. Internment, far from stabilizing the local power structure, merely paved the way for its collapse.

Brian Faulkner had been Stormont’s home affairs minister at the time of the Border Campaign, and was convinced that internment had ensured the IRA’s defeat – hence his eagerness to repeat the trick. But the real problem for the IRA during Operation Harvest had been the indifference of the nationalist population. It was easy for the authorities to hook the republican fish when they were cut off from the main body of water.

However, by 1971, northern nationalists had experienced several years of intense political agitation. They had marched and rioted, built barricades and organized self-defence committees. As Eamonn McCann pointed out, the IRA of the early 70s was quite unlike its 50s predecessor:

It had grown out of the community, was physically of the community’s flesh, emotionally and ideologically an element in its consciousness. As a result, when the state’s forces attacked the IRA, a sizeable part of the Catholic community felt itself attacked too. The fact that many of those lifted in the internment swoop were the wrong people may not have been as important as is commonly imagined.¹¹

This dramatic shift in popular consciousness would have been unthinkable without the preparatory work of those republicans and left-wing radicals who had given the civil rights movement its militant, confrontational edge. Many of those involved in such activity paid a high price for their efforts, as it made them prime candidates for the Army’s arrest sheets. Official IRA members were usually active in the Republican Clubs, as the movement’s political wing was known in the North, selling the United Irishman in defiance of a government ban and engaging in other activities that made it easy to identify them as republican militants. By October, more than a hundred Officials were behind bars, while many others had to flee south or go on the run.12 The first wave of arrests also targeted People’s Democracy members such as Michael Farrell. The Insight reporters of the Sunday Times described them as belonging to a ‘special group’ that had been arrested ‘simply because they were active politicians who, in the wake of internment, could cause a fuss’.¹³

On the first day of internment, an emergency bulletin from NICRA’s Belfast branch called for ‘total withdrawal by non-Unionists from every governmental structure, rent and rates strikes by the people, barricades for defence where necessary and total non-cooperation with a regime which has been stigmatized by the British establishment itself’.¹⁴ Nationalists quickly turned this blueprint into reality. The SDLP had already withdrawn from Stormont in July after the killing of two young nationalists by the Army in Derry, and there was no question of that boycott now being reversed. An unprecedented campaign of mass civil disobedience added to the pressure on Faulkner’s government. A rent-and-rates strike by council tenants won solid backing among working-class nationalists. By the end of September, there were 26,000 households on strike, representing one-fifth of the 135,000 local authority tenants. Participation rates were particularly high in certain areas, such as Strabane (87 per cent of tenants) and Belfast’s Divis estate (almost 100 per cent).¹⁵

A coalition of republicans and left-wing activists in Derry that called itself the Socialist Resistance Group issued the call for a strike in the city.¹⁶ Their proposal simply gave organized expression to the mood among nationalists, as Eamonn McCann acknowledged: ‘If the Plymouth Brethren had parked a soap-box at the bottom of Wellington Street and called for a rent strike they would have got it. The people were avid for action and it just so happened that we were first in the field suggesting what action they should take.’¹⁷ Faulkner’s government claimed that republicans had coerced tenants into withholding payments, but in private his civil servants recognized ‘the great mass of sincere and immediate support from the rank and file’ that lay behind it: ‘The relative success of the campaign from the beginning is probably due less to any organization behind it, which can only have been minimal, than to the conviction of individual participants that their cause was just.’18 They began drawing up legislation that would allow the authorities to deduct rent arrears from government benefits.

In tandem with the strike, nationalist anger expressed itself in the form of ‘no-go areas’ in Derry and Belfast where it was no longer safe for British troops to enter. Local people re-established the barricades that had been gradually dismantled after August 1969 and turned them into impressive fortifications. A report in PD’s newspaper at the beginning of 1972 described the ones in Derry as ‘not just token barricades but substantial structures which frequently consist of steel girders or concrete blocks sunk into the ground’, with just two entry points left for the Army into Creggan and the Bogside.¹⁹

Republican guerrillas may have posed the greatest threat to British soldiers who tried to breach the no-go zones, but their efforts alone would not have been enough to deter a full-scale invasion by the Army. It was the opposition they faced from the nationalist population as a whole that kept the troops out. A confidential briefing at the end of 1971 described the challenge facing the authorities in Derry: ‘At present neither the RUC nor the military have control of the Bogside and Creggan areas, law and order are not being effectively maintained and the Security Forces now face an entirely hostile Catholic community numbering 33,000 in these two areas alone.’²⁰ The United Irishman spoke in exultant terms of ‘mass total participation’ by nationalists in the civil resistance campaign, which had ‘brought the struggle of the people to a new height’.²¹ For the Joint Intelligence Committee at Westminster, that campaign was ‘perhaps the most threatening feature of the present situation in Northern Ireland’.²²

‘Smash Stormont!’

The British government continued to back Stormont in spite of all the turmoil. When Jack Lynch spoke to Edward Heath soon after Operation Demetrius began, he warned Heath that its effect had been to give the IRA a tremendous boost: ‘Urban guerrilla warfare can only work if there is cooperation from the people. This cooperation certainly exists because the minority are looking to the Provisionals for protection.’23 Lynch returned to Chequers a few weeks later for a meeting with Heath and Brian Faulkner. He argued that sweeping political reforms would now be required to isolate the Provos and shore up the SDLP, with a share in government for the minority ‘provided as a right and not by grace and favour’. But Faulkner insisted there could be no question of allowing Nationalist politicians to enter the cabinet.²⁴ Soon afterwards, the Irish civil servant Eamonn Gallagher paid a visit to the North and found that ‘moderate leaders’ on the nationalist side were close to despair: ‘Even the most pacific of them have now begun to say that they have a vested interest in the continuance of violence for as long as Stormont exists.’²⁵

In January 1972, Faulkner drafted a memo that presented Operation Demetrius as a clear-cut success, but still had to acknowledge some unpleasant facts: ‘Insofar as internment has not yet succeeded, this is due in no small measure to the fact that there are many people outside the IRA who do not want it to work.’ The Unionist leader railed against unnamed individuals who did not want to see the IRA defeated outright ‘until some at least of the organization’s aims have been achieved’.²⁶ If Faulkner considered the fall of Stormont to be one of those aims, that complaint now applied to much of the nationalist population.

Naturally, the Provos were delighted to see nationalists turning their back on the state, and their Volunteers took full advantage of the no-go areas to evade the British Army. But it was their rivals who tried to give some political direction to the civil resistance campaign. The Officials continued to work with their Communist allies on the NICRA executive, despite tensions over the question of armed struggle.27 They saw NICRA as the main vehicle for a new wave of protest that would combine the original platform of the civil rights movement with demands that sprang from the security crisis itself: the end of internment and an amnesty for political prisoners; cancellation of debts for those participating in the rent-and-rates strike; and withdrawal of British troops to barracks, pending their ultimate departure.

During the 1980s, opponents accused Sinn Féin politicians like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of representing the party in public while directing the IRA’s military campaign from behind closed doors. However, at this point in their history, most Provisionals concentrated on guerrilla warfare to the exclusion of any other tactic. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh did float the idea of running candidates on an abstentionist platform at Sinn Féin’s Ard Fheis in 1971, but nothing came of that proposal at the time.²⁸

As a result, it was the Officials who sought to bridge the gap between armed struggle and political agitation. Malachy McGurran combined his duties as head of the OIRA’s northern command with a public role as chair of the Republican Clubs. Soon after internment day, McGurran addressed a rally of 10,000 people in Belfast’s Casement Park, calling for resistance to the British Army.²⁹ The Clubs were still illegal, and leaders such as McGurran and Billy McMillen had to spend much of their time dodging the security forces, who knew all about their military functions.

Maintaining the movement’s political focus was no easy task. The Starry Plough, mouthpiece of the Derry Officials, later remarked on the double-edged character of the recruitment surge after 9 August: ‘Almost all of them wanted to “have a go” at the British Army. One quite obvious and glaring problem which faced all of us was how best we could deploy our newly acquired vast membership and at the same time advance our political and socialist ideas.’³⁰

Outside observers could be forgiven for losing sight of the distinction between Official and Provisional IRAs, as the two factions appeared to be competing to strike the hardest blows against the British Army; yet clear differences remained. While the Official IRA’s New Year’s statement for 1972 praised its Volunteers as ‘the army of the people’ and boasted of ‘the many casualties which they have inflicted on the forces of imperialism’, it went on to insist that ‘armed struggle on its own, or as an end in itself, is doomed to failure’.31 The Provisionals had no such qualms, as their Ardoyne commander Martin Meehan later recalled: ‘We actually believed we could throw the British Army into the sea. It was raw determination, a gut feeling that if we kept up the pressure, we could do it.’³²

The two groups also diverged in their analysis of the unionist community. The Officials believed that Protestant attitudes were ‘one of the major obstacles to the achievement of a socialist republic, and to the creation of a genuinely independent united Irish nation’.³³ Until those attitudes shifted, the focus should be on replacing the ‘discredited and gerrymandered’ Stormont system with a new regional government based on NICRA’s reform programme.³⁴ They still refused to argue for direct rule from London, insisting it would be the first step towards a new Act of Union. The sound and fury of the conflict often drowned out such arguments, and many recent OIRA recruits doubtless overlooked them entirely. But they proved crucial for the subsequent trajectory of the movement.

The Provos, on the other hand, saw no reason to worry about the reaction from unionists if Britain decided to leave without their consent. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh conceded that a peace-keeping force might be necessary during the transition, but felt that the majority of Protestants would ‘come to terms to make the best of it’.³⁵ Seán Mac Stíofáin, whose mode of expression was always much cruder than Ó Brádaigh’s, inadvertently revealed some of the fault lines that ran through the Provisional mindset. He dismissed the idea of a Protestant backlash as something that would ‘come and go and that would be that’. In the event of a showdown, the IRA was sure to come out on top: ‘I can’t see these people preparing themselves for a protracted guerrilla war. It’s just not in them.’ However, Mac Stíofáin did anticipate ‘an exodus of the more bigoted elements’ in the event of British withdrawal: ‘There would be no place for those who say they want their British heritage. They’ve got to accept their Irish heritage, and the Irish way of life, no matter who they are, otherwise there would be no place for them.’³⁶

The Provisional chief of staff was formally committed to an ideology that defined Ulster Protestants as fellow Irishmen. But his comments hinted at a darker view of the unionist population as foreign settlers – ‘planters’, in the local idiom – who would have to choose between assimilation and flight when Britain was forced to pull out. In areas like rural Tyrone, which were to produce some of the most active Provisional units, such attitudes ran deep.

People’s Democracy echoed the Officials with a call for mass opposition to Unionist rule. The group developed a more supportive view of armed struggle as the crisis intensified. In the early months of 1971, it had described the Provo campaign as ‘futile and doomed to failure’; by the start of the following year PD was arguing that republican guerrillas ‘must be encouraged and not stabbed in the back’.37 But its members related to that campaign from the outside, and channelled most of their energy into building support for civil resistance.

Before the arrival of British troops, Michael Farrell had asked whether it might be possible for left-wing radicals to advance their goals by ‘posing the question of dual power in areas where the Catholic population is concentrated and militant – by getting the local Catholic population to take over and run its own affairs, a sort of “Catholic power”.’³⁸ Now he hailed the partial fulfilment of this vision: ‘The Unionists and their imperial master are far more concerned about the Civil Resistance campaign than about the current campaign of violence. The reason is simple. If the Civil Resistance campaign was defeated they could deal with the violence very quickly. If the physical force campaign was defeated, the Civil Resistance campaign would still go on.’³⁹

To guide that campaign, Farrell’s group put forward a clear, emphatic slogan, ‘Smash Stormont!’, that was all the more effective for its ambiguity. The demand could bring together Provos who saw the demise of the local assembly as a step towards British withdrawal with SDLP supporters who would be satisfied with direct rule from London as an alternative to Unionist power.

Arguing that NICRA had become ‘too closely identified with a particular political viewpoint – that of the Official Republicans and the Communist Party – to be fully representative of the current mass movement’, PD moved to establish a new campaigning front, the Northern Resistance Movement (NRM).40 The NRM attracted support from the Provisionals, and from Bernadette Devlin and her fellow Westminster MP Frank McManus, an independent republican. PD argued that many Provos were already ‘seeing the need for deeper involvement in politics’, and just needed encouragement to go further down that path: ‘With their courage, natural militancy and working-class roots, many are natural revolutionaries. Instead of screaming abuse at these men forced into fighting a war against imperialism, socialists should be trying to involve them in political action.’⁴¹ Gerry Adams later recalled being exposed to the group’s arguments because of their involvement in the NRM: ‘PD argued quite correctly for wider popular mobilizations, and it struck me that all of the potential for mobilization was ours, while PD had the theory.’⁴²

As 1971 drew to a close, opponents of the Unionist government began to revive the tactic of street marches that had been the catalyst for the current unrest. The division between NICRA and the NRM meant that this attempt to bring the movement back onto the streets came from two competing sources. All the same, it is striking to note that three years after the first civil rights marches, it was the same loose coalition of forces – the Officials and the Communist Party, People’s Democracy and the Derry radicals – who were pushing for a revival of mass action as an alternative to armed struggle. Ironically, the result of their efforts was to give the Provos their greatest boost to date.

Bloody Sunday

The importance of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry should require no emphasis. The killing of fourteen nationalist civilians by the British Army in January 1972 has received more attention than any other incident of the Troubles, and was the subject of a decade-spanning inquiry that cost several hundred million pounds. However, for all the ink spilt on the events of that day, the wider context in which Bloody Sunday was embedded has not been given the same attention. Without examining that context, it is impossible to make political sense of what happened in Derry.

In the final weeks of 1971, Brian Faulkner suddenly had to grapple with an upsurge of protest. On Christmas Day, the NRM led an anti-internment march that reached the gates of Long Kesh. Then, on the first weekend of January 1972, NICRA organized a demonstration on the Falls Road.43 Five thousand people heard Paddy Devlin and Austin Currie of the SDLP pledge there would be no talks with the British government until it released all the internees.⁴⁴ These protests posed an immediate challenge to Stormont’s authority, as Faulkner had imposed a ban on all street processions to coincide with internment, which he extended in January.⁴⁵ But the forces behind the new wave of protest were determined to assert the legitimacy of such tactics, as Eamonn McCann later explained: ‘None of the other forms of protest provided a way for the mass of working-class people to become actively involved in the fight. The rent-and-rates strike had its attractions, but it was a passive sort of activity. The armed struggle could, of its nature, involve only a few, while rioting was appropriate mainly to the energetic young.’⁴⁶

NICRA raised the stakes higher still by organizing a march on 22 January to Magilligan, just north of Derry, where the authorities had recently opened another camp for internees. Soldiers of the Parachute Regiment prevented the marchers from reaching the camp by firing rubber bullets and striking freely with their batons. One soldier was heard remarking to his officer: ‘I thought we were here to stop them, not massacre them.’⁴⁷ NICRA then announced its intention to defy the ban once more with a demonstration in Derry on 30 January. The local branch of Paisley’s DUP called off its plan for a counter-protest at the last minute, claiming to have received assurances that the marchers would be stopped ‘by force if necessary’.⁴⁸ NICRA urged its supporters not to give the authorities any pretext for the use of such methods.⁴⁹

The local RUC commander, Frank Lagan, also wanted to minimize the danger of a violent confrontation. According to Brendan Duddy, who acted as an intermediary between Lagan and the two IRAs, he received assurances from both factions that their members would not bring weapons on the march or use it as an opportunity to attack the Army. But the Army commander Robert Ford ignored Lagan’s advice and decided to use the protest as the occasion for mass arrests, aiming to ‘scoop up as many hooligans as possible’.50

Ford chose the Paras, known to be the most aggressive of all the regiments stationed in Northern Ireland, as the agent of his plan. By one reporter’s estimate, 20,000 people joined the demonstration as it made its way towards the city centre.⁵¹ When the marchers reached the Army barricade, the Paras went into action, cheered on by Ford. By the time they were finished, the soldiers had shot thirteen civilians dead; another victim later died of his wounds.

Journalists quickly established that every known fact and every available eyewitness contradicted the Army’s version of events.⁵² But Home Secretary Reginald Maudling still used that account as the basis for his speech in the House of Commons, claiming that the soldiers had acted in self-defence after coming under sustained fire. Bernadette Devlin, who had been present on the march, could not endure Maudling’s performance and threw a punch at him. A Conservative MP spoke about Devlin as if she was an exotic anthropological specimen: ‘It is only by listening to her words that one can plumb the depths of the bitterness and hatred that is rampant amongst the minority in Northern Ireland today.’ But the SDLP leader Gerry Fitt gave Devlin his firm support. Facing a chorus of heckling from Tory backbenchers, Fitt lashed out at his fellow MPs: ‘I realize more and more as this debate progresses that I am an Irishman, and you are Englishmen. You have no understanding, no sympathy, and no conscience for the people who live in Londonderry.’⁵³

For supporters of the Provisional IRA, Bloody Sunday sounded the death knell for the tactic of unarmed protest: from now on, force would have to be met with force. That was certainly the view of the young men and women who flocked to join the Provos after the Derry massacre.⁵⁴ But in fact the civil resistance campaign entered its most intense phase in the weeks that followed. On 6 February, a NICRA demonstration in Newry attracted more than 50,000 people, despite warnings that the violence in Derry might be repeated and threats of mass arrest broadcast to the marchers from a low-flying helicopter.55

Sympathy for northern nationalists in the South began to assume organized form for the first time, with protest committees springing up and trade unionists calling for a general strike, hastily rebranded as a day of national mourning by Jack Lynch’s government. In his statement to the Dáil, Lynch demanded the withdrawal of British troops from the Catholic ghettoes, and promised to fund ‘peaceful action by the minority in Northern Ireland, designed to obtain their freedom from Unionist misgovernment’.⁵⁶ Meanwhile an angry crowd burnt the British Embassy in Dublin to the ground as police stood by helpless. The no-go areas were consolidated, the rent-and-rates strike strengthened. With the SDLP still boycotting Stormont and refusing to negotiate while internment continued, Faulkner and Heath now faced a nationalist population united in rejection of their authority.

Two months after Bloody Sunday, the British ambassador in Dublin passed on a copy of the report by Lord Widgery, who had been tasked by Heath with investigating the events in Derry. The civil servant who received the ambassador drily observed that Widgery’s account appeared to be ‘a rather one-sided interpretation’, and wondered ‘how those in Derry, who were fully familiar with what had happened, would take the report’.⁵⁷ This proved to be a classic case of diplomatic understatement. The Widgery Report did almost as much to inflame nationalist fury as the massacre itself. Its author held the organizers of the march responsible for what had happened, expressed ‘strong suspicion’ that some of the victims had been ‘firing weapons or handling bombs’, and found ‘no reason to suppose that the soldiers would have opened fire if they had not been fired upon first’.⁵⁸

Widgery’s conclusions are no longer considered defensible by the British authorities after the publication of Lord Saville’s 2010 report and the acceptance of its findings by the Conservative prime minister, David Cameron. However, Saville’s report did not resolve the dispute about political responsibility for the massacre. In the wake of Bloody Sunday, those who had been pressing for a return to the streets had no doubt the killings were the intended outcome of British policy. The goal, according to the Officials, was to abort the revival of protest before it developed unstoppable momentum: ‘While they can outshoot purely military campaigns, mass action on the streets will be their downfall. This was why the British government ordered their troops to fire on a defenceless and peaceful crowd.’59

Saville rejected such arguments, placing the blame firmly on the soldiers and their immediate commanding officer, Derek Wilford. But his report glossed over the role played by Wilford’s superior Robert Ford and his deputy Mike Jackson, who later became the Army’s chief of staff.⁶⁰ If Saville had given Ford and Jackson their due share of attention, it would have been much harder for David Cameron to endorse his findings without discrediting the Army as an institution.

In any case, the question of responsibility cannot be limited to the decisions made before and during the march. Widgery’s report was as much a part of the story as the shots fired three months earlier. By carefully obscuring all the evidence that members of 1 Para were guilty of unlawful killings, Britain’s most eminent judge gave his stamp of approval to the battalion’s conduct in Derry, indicating to nationalists that participation in a banned march could now be punished by summary execution. The Heath government fully endorsed this verdict.

Those who spoke of a carefully planned massacre designed to force protest off the streets exaggerated the degree of political forethought behind the killings. It appears much more likely that the Army’s intention was to goad the IRA into a shoot-out that it expected to win.⁶¹ But they were right to insist that Bloody Sunday was no accidental misfortune. Westminster’s policy of upholding Unionist rule was bound to provoke a test of strength between the Army and the nationalist population. Once NICRA and the NRM started to revive street demonstrations as the cutting-edge of resistance to the ‘Orange State’, British soldiers had to shoulder the burden of confronting them. Robert Ford’s decision to use the march in Derry as cover for his reckless plan then turned the risk of disaster into a near-certainty. Instead of breaking the IRA, Ford gave it an impetus and popular legitimacy that would have been unimaginable a year earlier.

In March 1972, as Stormont descended into a terminal crisis, a court in Belfast gave the PD activists Michael Farrell and Kevin Boyle six months in jail for their role in organizing the marches that preceded Bloody Sunday. According to a report in PD’s Unfree Citizen, the courtroom was packed with soldiers who ‘amused themselves by clicking and unclicking the safety catches of their rifles in the crowded room’.62 Farrell spoke from the dock, surrounded by his NRM allies, Kevin Agnew and Gerry O’Hare of the Provisionals, and the Westminster MPs Bernadette Devlin and Frank McManus. After objecting to the presence of the soldiers, which, he suggested, made the court resemble a scene from the dictatorships of southern Europe, the People’s Democracy leader went on to deliver a passionate defence of the entire civil resistance campaign:

Some evidence is being offered that I have committed certain actions but I want to challenge the whole basis of the legal set-up here which decides what is legal or illegal. I am not guilty of any offence, because it appears to me that the system of law and justice in this state has broken down and collapsed. On the 9^th August 1971, the door of my house was broken in and armed soldiers burst in and took me away at gunpoint. Later that day I was assaulted, beaten up and maltreated at Girdwood Park military barracks and then lodged in Crumlin Road jail. I was held there for five weeks and then released. At no time was I given any explanation for this treatment. It was later shown that it was all quite illegal even under the terms of the Special Powers Act. Yet I have no redress and there are some 700 or 800 others like me, still being held.

Farrell ended his speech with a rhetorical flourish: ‘The law in any society is based on a contract between the State and the citizen. When the State oversteps this authority, when it tramples on the rights of citizens, when it shoots down people in cold blood, then that contract is dissolved.’63

The End of Civil Resistance

By the time Farrell and his comrades brought an appeal against their convictions, the regime that had prosecuted them was no more. The turbulent aftermath of Bloody Sunday dealt the final blow to Stormont and obliged the Heath government to change direction. When Faulkner refused to hand over security powers to Westminster, Heath imposed direct rule on 24 March, ending half a century of Unionist Party rule. British civil servants began putting out feelers for a new political initiative that might bring the SDLP and the Irish government back onside and isolate the republican guerrillas. As Faulkner and William Craig addressed a rally of supporters outside their suspended parliament, those who had raised the slogan ‘Smash Stormont!’ had to ask themselves: what now?

A few months earlier, a prescient article in PD’s newspaper had suggested that, while the Provos were determined to keep fighting until Irish unity was achieved, ‘in practice much of the Catholic support would evaporate – and probably many of the Volunteers would be satisfied – if the internees were released, Stormont smashed and the British Army removed.’⁶⁴ One of these conditions had now been fulfilled, and the mood among nationalists was predictably triumphant. Divisions within the nationalist community that had been papered over since internment – between radicals and conservatives, militarists and those who favoured civil resistance – now reasserted themselves.

For a time, it looked as if the Officials would continue to wage war on the British Army. In the weeks following Bloody Sunday, they planted a bomb at the headquarters of the Parachute Regiment in Aldershot, killing a number of civilian workers, and tried to assassinate the Unionist home affairs minister, John Taylor. When British soldiers gunned down the Official IRA’s most charismatic figurehead, Joe McCann, in April 1972, Cathal Goulding promised revenge at McCann’s funeral in Belfast: ‘Those who are responsible for the terrorism that is Britain’s age-old reaction to Irish demands will be the victims of that terrorism, paying richly in their own red blood for their crimes.’65 But Goulding also declared that the Officials would ‘fight them on our terms, not on theirs’. The OIRA’s chief of staff was already contemplating a ceasefire at the time of McCann’s death, although most of his audience probably missed the hint.

That move came in May 1972, with a message from the Official IRA that described ‘a growing awareness by the leadership of the Republican Movement that we had been drawn into a war that was not of our choosing’.⁶⁶ The immediate cue for the ceasefire was a controversy that engulfed one of the movement’s strongest northern units in early May. After the Army shot dead a teenage boy, the Derry Officials responded by killing a young British soldier from a regiment deployed in West Germany who was home on leave in the Bogside. The death of William Best provoked a hostile reaction from many Derry nationalists who saw him as one of their own, greatly encouraged by the Catholic Church. The Starry Plough hit back with a firm anti-clerical line: ‘One of the curses of this area for ages past has been the identification of religion with politics. We are not part of that set-up, we are fighting to destroy it. We are out for a socialist Ireland in which, among other things, religion will be a thing for a man’s private conscience.’⁶⁷

When the Official IRA leadership in Dublin announced the ceasefire three weeks later, they denied having been influenced by the turmoil in Derry, and were widely disbelieved. In fact, the Ranger Best affair merely supplied the opportunity for a move that had much deeper political roots. But the use of this pretext stored up trouble for the leadership with their Derry unit, whose members felt they had been the targets of a spurious ‘peace campaign’, orchestrated by a Church that was highly selective in its moral indignation.⁶⁸

A confidential briefing prepared for Edward Heath in the summer of 1972 gave a shrewd assessment of the OIRA ceasefire, noting that Cathal Goulding’s movement had ‘always been more willing than the Provisionals to envisage the possibility of working through the institutions of Northern Ireland – as an intermediate measure – and to cooperate so far as they have been able with the Protestant working class’. The Officials had felt obliged to match the violence of the Provos in order to keep their own members on board and maintain their position in the Catholic ghettoes, but their desire to avoid sectarian conflict was perfectly genuine: ‘Secret sources have confirmed their feelings in this regard.’69

OIRA commanders often sold the ceasefire to rank-and-file members as a tactical expedient that left plenty of room for manoeuvre. Two years later, the United Irishman could still carry a report that the Army had shot two OIRA Volunteers dead while they were planting a landmine ‘as retaliation for the intimidation and harassment of the working-class people of Newry’, prompting a revenge attack that killed one soldier.⁷⁰ But May 1972 marked a clear turning point in the history of the Officials, after which they gradually wound down their armed wing and gave priority to political action.

The OIRA ceasefire made it easier for the Provisionals to call a truce of their own. When the British government imposed direct rule, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh warned against a ‘truce hysteria’ that would stampede the IRA into a premature halt: ‘Let there be no settlement short of the mark. If we do, we are sentencing the next generation to death and destruction.’ Seán Mac Stíofáin was much blunter: ‘Concessions be damned, we want freedom!’⁷¹ But the Provos still came out with their own set of peace proposals and indicated a willingness to talk. An MI6 officer, Frank Steele, held preliminary discussions with two Provo commanders, Dáithí Ó Conaill and Gerry Adams, which paved the way for a ceasefire in June. The briefing given to Steele described Adams as one of the most senior IRA men in Belfast. Expecting to meet an ‘arrogant, streetwise young thug’, Steele instead found Adams to be ‘a very personable, intelligent, articulate and self-disciplined man’, who ‘obviously had a terrific future ahead of him’.⁷²

As soon as the truce began, Heath’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, invited the Provisional leadership for secret talks on the region’s future. Mac Stíofáin headed a delegation that included several younger militants such as Adams, Martin McGuinness and Ivor Bell, who had to be talked out of wearing his combat fatigues for the occasion.73 The Provos insisted that Britain should declare its intention to withdraw all troops by the end of 1974, and allow the island’s future to be determined by an all-Ireland poll. Along with this maximum programme, the movement’s political wing also put forward a more limited set of demands that bore some resemblance to NICRA’s platform: release of internees; repeal of the Special Powers Act; PR for all elections; a lifting of the ban on Provisional Sinn Féin, and the scrapping of all oaths of allegiance to the British Crown.⁷⁴

British officials who took part in these abortive negotiations later accused the Provisional leaders of adopting a completely unrealistic attitude.⁷⁵ According to one participant from the British side, Seán Mac Stíofáin conducted himself ‘like Montgomery at Lüneberg Heath telling the German generals what they should and shouldn’t do if they wanted peace’.⁷⁶ This description of Mac Stíofáin’s outlook appears close to the truth, judging by his own recollections of Provo super-confidence after the fall of Stormont, as well as the account of the talks that Gerry Adams later supplied. According to Adams, when the Provisional delegation broke off to discuss what their British counterparts had said, Mac Stíofáin exclaimed, ‘Jesus, we have it!’⁷⁷

If so, the Provisional chief of staff had a greatly exaggerated sense of what could be achieved at the time. Sinn Féin’s short-term programme probably represented the outer limit of what the British government would have been willing to concede. Having failed to achieve their maximum goals, the Provos had little alternative but to return to war, since the movement had no political wing that could advance their agenda in the absence of a military campaign. A stand-off provoked by loyalist paramilitaries in Belfast was the immediate trigger for the resumption of hostilities, but there would most likely have been another incident to scupper the ceasefire if the loyalists had not intervened.

The Provisionals were now keen to make full use of a weapon that they had stumbled upon almost by accident: the car bomb. As Mike Davis points out in his history of the ‘poor man’s air force’, the conflict in Northern Ireland became a grisly milestone: the first time that urban guerrillas combined homemade bombs with motor vehicles to ravage a modern city.78 The military potential of this innovation exhilarated Mac Stíofáin and his comrades, who geared up for a final push that would eject Britain from Irish soil once and for all.⁷⁹

However, they had not reflected on another aspect of the new weapon noted by Davis: ‘Like even the “smartest” of aerial bombs, car bombs are inherently indiscriminate: “collateral damage” is virtually inevitable. If the logic of an attack is to slaughter civilians and sow panic in the widest circles, to operate a “strategy of tension” or just demoralize a society, car bombs are ideal. But they are equally effective at destroying the moral credibility of a cause and alienating its mass base of support.’⁸⁰

On the afternoon of 21 July 1972, twenty-one bombs went off in Belfast’s city centre, killing seven civilians and two soldiers and leaving more than 130 people wounded. Although the IRA had phoned in warnings, there were too many devices for the security forces to cope with at once. Gruesome scenes of human flesh and body parts being shovelled into plastic bags featured on the national news.

‘Bloody Friday’ was a propaganda disaster for the Provos, and provided William Whitelaw and the Army with the opportunity they had been waiting for. Ten days later, Operation Motorman swept aside the no-go areas in Belfast and Derry. The Army started to impose a new military architecture of barracks and observation towers on the Catholic ghettoes, destined to overshadow the urban landscape for the next two decades.⁸¹

The Derry Officials urged their republican rivals to end the dalliance with car bombs: ‘Bombing is an elitist tactic. It does not involve the people. This is true, of course, of all military activity, of the armed defence of the area or of offensive guerrilla activities such as we, as well as the Provisionals, engaged in until recently. But it is uniquely true of urban bombing which demands a tiny group, or perhaps a single person acting clandestinely.’ Such methods were no substitute for a political organization ‘confident of its own strength, conscious of its own involvement in real politics and clear about its objectives. You cannot bomb an organization like that into existence. You have to build it, and there are no short-cuts.’82

But the exhortation fell on deaf ears. Car bombs had a long future ahead of them in Northern Ireland. The Provisionals went on to devise ever-more sophisticated versions and take their war to the heart of Britain’s elite, claiming hundreds of civilian lives along the way. They would also belatedly accept the need for a political struggle to be waged alongside their military campaign. But civil resistance never reached the heights it had known between Demetrius and Motorman again.