By the spring of 1969 the violence in Londonderry was producing reverberations in Belfast. The city's IRA commander, Billy McMillen, a loyal supporter of Cathal Goulding's shift to the left, was under increasing criticism from a number of formidable traditionalist figures. These accused the leadership of neglecting the IRA's military role and leaving Catholics vulnerable to attack. McMillen had maintained a residual military role for the hundred or so volunteers who had to share twenty-four weapons between them.1 Any major outbreak of communal violence was bound to overwhelm such paltry resources, and McMillen was conscious of Goulding's determination that the IRA should not be drawn into sectarian warfare.
In April 1969 anti-RUC riots in the Ardoyne district of North Belfast had increased pressure on McMillen to prepare the IRA for ‘defensive’ action, and on 12 July IRA members were mobilized during clashes between Orange marchers and Catholics living in the inappropriately named Unity Walk flats complex at the bottom of the Shankill Road. In the same month, in an oration during the reinterment of two IRA men executed in England in 1940, Jimmy Steele, a Belfast IRA veteran, launched a bitter attack on Goulding's leadership. Although he was suspended from the movement, the speech became a rallying point for those who were soon to emerge as the leaders of the Provisional IRA. The traditional march by the Apprentice Boys in Derry on 12 August was to give them their opportunity.
After the April clashes with the RUC the influence of the more moderate leaders of the civil rights movement in Derry had gone into precipitous decline. In July, soon after the death of Samuel Devenny, popularly believed to be a direct result of his beating by the RUC in April, the ‘middle-aged, middle class and middle of the road’2 Derry Citizens’ Action Committee was superseded by the Derry Citizens' Defence Association (DCDA). This was dominated by local republicans, and Seán Keenan was its chairman. But, as Eamonn McCann, the Derry Trotskyist, noted, events were increasingly determined by ‘the hooligans’: the unemployed youth of the Bogside whose energy and aggression had done much to power the early civil rights movement but who were now set on a major confrontation with the police and loyalist marchers.3 Although the DCDA had met with leaders of the Apprentice Boys and promised to provide effective stewarding on the day of the march, it put much more energy into preparing for the defence of the Bogside. Barricades were erected in anticipation of an RUC and loyalist ‘invasion’, heaps of stones were piled at strategic points, and over the four days that culminated in the march a local dairy lost 43,000 bottles as large numbers of petrol bombs were prepared.4 The DCDA made little more than a token effort to prevent the march being stoned, and for more than two hours a police cordon shielding marchers was subject to a constant hail of missiles before launching the series of baton charges that began ‘The Battle of the Bogside’. An attempt by the RUC to follow the rioters into the Bogside was repulsed with barricades, bricks and a rain of petrol bombs from the top of a block of high-rise flats, and by 13 August ‘Free Derry’ had effectively seceded from the northern state.
With NICRA calling marches and demonstrations to relieve Derry nationalists by stretching the limited manpower of the 3,000-strong RUC, Chichester-Clark's government was told by Callaghan and his Home Office advisers that it must exhaust all the resources under its control, including the 8,500 B Specials, before a request for army assistance would be contemplated.5 The result was disastrous. Robert Porter, the liberal Unionist whom O'Neill had appointed to Home Affairs shortly before his resignation, was told by the Home Office that he could allow the RUC to use a new weapon, CS gas, against rioters. Over two days, huge amounts were used, and the Bogside became blanketed with gas.6 This served simply to stiffen resistance, as did the television broadcast by the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, on the evening of 13 August, in which he declared that his government could ‘no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse’. By the next morning the RUC commander in Derry told Chichester-Clark that his men were exhausted and incapable even of holding the centre of the city.7 Stormont then ordered a general mobilization of the B Specials. The Specials, who had been conceived as a counter-terrorist force, had no training in crowd control or dealing with rioters. After forty-eight hours of rioting, with the RUC depleted by casualties and exhausted and with the prospect of a murderous confrontation between Derry Catholics and the Specials, Wilson and Callaghan agreed to the dispatch of troops.
In Belfast, where there had been attacks on RUC stations and some rioting on 13 August, the Lynch broadcast and the mobilization of the Specials contributed powerfully to the worst outbreak of communal violence since the 1920s. It centred on the streets that linked the Falls and Shankill Roads. While Catholics erected barricades on the Falls Road, crowds of Protestants, amongst whom were members of the recently mobilized Specials, gathered on the Shankill. The Derry conflagration was the subject of two conflicting and destructive ethnic myths in Belfast. For Catholics it was a case of the Bogside residents being besieged by bloodthirsty RUC men and loyalists, while for Protestants, including many members of the RUC and Specials, the Bogside was in a state of IRA-sponsored insurrection. Both communities feared that their ethnic nightmare was about to become a reality in Belfast and acted accordingly.
Overreaction by the police led to the use of armoured cars mounted with machine-guns to disperse rioters. Protestant mobs pushing down towards the Falls Road petrol-bombed Catholic houses as they proceeded. In these confrontations and in similar ones in the Ardoyne area over 150 houses were destroyed. Seven people were killed including a nine-year-old Catholic boy, Patrick Rooney, who was asleep in his bedroom when he was struck by a stray RUC bullet. The small number of IRA members with a few handguns and a Thompson sub-machine gun could do little to prevent the carnage. They were equally powerless the next day when, before British troops could be effectively deployed in the city's trouble spots, Protestants launched an attack on the Clonard district, a small Catholic enclave near the Shankill Road, after rumours that there were IRA snipers on the roof of Clonard Monastery. Gerald McAuley, a member of the Fianna, the IRA's youth wing, was shot dead, and a whole Catholic street, Bombay Street, was razed. The burning of Bombay Street would become integrated into the founding mythology of the Provisional IRA, in which it was depicted as the inevitable consequence of the defenceless state of Belfast Catholics that resulted from the misguided policies of the ‘Marxist’ leadership in Dublin.8
British troops were on the streets of Belfast and Derry for the first time since 1935, but Wilson and Callaghan, who had both threatened to introduce direct rule if troops were sent in, now backtracked. For, although direct rule had been on the British cabinet's agenda since the early months of 1969, there was an undercurrent of horror at the possibility of such a deepening of involvement. As early as February 1969 Callaghan had told the cabinet that direct rule was a ‘serious option’, although he added that independence for the North might be a ‘preferable alternative’.9 The truth was that, although direct rule was held like a sword of Damocles over the heads of Chichester-Clark and his colleagues, neither Wilson nor Callaghan had the stomach for it. In part this reflected an understandable desire not to be drawn into what was seen as the bog of Irish politics, but it also reflected a fear of a Protestant backlash. Sir Harold Black, the Northern Ireland Cabinet Secretary, warned senior Whitehall figures that in the event of direct rule, ‘there would be a fright-ening reaction by the Protestant community which would make anything that had happened up to now seem like child's play.’10 The warning seemed to have the desired effect.
But if the British government recoiled from direct rule, it also made clear that Stormont could continue to exist only as a client regime under constant supervision at both ministerial and official levels. Called to Downing Street on 19 August, Chichester-Clark pre-emptively emasculated his government by proposing to give the army's GOC in Northern Ireland supremacy over the RUC and Specials in security matters. Although the declaration issued after the meeting affirmed Northern Ireland's constitutional status, it had an implicitly critical tone, affirming that ‘every citizen in Northern Ireland is entitled to the same equality of treatment and freedom from discrimination as obtains in the rest of the United Kingdom irrespective of political views or religion.’11 Two senior civil servants were sent from Whitehall to work within the Stormont Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Home Affairs, and Chichester-Clark accepted a British proposal for a committee of inquiry into policing, to be chaired by Sir John Hunt. The humiliation of the Stormont regime was complete when, in a subsequent television interview, Wilson indicated that the Specials were finished.
Callaghan's arrival for his first visit to the North deepened the impression of a new Westminster overlordship. Joint working groups of officials from Belfast and London were to examine how far Stormont's existing practices and commitments would ensure fair allocation of houses and public employment, and promote good community relations. Greeted as a conquering hero when he entered the Bogside, which, like large sections of Catholic West Belfast, was a ‘no-go’ area for the RUC and the British Army, he had a much less positive reception on the Shankill Road.
This system of direct rule by proxy enraged the unionist right and eventually unleashed a downward spiral of loyalist reaction and republican assertiveness. Lord Hunt's committee reported on 9 October, recommending that the RUC become an unarmed civilian force and the B Specials be disbanded to be replaced by the Ulster Defence Regiment, a locally recruited part-time military force under the control of the British Army. In response, loyalists rioted for two nights on the Shankill Road, and shot and killed the first RUC man to die as a result of political violence since the IRA's 1950s campaign. Ian Paisley's attacks on Chichester-Clark, whom he portrayed as Callaghan's submissive poodle, were increasingly influential in the Protestant community.
Although Callaghan had privately declared his desire ‘to do down the Unionists’,12 he and his colleagues were soon convinced that there was no alternative but to support Chichester-Clark. Oliver Wright, a senior diplomat who had been Wilson's emissary to Rhodesia, was now sent to oversee the implementation of the reforms and ‘put some stiffening into the administration’.13 Although Unionist ministers feared that he would listen only to their critics,14 his reports to Downing Street were surprisingly sympathetic to the good intentions of Chichester-Clark and his colleagues, if not to their abilities: ‘They were not evil men bent on maintaining power at all costs. They were decent, but bewildered men, out of their depth in the face of the magnitude of their problem.’15 Wright was critical of the recently published Cameron Report into the 1968 disturbances because it displayed so little understanding of Protestant fears: ‘not only the loss of political power within his own community, but his absorption into the larger society of Southern Ireland – alien in smell, backward in development and inferior in politics’. His central conclusion, one followed by Wilson's administration until it lost office, was that ‘our central purpose should be to support the Northern Ireland government, both to keep the problem of Ulster at arm's length and because they alone can accomplish our joint aims by reasonably peaceful means.’16 However, Wright was well aware of the pressure which Chichester-Clark's government was under from its own supporters, who increasingly complained that it was a puppet regime implementing pro-Catholic reforms under pressure from Wilson and Callaghan:
Her Majesty's Government is not allowing the Northern Ireland Government to do what they want to do: to issue statements about a timetable for proper action against the Catholic barricades and the extremists who seem to call the tune behind them. The result is that the Northern Ireland Government feel that the Catholics are getting away with it and they themselves are reduced more and more to the role of puppets… If and when we take over, and it will be a minor miracle if we don't have to, we shall, on present indications, have a pretty unfriendly majority party and majority community to deal with.17
Despite this, by the beginning of 1970 there was a facile optimism in the British cabinet and Whitehall that was reflected in an Irish Times investigation into the new relationship between Stormont and Westminster: ‘The British view is that the Northern Ireland problem “has been licked”.’18 At a meeting in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London in February, Wright informed Patrick Hillery, the Irish Minister for External Affairs, that ‘a lot of steam had gone out of demonstrations’ and that the only ones making trouble were ‘professional anarchists’. Irish fears about the growing support for Paisley, whose Protestant Unionist Party had recently won two council seats in Belfast, were dismissed with the claim that Chichester-Clark had a ‘moderate and united Unionist Party’ behind him and that the prospect was one of ‘steady improvement in the situation’.19 This ignored the reverberations from the violence of the previous summer in which thousands of people, most of them Catholics, had lost their homes. There was a dangerous new sharpness to sectarian tensions in Belfast from which both Paisley's Protestant populism and the infant Provisional IRA were already benefiting.
Traditionalist republicans had asserted themselves in the wake of the August violence. By September they had forced the Belfast IRA command to break its links with the national leadership, and by the end of the year the nucleus of an alternative republican movement had emerged, leaving Goulding's supporters to define themselves as the Official IRA. When in December an IRA convention voted in favour of ending the policy of abstention from the Dáil, Goulding's critics seceded and created a Provisional Army Council. In January 1970 the political wing of the movement, Sinn Féin, also split. While the largely southern leadership of the Provisionals – men including the new Chief of Staff Seán MacStiofáin and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh – were driven by a fundamentalist commitment to the main tenets of republican ideology, many of their new supporters in the North were motivated by a mixture of ethnic rage against loyalists and the RUC and the increasingly fraught relations between the British Army and sections of Belfast's Catholic working class.
Although the violence of August had created a reservoir of fear, resentment and anger that the Provisionals could exploit, recent research has pointed to slow and limited growth of the organization until the spring of 1970. The first ‘general army convention’ of the Provisional IRA was attended by just thirty-four people.20 For many of the young Catholics who approached veteran republicans to get trained in the use of arms, the enemy was not the British soldiers, who were enjoying a brief honeymoon period as the saviours of their communities, but loyalists and the RUC. Republicans such as Joe Cahill and the young Gerry Adams were aghast at the behaviour of Falls Road housewives who gave cups of tea to soldiers while their daughters attended discos organized by the army. But as early as September 1969 Callaghan himself had admitted to his cabinet colleague Anthony Crosland that British troops were no longer popular: ‘He had anticipated the honeymoon period wouldn't last very long and it hadn't.’21 British soldiers soon found themselves in the unenviable position of policing major sectarian confrontations and acting as the first line of defence of a Unionist government under intense pressure from the loyalist right.
Republicans had long denounced Stormont as a ‘police state’. However, the dominant characteristic of the RUC's response to the civil unrest after October 1968 had been its weakness and ineffectuality. In contrast, the army, whose presence had grown from the pre-Troubles garrison of 2,000 to 7,500 by September 1969,22 responded to rioting with often overwhelming force. The loyalists who rioted on the Shankill Road after the publication of the Hunt Report were the first to experience the difference. Two were shot dead and more than sixty injured, with a police surgeon commenting that the injuries were the worst he had ever seen after a riot.23 Given the atmosphere of intense sectarian animosity and potential confrontation that existed in the ‘shatter-zones’ of North and West Belfast, it was inevitable that the army's brutal and often indiscriminate response would be meted out to Catholics as well.
The first major conflict between Catholics and the army occurred in April 1970 after an Orange parade near the Ballymurphy estate in West Belfast, which was by then home to many of those displaced by the August violence.24 The Ballymurphy riots were accompanied by the expulsion of Protestant families from the nearby New Barnsley estate. Further confrontations in West and East Belfast precipitated by Orange parades in June led to the first significant military actions by the Provisionals. IRA men defending the small Catholic enclave of the Short Strand in East Belfast shot dead two Protestants, while republicans killed three Protestants in clashes on the Crumlin Road. The brutal sectarian headcount of five Protestants to one Catholic killed established the Provisionals' ghetto credibility over that of the more squeamish Official IRA, which had remained loyal to Goulding. The Provisionals experienced their first major influx of recruits since the previous August and accelerated their plans for moving from a largely defensive to an aggressive posture.25 A bombing campaign that had begun in Belfast in March 1970 was intensified in the autumn.
The growth of the Provisionals was encouraged by the combination of a Unionist government that was hostage to the right and by a new Conservative administration that republicans could portray as crudely pro-Unionist in sympathy. Ian Paisley and a supporter had been returned to Stormont in two by-elections held in April, Paisley taking particular relish from a victory in O'Neill's former constituency of Bannside. Paisley went on to win the Westminster seat of North Antrim in the June general election. Callaghan was later to blame ‘the far more relaxed and less focused regime’ of Reginald Maudling, his successor as Home Secretary, for allowing the situation to deteriorate radically.26 This too conveniently ignored the profoundly destabilizing effects of the policy of direct rule by proxy, which Wilson and he had bequeathed to Heath and Maudling. But it is true that while Callaghan and Wilson were inclined to be cautious, Maudling and Heath were disposed to give the army its head. Maudling's own character has been described as ‘brilliant if a little lazy’.27 His strong aversion to the North's warring factions – ‘these bloody people’28 as he referred to them – may have encouraged Sir Ian Freeland, the GOC in Northern Ireland, to a more aggressive approach than he would have adopted under Callaghan. It was Freeland who, without consulting Chichester-Clark's government, made the decision to impose a curfew on the Lower Falls area in July after a search for arms had provoked rioting. For two days 3,000 troops supported by armour and helicopters conducted a massive house search while saturating the area in CS gas and taking on both the Official IRA, who controlled the Lower Falls, and the Provisionals in gun battles in which five people were killed.29
A triumphalist tour of the area by the Stormont Minister of Information, who was a son of Lord Brookeborough, contributed to the politically disastrous results of this military operation, which marked the turning point in the relations between the army and the city's Catholic working class,30 By the end of the summer the Provisionals had launched a bombing campaign against government buildings and commercial targets and were organizing the importation of weapons from the US. Their strategy was aimed at provoking a more repressive response from Stormont, including internment, which they correctly calculated would fail and lead to direct rule. Republican theology saw Britain as the enemy, and the Provisionals did all in their power to reduce the conflict in Northern Ireland to one between the British state and the ‘Irish people’ without the complication of Stormont. They would be spectacularly successful in pushing the contradictions of direct rule by proxy to their limit and in bringing down Stormont, but the price would be a low-intensity sectarian civil war.
Republican violence exacerbated the problems that Chichester-Clark was experiencing in his attempts to maintain the momentum of a reform programme against a substantial section of his own party and the Unionist grass-roots. The decisions, post-August 1969, to create a Central Housing Authority and appoint a review body on local government reform chaired by Sir Patrick Macrory, were bitterly resented, particularly in the west of Northern Ireland where they were seen as ‘handing over half the Province to a one third minority.’31 To the consternation of many party members, Brian Faulkner, who as Minister of Development was in the forefront of reform, defended the need for a Central Housing Authority by pointing to the deficiencies in the North's housing stock: ‘half the houses were over 50 years old, 35 per cent were over 80 years old, there were 100,000 houses that should be replaced as quickly as possible.’ The usual governmental defence of its ‘progressive record’ gave way to the admission that ‘Our housing programme since the War has been badly behind the rest of the United Kingdom.’32
When the Macrory Report was published in June 1970, it recommended the centralization of major services such as health and education in a small number of area boards and the reduction of the number of councils from seventy-three to twenty-six. Disgruntled Unionists in border areas formed the West Ulster Unionist Council, led by Harry West and other prominent Unionist and Orange opponents of reform. The concerns of border Unionists were amplified by a more general discontent with the government's security policies, where it was alleged that a weakened and demoralized RUC and the newly created Ulster Defence Regiment were failing to counter growing lawlessness and subversion. In March 1970 five of the most prominent dissidents, including Craig and West, voted against the police bill that was implementing the Hunt recommendations and were expelled from the parliamentary party.33 Chichester-Clark's refusal to reinstate them infuriated many in the party's grass-roots, as did the regime's failure to impose authority on the ‘no-go’ areas. Such criticisms intensified when on July 23 the government imposed a six-month ban on parades. In September the usually supportive Executive Committee of the Ulster Unionist Council passed a resolution of no confidence in the government's security policies.
The Belfast IRA killed their first unarmed RUC men in August 1970 but did not manage to kill a British soldier until February 1971. In March the particularly brutal murder of three young off-duty soldiers by Ardoyne Provisionals precipitated Chichester-Clark's resignation when Heath refused his request for a toughening of security policy, including a military occupation of ‘no-go’ areas in Derry. Brian Faulkner, who easily defeated William Craig in the election to succeed Chichester-Clark, set out to restore the morale of his divided party by a determined reassertion of Stormont's role in security policy. Taking over the Home Affairs portfolio, he pressurized Heath and the new GOC, General Sir Harry Tuzo, to move from a containment policy to one of actively re-establishing the ‘rule of law’ in all parts of Northern Ireland.34 He complemented this with an attempt to court moderate nationalists by offering a new system of powerful backbench committees at Stormont, some of which would be chaired by the opposition.
The IRA greeted Faulkner's accession with an intensification of its campaign. In Derry, where the Provisionals were still weak and where no shots had yet been fired, the RUC had been able to resume patrols in Bogside and Creggan.35 With Seán MacStiofain complaining about lack of activity in Derry, the Provisional IRA in the city deliberately and abruptly escalated their activities against the army in early July.36 They began to use the routine confrontations between the city's young unemployed rioters and the army as a cover for sniping and the throwing of gelignite bombs. Within days the army shot and killed two Catholic youths, and all Nationalist MPs withdrew from Stormont in protest.
In the year to July 1971, fifty-five people had died violently, and there had been 300 explosions. Then the Provisionals launched their heaviest campaign of bombing in Belfast, with ten explosions along the route of the 12 July Orange parades and some ‘spectaculars’, including the total destruction of a new printing plant for the Daily Mirror.37 According to Faulkner, these summer bombings tipped the scales in favour of internment: ‘I took the decision… no one objected.’38 In fact, when he went to Downing Street on 5 August to get the approval of Heath and his colleagues, it was pointed out to him that neither the Chief of the General Staff nor the GOC believed internment was necessary from a strictly military point of view and the ‘national and international implications’ of such a serious step were stressed. Heath made the point that if internment were tried and failed, the only further option was direct rule.39
Launched at 4.15 a.m. on 9 August, ‘Operation Demetrius’ pulled in 337 of the 520 republicans on RUC Special Branch and Military Intelligence lists. These lists turned out to be grossly inadequate: they relied on outdated information about pre-1969 republicanism, which meant that, while middle-aged veterans of earlier campaigns were arrested together with many Officials, many of the new recruits to the Provisionals were untouched.40 Not one loyalist was interned, adding to the outrage in the Catholic community. Most damaging politically were the claims, later officially verified, that internees had been brutalized during arrest and interrogation and, in particular, that eleven men had been singled out for ‘in-depth' interrogation. This involved being deprived of sleep, food and drink and forced to stand hooded and spread-eagled against a wall while subjected to high-pitched sound from a ‘noise-machine’.41
Though the RUC and the army were satisfied that internment had damaged the Provisionals in Belfast, there was little evidence of this on the streets, where violence intensified dramatically. The reverse was true, in that internment had provided a major boost to Provisional recruitment. In 1971 prior to internment there had been thirty-four deaths; within two days of its introduction seventeen people had died, and by the end of the year 140 more.42 By the beginning of October, Heath was complaining that the crisis in Northern Ireland was threatening to jeopardize the success of the government's economic and defence policies and its approach to Europe. Despite this, he still gave priority to the defeat of the IRA by military means whatever this meant in terms of alienation of the minority and bad relations with Dublin.43 However, other senior ministers and officials favoured an approach that kept the option of a united Ireland open. The consensus that emerged was that Faulkner should be pressed to consider a radical political initiative that would involve bringing ‘non-militant republican Catholics' into the government, while the issue of internal reform would be separated from that of creeping reunification by the periodic holding of referendums on the border. Faulkner rebuffed the pressure, telling Heath that he could not contemplate serving in government with republicans – amongst whom he included politicians such as John Hume and Gerry Fitt. He was too mindful of previous British failure to deliver on threats of direct rule and placed too much faith in ritualistic statements by British ministers ruling it out. In fact, a belief that direct rule was likely had formed at the highest level of the British state by the autumn of 1971. The principal reason was the communal polarization generated by internment and an increasing inclination to reach out to the nationalist community by a radical break that would undermine support for the Provisionals. Suspension of Stormont had therefore become likely even before the tragedy of Bloody Sunday.
In Derry the GOC had come to an agreement with leaders of moderate Catholic opinion in August 1971 that the army would lower its profile in order to allow the ‘extremists’ to be marginalized. By the end of the year it was obvious that the wager on moderation had failed: ‘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.’44 This had allowed both sections of the IRA in the city large zones for rest and recuperation, from which they had emerged as the most formidable military challenge in the North. The large numbers of nationalist youth, ‘Derry Young Hooligans’ as the military commanders in the city referred to them, also used the ‘no-go’ areas as bases for incursions into the city centre, which was being decimated by the effects of rioting, arson and Provisional bombs. By the end of the year, faced with an increasingly rampant level of ‘Young Hooligan’ activity, which the IRA often used as a means of luring soldiers into situations where they were vulnerable to snipers or nail-bombs, there was a feeling amongst some senior military commanders that a more aggressive posture was necessary. This was the background to the events of Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972, when, after rioting that had developed in the wake of a banned civil rights march, members of the Parachute regiment, whose deployment in Derry had been questioned by local police and army commanders because of their reputation for gung-ho brutality, opened fire, killing thirteen civilians.
The material released to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, set up in 1997 by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, provides no evidence that the killings were the result of a policy decision by either the Faulkner or Heath cabinets. Instead there was a clearly defined local dialectic leading to the disaster. Major-General Ford, the Commander of Land Forces who was responsible for day-to-day operational decisions in Northern Ireland, had come to the conclusion that a ‘softly-softly’ approach to the Bogside and Creggan had placed an increasingly intolerable strain on his men as they faced strong and self-confident aggression from ‘Derry Young Hooligans’ and from the local IRA. He was contemptuous of the moderate advice coming from the local RUC commander, a Catholic. Afraid that the city centre itself was in danger of becoming a ‘no-go’ area, Ford had come to believe that only the shooting of identified ‘ringleaders’ would stop the rot.45
The Heath cabinet had no desire to push events in Derry to such a brutal conclusion, as a minute of the cabinet discussion shows:
As to Londonderry, a military operation to impose law and order would require seven battalions… It would be a major operation, necessarily involving civilian casualties, and thereby hardening even further the attitude of the Roman Catholic population.
Heath's own summing-up of the situation on 11 January was that a military operation to ‘reimpose law and order’ in Derry might become inevitable, but it should not be undertaken until there was a successful political initiative.46 The British political and military establishment may have been prepared to contemplate civilian deaths in Derry during an operation against the IRA in the Bogside and Creggan, but only when they believed that the political conditions were right. This would entail a major political initiative and one was not yet on the horizon when Bloody Sunday occurred. Less than a week before, the Chief of the General Staff, Sir Michael Carver, on a visit to the province, had defined the ‘IRA propaganda machine’ as the main enemy.47 The actions of the First Parachute Regiment on 30 January provided that machine with sufficient fuel to guarantee years of effective work.
The Derry killings unleashed a wave of angry protest in the South that culminated in the burning of the British embassy in Dublin after it had been attacked by a crowd of more than 20,000. Amidst a torrent of international criticism and with growing unease amongst his own colleagues and Tory backbenchers, Heath summoned Faulkner to Downing Street to discuss the possibility of a political initiative. Faulkner was confronted with a series of ideas, including repartition, a periodic border poll, a broadening of his government to include members of the recently formed moderate-nationalist Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) and the transfer of all Stormont's security powers to Westminster.48 On 3 March, as newspapers carried a number of speculative articles on the imminence of direct rule, Faulkner read out a telegram from Heath to the annual meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council. In it, Heath had described the stories as ‘pure speculation’. Kenneth Bloomfield noted that Faulkner ‘should have been more wary of that elastic form of words’.49 Even at a cabinet meeting the day before the crucial Downing Street meeting on 22 March, Faulkner told his colleagues that ‘consultation rather than announcement of decisions was what was in Mr Heath's mind – indeed he thought it would be unrealistic after weeks of independent study for him to be expected to accept any new ideas on the strength of a one-day meeting.’ Harry West was the only minister who is recorded as regarding Faulkner as ‘over-optimistic’: ‘preparations should be made for either of two extreme situations – an anti-climax causing major trouble by Republican supporters or such radical solutions being imposed on the Government that it would have to seriously consider its position collectively and individually’.50 It was West who was proved correct. At their meeting the following day Heath spelt out the realities as perceived in London:
At present there were 17 Battalions in Northern Ireland; the Army presence had existed for two and a half years and it was now becoming apparent that while the Army could deal with the IRA up to a point… there could be no purely military solution. The drain on United Kingdom resources was very considerable and there had been massive interference with the British Government's international commitments.
The United Kingdom Government had a situation where they had a responsibility and the blame for what happened as regards internment and on the security front but were without real power: this was a very unsatisfactory situation which was accentuated by the growing financial dependence of Northern Ireland.51
A military solution would mean an ‘escalation of force, whereas what was needed was a de-escalation… to swing the Catholic community away from those who were using force’. A political initiative was needed, and the British government did not consider that Faulkner's proposals were ‘sufficient to give the permanent, active and guaranteed role to the minority’. No specific proposals were put forward by the British, but they suggested the need to phase out internment and added that in order to do this it was necessary for Westminster to take over responsibility for law and order.52
Faulkner recounted his response: ‘I was shaken and horrified, and felt completely betrayed.’ The next day he set out the British proposals to the cabinet and admitted that he had been proved wrong about Heath's intentions. The cabinet's almost unanimous decision was to resign rather than to stay on as a ‘bunch of marionettes’.53 But as the Unionist government accepted its peaceful expropriation, it remained to be seen how the unionist community would react and what the implications would be for the leaders of the UUP.
Unionism was driven towards a bitter and fevered fragmentation by the twin threats of Provisional violence and British intervention. Deaths from the conflict had risen from fourteen in 1969 to 174 in 1971. The first three months of 1972 produced eighty-seven more, and that year would be the worst in three decades of violence with 470 deaths, 14 per cent of all those killed in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998. Other indices of sharply escalating violence were a rise in the number of shootings from seventy-three in 1969 to 1,756 in 1971 and of explosions from nine to 1,022 in the same period.54 On 20 March the Provisionals made their most destructive and indiscriminate contribution to the tool-kit of terrorism with the first use of a car-bomb in a devastating explosion in Belfast's Donegall Street. Claimed to be a blow at ‘the colonial economic structure’55 and the British ruling class, this Provisional bomb killed six people, most of them members of the crew of a bin-lorry.56 With the IRA declaring that 1972 would be the ‘Year of Victory’ and Harold Wilson being prepared to meet leading Provisionals in Dublin and declare his support for their inclusion in all-party talks in the event of an IRA ceasefire, many unionists scented betrayal, fearing that Wilson was a surrogate for Heath, who would do anything to extricate his government from the Irish quagmire.57
This was the environment in which support for both radical constitutional change in the form of a possible independent loyalist state and the much more localistic and almost apolitical vigilantism of the emerging Protestant paramilitary groups developed. The politician who temporarily dominated the Protestant reaction was William Craig. He had played a leading role in all the anti-reformist movements that had developed since O'Neill had sacked him from the cabinet. He warned that if the British government abolished Stormont it would be met by massive resistance; a provisional government would be formed and, if necessary, Northern Ireland would go it alone.58 As the IRA campaign intensified he criticized Faulkner's acquiescence in London's ‘interference’ in Stormont's security responsibilities and demanded the creation of a ‘third force’ of loyalists, essentially a return of the B Specials, to deal with the republican threat.59 In the aftermath of ‘Bloody Sunday’, with rumours of imminent direct rule abounding, Craig launched Ulster Vanguard on 9 February. Although other leading members of Vanguard, such as the Presbyterian minister and leading Orangeman Martin Smyth, saw the organization as a means of reunifying the Unionist Party around more right-wing policies,60 Craig's willingness to be associated closely and publicly with loyalist paramilitaries was an embarrassment to the staid and conservative figures who were the backbone of the right within the party. Vanguard's initial role was to scare off any interventionist urges Heath might be planning to indulge by a theatrical politics of threat. Craig was borne in an ancient limousine, complete with motorcycle outriders, to mass rallies stiffened by the presence of paramilitaries in uniform, where he threatened violence: most graphically to a crowd of over 60,000 in Belfast's Ormeau Park on 18 March, where he proclaimed, ‘We will do or die. We will not accept direct rule… We must build up dossiers on the men and women who are the enemies of Northern Ireland because one day, if the politicians fail, it will be our job to liquidate the enemy.’61
When on 24 March Heath announced the suspension of the Stormont parliament after Faulkner and his cabinet refused a demand for the transfer of all security powers to London, Vanguard's response was a two-day general strike. Although it was relatively successful, it did little to obstruct the unfolding of British policy. The introduction of direct rule was hailed by the Provisional IRA as a victory, which they declared ‘places us in a somewhat similar position to that prior to the setting up of partition and the two statelets. It puts the “Irish Question” in its true perspective – an alien power seeking to lay claim to a country for which it has no legal right.’62 But the significance of direct rule was elsewhere: its introduction marked the definitive end of the ‘Orange state’, and it allowed the British government to introduce a strategy of reform from above. Northern Protestants were inevitably divided in their reading of the conflicting interpretations of direct rule put forward within a unionist politics characterized by disarray and confusion.
Craig advocated an independent Ulster as the only defence against the IRA and a Conservative government that a Vanguard pamphlet portrayed as ‘tired, even bored with Irish politics from which they wish to extricate themselves’.63 In a newspaper article he denounced British treachery:
They had experience of Westminster politicians from Gladstone to Wilson. Consistently at every crisis Westminster has produced politicians prepared, for party advantage, to renege on Ulster. If the gentlemen at Westminster are bent on seriously tampering with our constitution, Vanguard will seek a transfer of power from Westminster with the objective of achieving some form of friendly dominion status.64
But Vanguard's willingness to contemplate fundamental constitutional change and its association with Protestant paramilitary groups was unappealing to many unionists. Distrust of the British governments was a much more widespread phenomenon amongst unionists than a willingness to contemplate a radical loosening of the constitutional link with the British state.65 There was also little evidence that the emergence of Protestant paramilitary groups as players in inter-communal conflict had allowed them to develop the sort of political and ideological legitimacy that the Provisional IRA had achieved in the Catholic community.
The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) – its name adapted from that of the unionist paramilitary grouping created in 1912 to resist Home Rule – had been formed in 1966 by ex-servicemen who worked in the shipyard and lived in the Shankill district of West Belfast. They had been involved with Ulster Protestant Action, founded in 1959 to ensure that Protestant employers looked after loyalists as redundancies threatened, and were influenced by the anti-ecumenical and anti-republican preaching of Ian Paisley. However, the UVF's murder of two Catholics in 1966 and the arrest of its leader Gusty Spence and two of his associates dealt it a near-fatal blow and left little in the way of enduring organization or support.66
It was the communal violence in West and North Belfast in August 1969 and after internment that propelled Protestant paramilitarism from the lumpen fringes of loyalist activity to, at least temporarily, a more central role. Although the UVF would benefit from the violent and febrile conditions post-August 1969, the main organization to emerge was the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). The UDA was established in September 1971 out of the fusion of a number of vigilante groups that had emerged in North and West Belfast. At its peak in 1972 it had a membership of between 40,000 and 50,000 men.67 The declared motivation of the UDA was the defence of its communities from republican attacks. Most of the membership had full-time employment and so tended to play little part in the day-to-day running of the organization, coming out at night and weekends to man barricades or take part in marches and demonstrations, which were common in the centre of Belfast in 1972. However, a hard core of often unemployed members would work full time for the organization, and, as in the smaller UVF, it was these who were also involved in violent actions under the nom de guerre of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF). The object of its attacks was defined as the republican movement, but UFF targets extended well beyond known IRA men to include any Catholic unlucky enough to come into the path of one of its assassination squads. In the eighteen months after its first killing of a Catholic vigilante on the Crumlin Road in February 1972 it would kill over 200 people.68 Although some of the more cerebral of its leaders would rationalize these sectarian killings as an attempt to dry up the reservoir of popular support and sympathy for the Provos in the Catholic community, many were ad hoc responses of small groups of UDA men enraged by an IRA attack and often inflamed by alcohol and sectarian hatred.
Although the Provisionals had a less nakedly sectarian agenda than that of the loyalist groups, their campaign was also tainted by sectari-anism.69 Until the onset of the ‘Ulsterization’ of security policy in the mid 1970s, the Provisionals had a large and easily identifiable non-Protestant target in the British Army. Even then their use of car-bombs in Belfast and other town centres showed a cavalier disregard for the lives of civilians, the majority of them Protestants. Nor did the IRA hesitate to bomb pubs in Protestant areas: in September 1971 a Provisional bomb at the Four Step Inn on the Shankill Road killed two people and injured twenty.70
In this situation of political instability and intense violence, Ian Paisley posed the biggest threat to the position of the Unionist Party. There was nothing inevitable about this, for down to 1973 it was to William Craig that most disaffected unionists looked to provide leadership against Faulkner's ‘appeasement’ policies. Paisley was by 1971 a member of both the Stormont and Westminster parliaments, but his coarse and unsophisticated anti-Catholicism made him and his Protestant Unionist Party appear too extreme for the vast bulk of ‘respectable’ unionists. His support was still largely confined to rural Ulster, where he had, in areas such as north Antrim and north Armagh, a following composed of a mixture of pietistic Protestants and members of the Orange Order.71
However, the hostility he had experienced from other MPs at Westminster led him to modify the more fanatical features of his public persona. He was also affected by his friendship with the Ulster Unionist MP for Shankill, Desmond Boal. Abrasive, intelligent and one of the North's leading lawyers, Boal emphasized the importance of class issues if Paisleyism were to become an effective challenge to the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). Both he and John McQuade, the ex-docker and ex-soldier who was MP for Woodvale in North Belfast, personified the dissident Unionist tradition that had produced previous independent Unionist MPs such as J. W. Nixon and Tommy Henderson, who combined ultra-loyalism and strong Orange credentials with a record of criticism of the Unionist Party on social and economic issues.72
Paisley and Boal made a bid to widen their political appeal by the replacement of the Protestant Unionist Party with a new organization, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), founded in September 1971. Boal defined it as being ‘right wing in the sense of being strong on the constitution, but to the left on social issues’. But although some of its Belfast activists were from the NILP tradition, most of the DUP's belonged to Paisley's Free Presbyterian Church. This provided the party with an infrastructure of dedicated and ultra-loyal activists who in time would emerge as a disciplined and monolithic threat to the defensive and divided Unionist Party. However, for most of the first two years of the DUP's existence the policy stances adopted by Paisley did much to confuse his supporters and limit his appeal. Paisley opposed internment, supported Northern Ireland's full political integration into the UK political system and speculated that changes in the Republic's Constitution might change Protestant attitudes to a united Ireland. These heretical statements created confusion and incredulity amongst his supporters. They also prompted the IRA leadership to praise his ‘statesmanship’, and evoked a prediction from William Whitelaw, first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, that he would be ‘the future leader of Northern Ireland’.73
In the short term his iconoclasm was little short of disastrous for the appeal of the party. When it was revealed that Whitelaw had had leading members of the IRA flown to London for secret talks in July 1972, calls for the full integration into the UK appeared both fatuous and positively dangerous. However, after ‘Operation Motorman’ had ended the ‘no-go’ status of the Bogside and the Creggan in July and it became clearer that the objective of British policy was a reformed Northern Ireland and not disengagement, the environment for a DUP take-off became more favourable.
Paisley was assisted by Craig's political ineptitude. In a speech to the right-wing Monday Club in the House of Commons in October 1972, he declared that his supporters were prepared to ‘shoot and shoot to kill’ and added ‘I am prepared to kill and those behind me have my full support.’74 In February 1973 he told an audience in the Ulster Hall that an ‘independent dominion of Ulster’ would be economically viable. This vision might have enthused the largely middle-class activists of Vanguard, but it had little appeal to working-class loyalists, who wondered what would happen to the welfare state and many of their jobs in Craig's utopia. In the same month he identified Vanguard with a one-day general strike called by the UDA and the Loyalist Association of Workers (LAW) in protest at the internment of two loyalists, the first Protestants to be interned at a time when there were already hundreds of Catholics ‘behind the wire’. LAW was composed of Protestant trade unionists in some of the North's key industries, including the main power stations in Belfast and Larne. The strike, which combined limited industrial muscle with paramilitary intimidation, shut down transport and the electricity supply in Belfast and was accompanied by widespread rioting and destruction of property. Five people died, including a fire-fighter shot by a loyalist sniper. The great majority of unionists were appalled by these events, and in their aftermath LAW fell apart and many on the unionist right turned their backs on Craig.
Paisley exploited this weakening of Craig's position and was able to use the border referendum held in March 1973 to bring the DUP back in from the periphery of loyalist politics.75 The British government, relying on the poll to reassure unionists that their constitutional position was secure, pressed ahead with plans for a return to devolved government in Northern Ireland.The White Paper Northern Ireland Constitutional Proposals, published in March, made it clear that any new administration must be based on some form of executive power-sharing between unionists and nationalists and would also have an ‘Irish Dimension’: new institutional arrangements for consultation and cooperation between Dublin and Belfast. The new northern arrangements should be ‘so far as is possible acceptable to and accepted by the Republic of Ireland’.76
At a time when violence, although somewhat lower in intensity than in the previous horrendous year, was claiming around thirty lives a month and with nationalists publicly committed to joint Dublin-London rule over the North as a ‘transition’ to unity, what is surprising is not the Protestant support for the right but rather the continued existence of a considerable constituency that was prepared to back Faulkner's qualified and ambiguous acceptance of the White Paper. A special meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council rejected an anti-White Paper motion, forcing Craig to lead his followers out of the Unionist Party to form a new organization, the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party (VUPP).77 Former allies, including John Taylor, Harry West and Martin Smyth, refused to follow him and resigned from Vanguard. The right was determined not to cede control of the Unionist Party to the Faulknerites and stayed inside to mobilize opinion against ‘capitulation’ to the British government's ‘pro-republican’ stratagems. Here they showed more political sense than those liberal Unionists who left the party to join the new non-sectarian Alliance Party. Established in April 1970, Alliance quickly gained support from middle-class unionists in the greater Belfast area who had supported O'Neill. Their defection denuded the ranks of those within the Unionist Party who could most effectively have resisted the onward march of the right and split the pro-power-sharing constituency in the Protestant community as well.78
Paisley benefited from the confused and disorganized state of the Ulster Unionist Party. Direct rule had at a stroke removed the UUP's control of governmental and administrative power. No longer was the directing centre of Unionism located in the cabinet, with its access to the substantial resources of the Northern Ireland civil service. Within months of the prorogation, Faulkner's old cabinet had collapsed as an effective political force, and he was faced with an increasingly assertive set of officers from the party's ruling Ulster Unionist Council, within which the older and more traditional elements of the party were strongly ensconced.79 Senior civil service officials such as Sir Harold Black and Kenneth Bloomfield, who had been at the core of the Stormont system, were now working within the new Northern Ireland Office, created to service William Whitelaw's ministerial team.80 While Bloomfield was using his sharp political intelligence and considerable drafting skills in the preparation of the British government's constitutional proposals, Faulkner had to rely on the penny-farthing machine that was the Unionist Party's ‘research and publicity’ department, staffed by a few young graduates almost totally lacking in political experience. Given these exiguous resources, Faulkner's political achievements down to the end of 1973 were considerable.
After winning the support of the Ulster Unionist Council to participate in the constitutional experiment outlined in the White Paper, Faulkner applied all his undoubted resources of energy, courage and verbal dexterity to selling a deal based on power-sharing with the SDLP and what he saw as a ‘merely' symbolic concession to nationalist sentiment in agreeing to the setting up of a Council of Ireland. The manifesto on which Faulkner proposed that the party's candidates contest the June 1973 elections for a new Northern Ireland Assembly contained the formula, soaked in ambiguity, ‘we are not prepared to participate in government with those whose primary objective is to break the Union with Great Britain.’81 Preparing to drop his previous opposition to sharing power with constitutional nationalists, he argued that any member of the proposed Executive had to take an oath under the Northern Ireland Constitution Act of 1973 ‘to uphold the laws of Northern Ireland’, which would make them structurally, if not ideologically, Unionist.82 This was a relatively subtle distinction for many Ulster Unionists to appreciate at a time when their predominant emotions were often ones of bewilderment and apprehension at the collapse of the Stormont regime, coupled with bitter resentment at those they considered responsible, amongst whom the leaders of the SDLP ranked almost as high as the Army Council of the Provisional IRA.
Faulkner insisted that all UUP candidates sign a statement committing them to working within the framework of the White Paper. This statement became known as the ‘Pledge’, and the thirty-nine Unionist candidates who signed it became known as ‘Pledged Unionists’, while the ten party candidates who refused to sign the pledge were ‘Unpledged’.83 The results of the election on 28 June were, as Faulkner admitted, ‘mixed’. He had topped the poll in South Down, and two of his main supporters, Roy Bradford and Basil McIvor, had also come first in East and South Belfast. Craig, by contrast, had come third in North Antrim, trailing not just Paisley but the ‘Pledged’ Unionist as well. Overall the ‘Pledged’ UUP candidates won 29.3 per cent of the first-preference vote and twenty-two seats, with the ‘Unpledged’ Unionists at 8.5 per cent and ten seats. Despite Craig's prediction of thirty seats, the VUPP won 10.5 per cent and seven seats, while the DUP took 10.8 per cent and eight seats.84 The UUP retained a strong pull on a substantial sector of the Protestant electorate, and this traditionalist appeal was accentuated by distrust of Paisleyism and Craig's constitutional radicalism. However, the UUP vote was not necessarily a vote for the White Paper, and up to three of the ‘Pledged’ candidates returned had made it clear that they opposed it. As a result Unionist representation in the Assembly was fairly evenly divided, and the risks of pressing on with the constitutional proposals were evident. However, together with the SDLP, which had won 22 per cent of the vote and nineteen seats, and the Alliance's 9 per cent and eight seats, the parties supporting the proposed new dispensation had a commanding majority in the Assembly. Negotiations began between delegations of the three parties on the formation of an Executive. Faulkner, perhaps because of an exaggerated belief in the effect of the Border poll in generating a sense of constitutional security amongst unionists, seriously overestimated his ability to sell the prospective deal to his party. He astounded the supportive but cautious Ken Bloomfield when, after a visit to his home in October by the Irish Foreign Minister, Garret FitzGerald, he agreed that the proposed Council of Ireland would not simply be a consultative body but would have executive powers.85 Bloomfield's reaction – that it ‘represented the crossing of a significant Rubicon… I wondered if it would not have proved a bridge too far for the unionist community’86 – accurately predicted the role that an overambitious ‘Irish Dimension’ would have in destroying reformist unionism's prospects for two decades.
While the dynamic behind the Provisionals was found in the Catholic working class of North and West Belfast and Derry's Creggan and Bogside, the modernized constitutional nationalism of the Social Democratic and Labour Party had its social roots in the post-war educational revolution. Francis Mulhern, who as a teenager from a Catholic working-class background in County Fermanagh took part in the civil rights movement, provides an acute summation of the local effects of the Butler Education Act:
The local leaderships of the civil rights movement were to a striking degree highly educated, with teachers, present, past or future, most prominent in them. These people enjoyed a conventional authority, but unlike an earlier generation of their kind they were not a rarity and unlike the Nationalist notables they now displaced they wore their class differences lightly.87
The dominant intellectual influence in the SDLP came from the revisionist nationalist thinking associated first with the National Unity project in the early 1960s and then with the more politicized challenge to the Nationalist Party that emerged with the formation of the National Democratic Party (NDP) in 1965. The NDP's arguments for a participationist strategy that maintained a commitment to unity but only with the consent of a majority in the North, and for a modern democratic party structure, were central to the SDLP at its formation; of the almost 400 people who joined the new party, nearly 80 per cent had been NDP members.88 The NDP had made little progress because it confined its activities to those areas where the Nationalist Party did not have seats, and it was left to the civil rights movement to create that unprecedented mobilization of northern Catholics that made a frontal challenge to the party possible. In the February 1969 Stormont election the Nationalists lost three of their nine seats to independents, all of whom had played a prominent part in the civil rights movement. Most shattering was the defeat of the Nationalist leader, Eddie McAteer, by John Hume in the Foyle constituency. Over the next decade Hume would establish himself as the predominant strategic intelligence in non-violent Irish nationalism on the island. This would also be a period in which constitutional nationalism adopted a more implacable position.
In his early thirties when elected to Stormont, Hume had already established a reputation for incisive criticism of the negativity and conservatism of the Nationalist Party combined with a moderate and ‘responsible’ role in Derry's increasingly disturbed situation after 5 October 1968. From working-class origins, he had been empowered by the Education Act of 1947 to follow the traditional route of many middle-class Derry Catholics through the strict religious and nationalist environment of St Columb's Grammar School to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth. A loss of vocation led him into teaching in his home town and an increasingly prominent role in community politics through his active promotion of ‘self-help’ schemes such as the Credit Union movement and local housing associations. Hume's politics, while professedly left of centre, had little association with the city's labour tradition, which by the end of the 1960s had become heavily influenced by Eamonn McCann's Trotskyism and leftist republicans. Derry's Catholic middle class of teachers, shopkeepers and publicans looked to Hume and other members of the Citizens’ Action Committee to curb the excesses and extremism of the leftists and republicans, who were seen as dangerously influential, particularly on the rioting activities of the young.
During his campaign against McAteer, Hume had committed himself to working for a new political movement based on social democratic principles, which would be ‘completely non-sectarian’ and animated by the ideal that the future of Northern Ireland should be decided by its people.89 However, the insurrection in the Bogside in August 1969 and the impetus it gave to the rebirth of physical-force republicanism would put increasing pressure on this project. At Stormont, Hume attempted to unite the divergent elements of anti-unionism into a coherent force. Nationalist Party hostility to this dangerous upstart meant that the focus of his activities was a group of five MPs, comprising former civil rights leaders and two Belfast labourists, Gerry Fitt and Paddy Devlin.
Fitt and Devlin were essential to Hume's project of a serious political challenge to unionism, for without them any new party would continue to replicate the largely rural and border-counties orientation of the Nationalist Party. Without a base in Belfast the party would also be absent from the cockpit of the struggle with resurgent republicanism. But both men, with their powerful personalities and strong labour and socialist sentiments, fitted uneasily into the new formation. Fitt, an ex-merchant seaman who had done convoy duty to the USSR during the war, had built a political base in his native dock ward through a combination of republican socialist rhetoric and clientelism. A councillor from 1958, he had entered Stormont in 1962. But it was his victorious return as Republican Labour MP for West Belfast in the 1966 Westminster general election that allowed him to capture the attention of the British and Irish media as he gave powerful and eloquent expression to the emerging civil rights critique of the Unionist regime. Fitt's seniority, his growing influence in the House of Commons and his friendly relations, not only with members of Wilson's cabinet but also with leading Tories, helped to ensure that this arch-individualist who had little interest in questions of long-term strategy or party management became leader of the new party.90
From the start there were tensions. Fitt's predominant orientation towards Westminster-inspired reform of the North was at odds with Hume's increasingly close connections with the southern state. Fitt's almost instinctive class politics led him to be suspicious of Hume's social democratic philosophy and the school teachers and other middle-class Catholics whom he believed dominated the SDLP. This suspicion was shared by Paddy Devlin, a more cerebral socialist but also a fiercely individualist and prickly individual. A republican internee during the Second World War, Devlin had educated himself out of both nationalism and Catholicism to become a dogged and courageous exponent of socialism and secularism. He had won the Falls constituency for the NILP in the 1969 election. Fitt and Devlin insisted that any new organization should make clear its distance from traditional forms of Catholic nationalism by including in its name an identification with the North's Labour tradition, which both saw as the basis for a cross-sectarian appeal. Hume had to explain to an Irish official that the new formation would include the word ‘Labour’ in deference to Fitt and Devlin but asked him to assure Jack Lynch that there would be no connection between the new party and the British, Irish or Northern Irish Labour Parties.91 Fianna Fáil was not to be embarrassed by any outbreak of class politics in the North.
When the SDLP was launched in August 1970, Fitt emphasized its left-of-centre, non-sectarian philosophy. Its nationalism was expressed in a moderate and democratic form: ‘To promote co-operation, friendship and understanding between North and South with a view to the eventual reunification of Ireland through the consent of the majority of the people in the North and South.’92 One of the party's first policy-makers has subsequently outlined the ‘dream’ of many members in 1970: ‘to participate in a coalition government with the NILP and some liberal Unionists. Agreement within Northern Ireland might destroy many Unionists' fears [and] be a preliminary to agreement in Ireland.’93
However, just as the violence of August 1969 had pushed Devlin into rushing to Dublin to call for the defensive arming of northern Catholics, internment and Bloody Sunday forced a radicalization of the SDLP's attitudes to the state. In the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday, Hume gave an interview on Irish radio in which he said that, for many people in the Bogside, ‘it's a united Ireland or nothing. Alienation is pretty total.’94 In a subsequent interview he claimed that reunification was ‘a lot nearer than many people believed’.95 Radicalization was obvious in the party's policy statement, Towards a New Ireland, published in September 1972, which called on Britain to make a formal declaration of intent in favour of a united Ireland and in the interim proposed that Northern Ireland be jointly ruled by Dublin and London. The document reflected the fear that the Provisional IRA could challenge the party for the leadership of the Catholic community.96
Although the Provisionals had declared that 1972 would be their ‘Year of Victory’,97 direct rule and the possibility of British-sponsored reforms created major problems for them. Many Catholics saw direct rule as a victory and as an antechamber to more radical changes, thus making further republican violence unjustifiable. Even areas with strong support for the IRA, such as Andersonstown in West Belfast, developed local peace groups often linked to the Catholic Church. Such attitudes affected the IRA, and there were reports that rank-and-file Provos in Belfast and Derry favoured a truce.98 Pressure for a Provisional ceasefire was intensified when the Official IRA announced one in May. The Officials had been involved in a militarist competition with the Provisionals since internment. The results had been difficult to reconcile with their pretensions to non-sectarianism and the defence of working-class interests. The Derry Officials shot dead a prominent Unionist Senator, Jack Barnhill, in December 1971. Then, in retaliation for Bloody Sunday, the Officials bombed the officers’ mess of the Parachute Regiment in Aldershot, killing seven people, including five female canteen workers and a Catholic chaplain. Finally, in April 1972, the Derry Officials ‘executed’ Ranger William Best, a young Derry Catholic who had joined the British Army and was home on leave. Convinced that such actions made political progress in the South impossible and could even allow the southern state to introduce internment, Goulding and a majority on the Army Council declared a ceasefire in May.99
Within the Provisionals there were signs of a North–South divide on a ceasefire. The cutting edge of the armed campaign was being provided by young working-class Catholics in Belfast, whose republicanism was more a product of the conflict with Protestants and the security forces since 1969 than any ideological commitment to a united Ireland or identification with the martyrs of 1916. Here suspicion that a ceasefire would allow the security forces to reassert their control of the IRA's base areas in North and West Belfast was strong and reflected in the scepticism of the IRA's Belfast commander, the former bookmaker Seamus Twomey, and the up-and-coming Provo strategist Gerry Adams. However, for leading members of the largely southern leadership of the Provos, including Dáithi Ó Conaill and Ruairi Ó Brádaigh, the increasingly obvious sectarian effects of the bombing campaign, along with an exaggerated estimation of the British state's willingness to consider radical constitutional change, made a ceasefire attractive, and an indefinite one was declared on 22 June.
The ceasefire was agreed in return for the granting of political status to their prisoners (some of whom were on hunger strike), the temporary release from detention of Gerry Adams and the promise of direct talks at a high level. A six-man delegation led by Seán MacStiofáin was secretly flown to London for talks with Whitelaw and senior officials. Its demands, which included a British declaration of intent to withdraw within three years, offered little to negotiate over. Whitelaw responded to MacStiofáin's shopping list by pointing out that the British government was constrained by the consent provisions of the Ireland Act.100 Within two weeks the Belfast IRA had brought the ceasefire to an end and launched an intensified campaign, culminating on 21 July in ‘Bloody Friday’, when it placed twenty-six bombs in Belfast, killing eleven people and injuring 130. Seven people were killed in the city's main bus station, and as the television cameras showed human remains being scooped up into black plastic bags, the Provisionals suffered a major blow to the moral credibility of their campaign. Whitelaw moved quickly to exploit popular revulsion, and the ‘no-go’ areas in Belfast and Derry were reoccupied with a massive display of military might in Operation Motorman. From this time on the Belfast IRA was subject to attrition, and by the end of 1973 the organization increasingly had to centre its operations in rural areas such as south Armagh and mid Ulster. In the South, Lynch's government closed Sinn Féin's headquarters, and a number of senior republicans were arrested. In November the government dismissed the entire governing body of the Republic's television service after the showing of an interview with MacStiofain.101
The SDLP benefited significantly from the ceasefire and its violent aftermath. Republican willingness to halt their campaign and enter into discussions without an end to internment made it easier for the SDLP to resume negotiations with the British and the Unionists. The utter inflexibility of the republican negotiators when they got their chance to put their demands to Whitelaw allowed them to be politically outflanked by the SDLP. The government's Green Paper, published in October, with its support for power-sharing and an ‘Irish Dimension’, indicated that, while a united Ireland might not be on the immediate agenda, northern Catholics were being offered the possibility of political gains that would have been inconceivable even two years previously. That these possibilities would not be realized would be in large part a result of the increasingly tough bargaining position that the SDLP adopted and whose main architect was John Hume. Thus on 12 December 1972 Whitelaw met an SDLP delegation led by Fitt and including Hume, Devlin and Austin Currie. The SDLP warned Whitelaw that the government was adopting ‘short-term expedients’ in treating the province of Northern Ireland as the basis for a settlement: ‘A framework of reconciliation should be provided on the basis of absolute equality between the two communities. What was needed was the long-term certainty of political union by 1980 within the context of the European Community.’ Whitelaw pointed out that many of the SDLP's proposals would be ‘repugnant to the majority in Northern Ireland,’ but the SDLP impatiently brushed aside such warnings.102
In local government elections in May 1973 the SDLP showed that it had emerged as a political force, with 13 per cent of the vote. For the first time since the death of Joe Devlin in the 1930s, a nationalist party could claim support in both the west and east of Northern Ireland as the influence of Fitt and Devlin ensured the party had a solid base in Belfast. Provisional Sinn Féin had urged a boycott of the elections, and some of its strategists were concerned that the support for both the SDLP and the Republican Clubs, the political wing of the Officials, came from Provo sympathizers who rejected abstentionist tactics. The republican dilemma was even more obvious in the election for a new Northern Ireland Assembly, held in June. In these the SDLP emerged as the second-largest party, with almost 160,000 votes, 22 per cent of the total and nineteen seats.103 Provisional unease over strategy was manifest in conflicting advice to their supporters, who were urged first to abstain and then to spoil ballot papers. A mere 1.2 per cent of ballots were spoiled, and it was clear that the majority of northern nationalists had put their hopes in radical reform rather than in armed struggle.
Hume, with the support of most of the SDLP Assembly members from constituencies outside Belfast, was convinced that the political fragmentation of unionism and the British desire to build up the SDLP as a bulwark against the Provisionals meant that an ‘interim' settlement combining power-sharing with a powerful Council of Ireland should be the only acceptable outcome of any negotiations. When Liam Cosgrave, the Taoiseach in the new Fine Gael–Labour coalition government, told a Conservative meeting in London that any pressure for movement on the partition issue ‘would dangerously exacerbate tension and fears’,104 he provoked an angry response from the SDLP. Hume gave a tough speech in which he advised Cosgrave's government not to underestimate its strength or to surrender its position to ‘the false liberalism of placating the Unionists’.105 SDLP delegations arrived in Dublin to emphasize that they saw Cosgrave's position as less robust than Fianna Fáil's106 and as weakening their negotiating position with the British and the Unionists. Fearful of being portrayed as letting the ‘separated brethren’ down, the Irish government's official position soon shifted to one of uncritical support for Hume's analysis and prescriptions. By the autumn Garret FitzGerald was pressing the British hard on several fronts. He wanted: agreement on a Council of Ireland before the formation of an Executive in Northern Ireland; the proposed Sunningdale Conference to be co-chaired by an Irish minister or a ‘neutral’ chairman to be drawn from the European Union; and an all-Ireland police force under the supervision of the Council of Ireland. In the view of the British Ambassador in Dublin, the Irish government, with the exception of Conor Cruise O'Brien and Patrick Cooney, were ‘timorous’ and ‘narrow-minded… they cannot lift their eyes above their own domestic politics.’107
As the intense and exhausting process of inter-party talks at Stormont Castle under Whitelaw's chairmanship continued through October and November 1973, the Unionist negotiators were aware that opposition within the Protestant community was growing. On 20 November the Ulster Unionist Council narrowly turned down a proposal to reject power-sharing by 379 votes to 369. Despite the obviously precarious position of Faulkner, Hume, described by one of the most liberal of Faulkner's supporters as ‘grim and unbending in negotiations’,108 remained implacable in his commitment to a Council of Ireland with substantial powers. An agreement on the formation of a power-sharing Executive was announced on 22 November. The Executive was to consist of eleven members: six Ulster Unionists, four SDLP and one from the Alliance Party. Brian Faulkner was Chief Executive and Gerry Fitt Deputy Chief Executive. It was the SDLP's insistence that ‘nothing is agreed until everything is agreed’ that prevented the immediate devolution of power following the successful conclusion of the talks. Instead Faulkner and his Unionist ministers-in-waiting had to participate in a conference with the SDLP, the Alliance Party, and the British and Irish governments to deal with the unresolved issue of the Council of Ireland.
The conference, held at the civil service college at Sunningdale in Berkshire between 6 and 9 December, was an unmitigated disaster for Faulkner's standing in the unionist community. Heath had viewed the deepening of his government's involvement in Northern Ireland affairs after direct rule as a necessary but unfortunate diversion of the time and abilities of some of his most important ministers. With the formation of the Executive his immediate inclination was to reduce the quality of his commitment. This meant the recalling of Whitelaw to Westminster to deal with the pressing problem of industrial militancy, and his replacement by Francis Pym. If Whitelaw had been present at Sunningdale, his almost two years of experience in the North might have allowed him to make Heath more aware of the difficulties of Faulkner's position. As it was, the Unionist negotiators were confronted with an SDLP supported by a heavyweight Irish governmental team led by the Taoiseach; they also found themselves at loggerheads with Heath, who showed little patience with Unionist concerns that they were being asked to sign up to an agreement that would be unsellable at home.
Hume brushed aside the nagging concerns of his party leader: that by pushing the role and powers of the Council of Ireland to the forefront of negotiations, the SDLP would make the position of Faulkner untenable. The only voice that was raised against Hume's agenda was that of Paddy Devlin, who, on seeing the full list of executive functions proposed for the Council of Ireland, exclaimed that it would result in his Unionist colleagues being hanged from the lamp-posts when they got back to Belfast.109 Heath's overwhelming desire for a deal and his impatience with Unionist concerns, which might have been checked by Whitelaw's knowledge of Ulster conditions, were unrestrained by Francis Pym. The result was disastrous for the new power-sharing government.
Although the extent of Unionist/SDLP differences on the functions and powers of the Council of Ireland meant that these areas were set aside for further discussion, the final communiqué, by agreeing that the Council would be created, provided Faulkner's enemies with a focus for their attack, while the very lack of a clear definition of powers allowed the most extravagant claims to be made and believed. Faulkner had hoped for compensatory commitments from the Irish government on the removal of Articles 2 and 3 from the Irish Constitution and the extradition of terrorist offenders. He got neither, and even senior members of the Irish delegation feared that nationalism had been too successful at Sunningdale.110 Whitelaw confided in FitzGerald that in his acceptance of the Council of Ireland Faulkner was ‘perhaps further ahead of his party than was quite wise for him’.111
On the day that the Sunningdale Conference began, 600 delegates from Unionist Party constituency associations, Vanguard, the DUP and the Orange Order agreed to form the United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC) to oppose power-sharing and the Council of Ireland, which was described as ‘so obvious a preparation for a united Ireland’.112 The Grand Lodge of the Orange Order had sent an unprecedented letter to all Orange delegates to a special meeting of the UUC on 20 November 1973, urging a vote against power-sharing. Martin Smyth, who was Grand Master of the Order as well as Vice-President of the UUP, along with the new MP for South Antrim, James Molyneaux, also a leading member of the Order, played a central role in the UUUC. Although the UUC meeting rejected the anti-power–sharing motion, it did so by a narrow margin of 379 to 369.113 The Sunningdale Agreement would ensure that Faulkner lost this remaining narrow margin of support. A special meeting of the UUC on 4 January 1974, just four days after the Executive took office, passed a resolution opposing any Council of Ireland by 427 to 374, and Faulkner resigned as leader of the party. Despite this further blow to the Unionist pillar of the new devolved structures, the SDLP continued to inflame Protestant fears with claims such as that of one Assembly member, Hugh Logue, that the Council of Ireland was ‘the vehicle that would trundle Unionists into a united Ireland’. Faulkner's earlier demands for constitutional recognition rebounded when on 16 January the High Court in Dublin ruled that the Irish government's recognition of the North in the agreement was ‘no more than a statement of policy’ with no constitutional significance.114
Faulkner hoped that the effective and mundane working of the new institutions would dissipate the fears of many ordinary Unionists, but Heath's overriding concern with the challenge of industrial militancy in Britain impinged disastrously on Northern Ireland. Ignoring pleas from Faulkner, Gerry Fitt and Pym that an election could be fatal for the Executive, Heath called a general election for 28 February.
The UUUC, mobilizing with the slogan ‘Dublin is only a Sunningdale away’, won eleven of Northern Ireland's twelve constituencies at Westminster. The power-sharing parties – Faulkner Unionists, the Alliance Party, the NILP and the SDLP – competed against one another. The result was that in South and East Belfast the victorious UUUC candidates got fewer votes than the combination of their power-sharing opponents. There was still a substantial Unionist power-sharing constituency in suburban Belfast and North Down, but it was drowned in the rejectionist tide that flowed through the rest of Northern Ireland.115 The Executive had lost all legitimacy with the bulk of the Unionist electorate, and this is the key to understanding the British government's reaction to the unprecedented industrial action by the Ulster Workers' Council (UWC), which was the occasion, but not the fundamental cause, of the Executive's collapse.
The UWC had been created in November 1973 by groups of loyalist trade unionists who had been involved in the discredited Loyalist Association of Workers. They were convinced that it would be easier to mobilize support against an unpopular Executive and the spectre of creeping unification associated with the Council of Ireland than it had been to protest about the internment of loyalist paramilitaries. Distrustful of most of the Unionist politicians who were opposed to Faulkner, they were determined to maintain their independence and take action with or without the politicians' blessing. Although the UWC maintained a notional separation from the main paramilitary organizations, its ‘coordinating committee’ (headed by the impressive Derry trade unionist and Vanguard activist Glenn Barr) included UDA and UVF members. Its paramilitary links would be crucial in ensuring the withdrawal of labour in the first days of the strike that began on 15 May 1974. The possible role of intimidation and violence had been one of the factors that had made the main leaders of Unionist opposition to the Executive reluctant to consider industrial action when the UWC issued its first public statement on 23 March. This threatened widespread civil disobedience unless fresh Assembly elections were held. The UUUC's response was to ignore the UWC and to call for a boycott of southern goods by northern consumers instead.116
The motley crew of industrial militants and paramilitaries had read the popular mood better than the politicians, although even they did not expect the stunning victory that was to come. The SDLP and some leading Labour and Conservative politicians were to explain the success of the strike in terms of intimidation and the failure of the authorities to act decisively and early to keep roads open and remove the barri-cades erected by strike supporters. This simply ignored the extent of support for the strike in the unionist community. Most unionists perceived the course of events from 1968 to 1973 as one of continued political retreat, if not defeat. It was unlikely that they would accept in government those whom they considered as instrumental in bringing down the Stormont regime, especially when members of the SDLP still talked as if a united Ireland were an imminent possibility through the Council of Ireland.117 By the end of the first week of the strike the UWC had shut down the North's main industries and through its control of the Ballylumford Power Station at Larne had a stranglehold on the electricity supply, which put it in a position to bring daily life to a standstill.
The new Labour administration showed no desire to confront the strikers for the sake of a terminally divided Executive; moreover, the army's advice was that it would be disastrous to open up a second front against the Protestant paramilitaries at a time when its resources needed to be fully committed against the Provisionals. Harold Wilson's main contribution to the dénouement of power-sharing was a crassly misjudged national television and radio broadcast in which he denounced the strikers as ‘thugs and bullies’ and their supporters as those who ‘spend their lives sponging on Westminster’. Ken Bloomfield judged the broadcast ‘catastrophically unhelpful’, and in the days that followed even moderate unionists sported pieces of sponge in their lapels.118 A plan devised by John Hume, the Minister of Commerce, to use the army to take over a number of petrol stations to break the UWC's control of fuel supplies was leaked in advance by a sympathetic official – an indication of the defection en masse of the Protestant middle class – and the UWC announced a total shutdown of services. Faced with the possibility of the closure of hospitals and the probability of raw sewage flooding Belfast streets, the Executive resigned.119
Those commentators who saw in the victory of the UWC strike the emergence of a new proletarian leadership for unionism had obviously never read Lenin's What is to be Done?, with its powerful dissection of the limits of even the most militant forms of trade union consciousness. After the strike the UWC leadership, faced with decisions about the future, began to fragment. Sarah Nelson has described the various tendencies as follows: ‘hardline Loyalists, more conciliatory socially radical elements and people who had just not thought what constructive alternative they were aiming for’.120 While Glen Barr, together with some leading members of the UVF, saw the UWC as the possible basis for the development of an independent working-class political grouping, the more influential groups were those dominated by support for Craig and Paisley.
Vanguard and the DUP appeared to be equal contenders in the competition to displace an Ulster Unionist Party that, although it was now firmly under the control of the right, remained enervated and demoralized after almost a decade of internecine conflict. Harry West, the bluff Fermanagh farmer whom O'Neill had sacked and Faulkner reinstated, had been elected leader of the party following Faulkner's resignation. After the Westminster general election of October 1974, when he lost his seat for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, West saw his leadership undermined by the increasingly important integrationist lobby led by the leader of the Ulster Unionists at Westminster, the self-effacing but crafty MP for South Antrim, James Molyneaux, and his intellectual guru, the former Conservative MP for Wolverhampton, Enoch Powell, whose record of support for the unionist cause while a Tory got him the UUUC nomination for South Down in the 1974 general election.
In the wake of the collapse of the power-sharing Executive, the Wilson government arranged elections for a Constitutional Convention to consider what provision for the government of Northern Ireland was likely to command the most widespread support. The results, in May 1975, showed for the first time an Ulster Unionist Party that, though remaining the largest single party, with 26 per cent of the vote and nineteen seats, had less support than the combined strength of Vanguard (13 per cent and fourteen seats) and the DUP (15 per cent and twelve seats).121 The UUP was weakened by evidence of increasing tensions between those, like West and the Reverend Martin Smyth, who remained convinced devolutionists, as well as by escalating integrationist pressure from Molyneaux and Powell. The divisions showed up when Craig, to the surprise of many observers, launched a proposal for the formation of an ‘emergency’ coalition government with the SDLP in September 1975. The idea had emerged from discussions between the SDLP and a negotiating team from the UUUC, which had included Craig, William Beattie of the DUP and Austin Ardill of the UUP. It used a section of the proposed UUUC Convention report, which stated that in times of war and similar emergency it was appropriate British practice to form a coalition government. The three had approached the Chairman of the Convention, Sir Robert Lowry, to ask for a report on the idea. Paisley was initially sympathetic,122 but a hostile response from sections of his party, and possibly the realization that Craig could be isolated, led him to denounce the idea once it became public. Craig was, indeed, isolated, and eventually he was expelled from the UUUC.123
During West's leadership of the UUP there were signs that, despite the conflict between its devolutionist and integrationist tendencies, the party had begun to regain some of the self-confidence that had been shattered during the 1968–74 period. In part this reflected the belief that, as the ‘middle ground’ in Ulster politics, it would benefit from the extremism of its loyalist opponents.124 When, as Craig had predicted, the UUUC majority report was ignored at Westminster and the Convention shut down in March 1976, the DUP adopted a militant posture. Here it was influenced by the rhetoric of Craig's opponents in Vanguard. A majority within the organization had opposed the emergency coalition proposal and, led by Ernest Baird, had rechristened themselves the United Ulster Unionist Movement. Baird, who owned a chain of chemist shops, was an uncritical Ulster nationalist, and was beginning to talk of militant resistance to direct rule. He was in the forefront of calls for the formation of a loyalist vigilante force to combat terrorism. In March 1976 he and Paisley took the initiative within the UUUC in forming a United Ulster Action Council to oppose direct rule and press the government for tougher security policies. Within a few weeks the UUP withdrew from the Action Council because of the prominent role of Protestant paramilitaries in it. In contrast to the DUP's dalliance with vigilantism, West's party, with the strong support of the leadership of the Orange Order, urged unionists to join the official security forces.
Baird and the DUP gave much credence to the common belief of the period that Britain was disengaging from Northern Ireland, which provoked a clear sympathy for the idea of loyalists going it alone in some sort of independent state. In the interim Baird and Paisley focused on the ‘disastrous security policies’ being followed by the Northern Ireland Office and in May 1977 attempted a repeat of the UWC strike. The Action Council launched a general strike to force the British government to concede a return to majority rule and tougher security policies. Both the UUP and the Orange Order opposed the strike, as did the crucial group of power workers who had been central to the success of the UWC strike. In September 1976 the ineffectual Merlyn Rees had been replaced as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland by Roy Mason, an altogether blunter and more robust figure. Mason ably exploited the contradiction between the strikers’ demand for increased security and their launching of a major disruption of public order. The strike collapsed ignominiously after a few days.125 In its aftermath the UUUC broke up, and in the local government elections later that year the UUP won 34 per cent of the vote, down on its 1973 share but an improvement on the Convention election. Nevertheless, despite the débâcle of the Action Council strike, the DUP saw a significant increase in support, demonstrating the existence of a growing constituency for its perceived militancy.126
The DUP's hard core of Free Presbyterian activists in its rural and small-town base areas was increasingly augmented by a group of youngish Belfast members, some of them graduates, who were extending the party's influence in the Protestant working class through involvement in community politics and local government. Lean and hungry for power, they took as their model Peter Robinson's expanding fiefdom in the Castlereagh area of East Belfast. Robinson, who was twenty-nine when he won his first elected office for the DUP (as a councillor in Castlereagh in 1977), had been a Paisleyite activist since leaving grammar school in 1966, and his intellectual and organizational abilities had led Paisley to make him his secretary at Westminster in 1970. He became the DUP's general secretary in 1975 and played a central role in making it the most coherent and well-organized party in the North.127 Robinson did not share the scruples of some of the Free Presbyterian members about associating with paramilitaries. While his cultivation of the UDA failed to force a change of British policy in 1977, it contributed significantly to the DUP's winning of its first Belfast constituencies in the Westminster general election of 1979, when Robinson defeated William Craig for East Belfast and his party colleague Johnny McQuade won North Belfast.128 The tensions between the original hard core of Paisleyism, the conservative fundamentalists of areas such as North Antrim and Robinson's more pragmatic, left-of-centre populism were easily enough contained through a combination of the integrating force of Paisley's personality and the healing balm of electoral success.
The success was certainly spectacular. Between the local government elections of 1973 and 1981 the DUP expanded its number of councillors from twenty-one (4 per cent of the vote) to 142 (26.6 per cent), fractionally ahead of the UUP. From a narrow base, with representation in only seven of the North's twenty-six local authorities, the party was now represented on every council in Northern Ireland. Most spectacular of all was its advance in Belfast: from two seats to fifteen, making it the largest party on the Council.129 But it was the first direct election to the European Parliament, in 1979, that did most to support Paisley's claim to be the leader of Protestant Ulster. With Northern Ireland treated as one constituency, his own gargantuan appetite for electioneering – he claimed to have covered 122 miles on foot and 4,000 miles by car130 – and the DUP's polished election machine, he delivered a devastating blow to the UUP, which had put up two candidates, John Taylor and Harry West. Taking 170,688 votes, 29.8 per cent of the total, Paisley topped the poll and claimed that he now spoke for a majority of the Unionist population. Between them the two UUP candidates obtained 125,169 votes, 22 per cent. West's particularly weak performance, which reflected his marked disinclination to pursue an active canvass, led to his resignation as leader of the UUP. His replacement by Molyneaux marked another stage in the increasingly integrationist tone of the party.
Padraig O'Malley, at this time of DUP ascendancy, wrote of Paisley:
he is the personification of the ‘fearful Protestant’, the embodiment of the Scots-Presbyterian tradition of uncompromising Calvinism that has always been the bedrock of militant Protestant opposition to a united Ireland. It is a tradition shaped by a siege mentality, and the almost obsessive compulsion to confirm the need for unyielding vigilance.131
This overplays the religious and irrational component in Paisleyism's success, important though it was, at the expense of those elements of the political conjuncture that were favourable to the DUP. The return of the Tories in 1979 had replaced a period of ‘positive direct rule’ under the Labour Northern Ireland Secretary Roy Mason with another search for a devolutionary settlement under his successor, Humphrey Atkins. Molyneaux's integrationist agenda – which his friendship with Margaret Thatcher's Northern Ireland spokesman, Airey Neave, had encouraged him to believe would be indulged when the Tories returned to power – had been pointedly ignored. When Atkins's initiative failed, in part because Molyneaux had cold-shouldered it, a resentful Thatcher turned towards an Anglo-Irish framework with a summit in Dublin with Charles Haughey in December 1980, in which she agreed to new institutional structures to reflect the ‘unique relationship’ between the two islands and to further meetings to give ‘special consideration to the totality of relations within these islands’. While Molyneaux continued to reassure his followers that he had the ear of the British Prime Minister, Paisley scented betrayal and launched the ‘Carson Trail’, a series of paramilitary-style rallies in which he vowed to go to any lengths to resist Thatcherite ‘treachery’.
Although by the time of direct rule a number of senior Conservative politicians such as Peter Carrington and William Whitelaw had come to agree with Harold Wilson that the only ultimate solution was Irish unity, it was recognized that this would be a long-term process. Power-sharing devolution and an ‘Irish Dimension’ would, it was hoped, provide interim structures that, while providing stability, could be open to constitutional change. However, when Wilson returned to power in 1974 he asked one of his advisers, Bernard Donoghue, to put forward suggestions for a new initiative. This occurred before the UWC strike and illustrates Wilson's belief that the Sunningdale project was doomed. Donoghue's paper suggested granting Northern Ireland dominion status, with the UK, the US and Ireland acting as guarantors of Catholic rights within the now autonomous Ulster state. By the time of the strike, Wilson had established a small and secret committee in the Cabinet Office to develop new ideas on the North. After the strike, Wilson wrote a memorandum arguing that, as power-sharing was now ruled out, the UK government was in a position of ‘responsibility without power’ and proposing that his ‘Doomsday Scenario’ of withdrawal be seriously considered. He proposed dominion status and a tapering off of financial support to the province over five years.132 Nothing came of these proposals, in part because of the horrified reaction of the SDLP when Wilson put forward the idea of Ulster independence to a delegation in June 1974.133 The UK Ambassador to the United States also warned that the US ‘would most likely follow the lead of the Irish Republic in castigating withdrawal as a loss of will and a betrayal.’134 Although little hope was vested in the Constitutional Convention and the British government prepared for direct rule for the foreseeable future, Wilson's withdrawal plans had contributed to an air of fevered speculation in the province about the possibility of British disengagement.
Such rumours had their origins also in secret negotiations between British officials and the leadership of the Provisional IRA, which resulted in an IRA ceasefire that lasted for most of 1975. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and his allies in the leadership of the Provisionals had seen the UWC strike as a watershed that ‘threw British policy totally into the melting pot… The word coming through was that every solution was up for consideration.’135 The ‘word’ was conveyed by various officials from the Foreign Office and the security services, working out of Laneside, a nineteenth-century mansion on the shores of Belfast Lough where the Political Affairs section of the Northern Ireland Office preferred to have its meetings with paramilitaries away from possible media intrusion. The British officials did not discourage the Provisional belief that the Constitutional Convention had been set up in the expectation that it would fail through loyalist intransigence, thus providing the British government with the justification for extrication. There is some evidence that the officials involved may have gone as far as talking about the ‘structures of disengagement’.136
The British had hoped that a successful political initiative would enable the SDLP to marginalize the republicans politically and make their military defeat easier. Since Operation Motorman the Provisionals' campaign in Belfast and Derry had been curtailed radically, and the political developments of 1973 put the IRA on the defensive. The level of violence had reduced considerably. With 470 deaths and over 10,000 recorded shootings, 1972 was by far the worst year in three decades of the ‘Troubles’. By 1974 the number of deaths had fallen to 220 and shootings were down by two thirds. In 1972, 105 British soldiers had been killed, while by 1974 the figure was thirty.137 However, the IRA compensated for setbacks in its urban strongholds by intensifying its campaign in rural areas such as mid Ulster and south Armagh. It had also initiated a bombing campaign in England in 1973 to compensate for being forced on the defensive in the North and to attempt to galvanize the undoubtedly strong ‘troops out’ sentiment in British public opinion. The first deaths occurred when a bomb on a coach carrying British soldiers killed twelve people in February 1974. Bombings of pubs that were claimed to be ‘military targets’ because they were used by soldiers followed, with deaths and dozens of injured at Guildford and Woolwich. The culmination of this first Provisional campaign was the bombing of the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town pubs in Birmingham on 21 November 1974 in which nineteen people were killed and 182 injured.138
Although the republicans were contained militarily, their continued capacity for violence and the resultant communal polarization made the possibility of a ceasefire very attractive for the British. The ceasefire allowed the political embarrassment of internment to be ended. The murder and intimidation of witnesses and jurors had already resulted in the introduction of so-called Diplock courts (named after Lord Diplock who, in 1973, had chaired a commission to investigate alternatives to internment), where persons accused of ‘scheduled offences’, that is those of a terrorist nature, could be tried in the absence of a jury. The Emergency Provisions Act of 1973, which introduced these courts, also repealed the Special Powers Act while re-enacting many of its provisions. Like the Prevention of Terrorism Act introduced after the Birmingham bombs, which allowed for detention for up to seven days and provided for the exclusion from the rest of the UK of ‘undesirables’ from the North, it was to apply for one year but was renewable annually. Both pieces of legislation became key components of the state's anti-terrorist strategy. Although they had a real effect in weakening paramilitary structures, they inevitably generated resentment in those Catholic working-class areas where they were often implemented in a heavy-handed and indiscriminate manner.139
The ceasefire also allowed the shift to a security strategy of ‘Ulsterization’ under which the role of the British Army was diminished in favour of the RUC and the Ulster Defence Regiment. While this avoided the possibility of a Vietnam syndrome in British politics, its effect in deepening sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland cannot be overemphasized. In the early 1970s there were over 23,000 British soldiers in Northern Ireland, compared with 7,000 full-time and part-time police officers and 7,500 in the locally recruited Ulster Defence Regiment. By the end of the 1980s the number of British soldiers had declined to around 10,000, while the RUC had increased to 11,500, with the UDR maintaining its size at 7,500.140 After 1976, while the IRA was still capable of dealing the British Army occasional major blows – most spectacularly at Narrow Water near Warrenpoint in County Down in 1979, when its bombs kiled eighteen soldiers – its most relentless campaign was aimed at local members of the security forces. These were largely Protestant and often, when part-timers, easy targets as they carried out their jobs as bus drivers, milkmen and farm labourers. As the ‘anti-imperialist struggle’ increasingly killed Protestant members of the Irish working class, its effects on community relations began to concern even some members of the IRA's leadership, who were repulsed by the brutal and casual sectarianism of many of their northern comrades.141
Along with Ulsterization went a policy of ending the granting of political status to paramilitary prisoners. Since 1972 political status had allowed prisoners to organize their day-to-day existence in prison, including wearing their own clothes and running education classes instead of performing the prison work required of ‘ordinary decent criminals’. During the ceasefire Merlyn Rees announced that political status would be ended for all newly convicted paramilitary prisoners. With the IRA leadership confident that all its prisoners would soon be released as part of the process of British withdrawal, there were only the most formal of protests from republicans.142
Rees's successor as Secretary of State, the tough ex-miner Roy Mason, pursued the policies of criminalization and Ulsterization with a crude vigour. At his first press conference in September 1976 he announced that the IRA was ‘reeling’.143 A new Chief Constable, Kenneth Newman, who had come from the Metropolitan Police to implement the policy of police primacy, oversaw a process through which a major expansion of resources was focused on four new regional crime squads targeted at the IRA's most active units. Suspects were held under detention orders for up to seven days at RUC holding centres at Castlereagh in East Belfast and Gough Barracks, Armagh. Making use of Lord Diplock's permissive recommendation that confessions made under interrogation could be accepted unless it was proved that they had been extracted by torture, the RUC was able to deal such serious blows to the IRA that an IRA ‘Staff Report’ captured by the police in Dublin referred to it as ‘contributing to our defeat’.144 By the end of 1977 Mason was claiming that ‘the tide had turned against the terrorists and the message for 1978 is one of real hope’.145 In fact, 1978 was to see clear signs that the Provisionals had been able to regroup and reorganize.
The prime architect of the strategic redirection of the Provisionals was Gerry Adams. A senior member of the Belfast IRA when he was rearrested in July 1973, Adams spent the next four years in the IRA compounds at the Long Kesh Prison. Here he took an increasingly critical line against the still largely southern leadership of the Provisionals. This in part reflected the hard sectarian edge of northern republicanism that detected in the southerners’ Éire Nua document a deplorable tendency to accommodate Unionists. There was also a realistic assessment that the British state was not in the process of withdrawing from the North. But the main criticism that Adams and his supporters levelled against the leadership was their support for the ceasefire that had divided and demoralized the IRA. With their main targets temporaily out of reach, sections of the IRA became unofficially involved in violent conflict with the Official IRA, who themselves had recently suffered a split: a more militaristic and ultra-leftist group broke away and founded an Irish Republican Socialist Party with its own military wing, the Irish National Liberation Army. Even more politically damaging to the Provisionals was their response to the loyalist paramilitaries who had intensified their activities during the ceasefire. Acting under the flag of convenience of ‘South Armagh Republican Action Force’, Provisionals shot dead six Protestants in Tullyvallen Orange Hall in September 1975 and on 5 January 1976 stopped a minibus carrying workers, separated out the Protestants and machine-gunned them, killing ten. The eruption of support for a grass-roots anti-violence movement, the Peace People – after a car driven by an IRA man attempting to escape from soldiers ploughed into a Catholic mother and her four children in West Belfast, killing three of the children – was also a worrying sign of a potential drying-up of toleration for the ‘armed struggle’ in Provisional heartlands.
The basis for Adams's rise to a dominant position in the republican movement was his role in ensuring that the IRA recovered from its near defeat in the mid 1970s. He promoted a reorganization of the IRA, replacing its old structure of geographically based brigades, battalions and companies with small Active Service Units, whose members would be drawn from different areas for a specific task such as assassination or robbery. This cellular structure was designed to be less vulnerable to infiltration and disruption by the security forces. A new Northern Command was established, which ensured that Adams and his allies controlled the main area of IRA operations. The northerners made it clear that they did not expect an imminent British withdrawal but were prepared for a ‘Long War’ that could last for two decades or more. IRA activity would be refined and increasingly take the form of ‘armed propaganda’ aimed at a process of attrition of the British will to remain in the North.
The ‘Long War’ would be fought as much politically as militarily, and Adams looked enviously at his rivals in the Officials who were enjoying increasing success as a left-wing political force in the South. He advocated that Sinn Féin become a campaigning political party rather than simply an IRA support organization. Adams and some of his lieutenants, for example Tom Hartley and Danny Morrison, adopted an increasingly left-wing language, which won them allies on the left wing of the British Labour Party. However, their major political breakthrough would come about not because of this rather superficial radicalism but through the unleashing of much more primordial passions in the North.
Mason had tried to buttress his robust security policies with a strong commitment to use the public sector and state investment to undermine the economic and social deprivation that he was convinced exacerbated communal conflict: ‘The terrorists needed unhappiness and hopelessness.’146 In the 1960s Northern Ireland had a thriving manufacturing sector, employing over 30 per cent of the workforce and returning the highest rates of productivity growth amongst the UK regions. The engine driving this impressive performance was the large number of multinationals that came to the region in this decade and the still-sizeable indigenous industrial base in shipbuilding, aircraft production and textiles. The twin pillars of this success were badly hit by the worldwide economic recession of the 1970s. The multinationals left the region as quickly as they had arrived, employment in manufacturing fell to 18 per cent of the overall workforce, and unemployment rose significantly.147 In 1976 unemployment in the North, at 10 per cent, was double the UK rate and in some areas in Catholic West Belfast the rate amongst adult males was over 50 per cent.148
Mason's response was to try to follow the recommendations of the Quigley Report, produced by four senior civil servants in 1976, which proposed a heavily subsidized economy, with the state playing a much greater role until market conditions improved. Employment in the public sector increased by over 50 per cent during the 1970s, compared to 22 per cent in the UK as a whole, and Mason's period at the Northern Ireland Office accounted for a substantial part of this.149 So strong was his view of the causes of support for violence that he persuaded the cabinet to support an extremely high-risk venture in which an American entrepreneur proposed to build a futuristic sports car on a green-field site in West Belfast. The project eventually collapsed when Thatcher was in office in part because of a lack of demand for its cars but also because of the embezzling activities of its founder, John DeLorean, who had siphoned off millions of pounds of public money for his private use.150
Mason's strong commitment to direct rule as an acceptable interim form of governing Northern Ireland, together with his tough rhetoric on security, endeared him to many unionists but did little to counter an increasingly militant tone in nationalist politics, reflected in John Hume's ascendancy in the SDLP. Hume, who as Minister of Commerce had denounced the UWC strike as a fascist takeover,151 blamed the Wilson government for political cowardice in not standing firm and in using troops to break it. The SDLP was traumatized by the collapse of the Executive, and in its immediate aftermath Hume told an official from the Department of Foreign Affairs that any hope of Irish unity was gone for ever. The members of the party's Assembly group reported a ‘massive swing’ of support away from them towards both wings of the IRA, while Fitt and Paddy Devlin claimed that they no longer had any support in Belfast.152 The year 1974 now entered the Irish nationalist chronology of shameful British capitulations to loyalist threats, along with 1912 and 1921. Although Fitt and Devlin had been prepared to respond to Craig's proposals during the Convention, Hume was hostile. Even if Craig had been able to win the support of Unionists for voluntary coalition, the SDLP would probably have split over participation in what Hume and many of its members would have seen as a ‘partitionist’ administration.153 The defeat of Craig's proposal ensured that the SDLP continued to shift in a more traditionally nationalist direction. At their conference in 1976 a motion calling for a British declaration of intent to withdraw was only narrowly defeated.154
Hume, who recognized the dangers for the party of adopting a policy that would make it indistinguishable from the Provisionals, countered with a proposal for a ‘third way’ between the constitutional status quo and British withdrawal. This ‘agreed Ireland’ would be the result of a process beginning with a statement from the British government that ‘its objective in Ireland was the bringing together of both Irish traditions in reconciliation and agreement’.155 Subsequent talks amongst the northern parties should be jointly chaired by the British and Irish governments. By this time Hume had begun the process of constructing a coalition of important allies in Europe and the US that he hoped to mobilize to apply sufficient pressure on Britain to bring a shift in policy. All this was too much for Paddy Devlin, who detected behind the language of ‘agreement’ and ‘process’ an iron determination to have the British state ‘educate’ the Protestants as to what their true interests were. For Devlin, the essence of ‘Hume-speak’ was the desire to impose a settlement over the heads of the unionist population. He resigned from the SDLP in 1977 and was soon followed by Fitt.
The ‘greening’ of the SDLP in 1978–9 was accelerated by increasing evidence that some RUC officers had brutalized suspects in Castlereagh and the fear that British policy was taking an integrationist direction. The Callaghan government's increasing vulnerability in the House of Commons led to negotiations with James Molyneaux to obtain Unionist votes and produced a commitment to deal with Northern Ireland's under-representation at Westminster. The promise of more seats enraged the SDLP and strengthened Hume's argument that the conflict could be resolved only through a process of internationalization involving the US and the Irish government.
However, even with this alienation of mainstream nationalists, the Provisionals faced the new Tory government with little evidence that, despite a successful reorganization of their military machine, they had overcome their political weakness. This was in part a reflection of popular revulsion at some of their actions, particularly the fire-bombing of the La Mon House Hotel in County Down on 17 February 1978 when twelve people were incinerated. Gerry Adams recalls being ‘depressed’ at the carnage and fearing that his two years of work at reviving the Provisionals was in danger of going down the drain.156 The victory of Hume in the election for the European parliament in June 1979, in which he came second to Paisley, with almost a quarter of the votes cast, seemed to emphasize republicans’ political irrelevance. Yet within two years, more by accident than by calculation, Adams would find himself in a position to launch an unprecedented political breakthrough for Sinn Féin.
A hint of what was to come was the 38,000 voters, 6 per cent of the total, in the European poll who had supported the former student revolutionary Bernadette McAliskey, née Devlin. She had stood as an independent supporting the demands of republican prisoners for political status. Since 1976 those convicted of terrorist offences had been placed in new cellular accommodation at what was now called the Maze Prison, although republicans continued to refer to it as Long Kesh. In protest they had first refused to wear prison clothes, covering themselves with blankets, and subsequently radicalized their campaign by smearing the walls of their cells with excrement. By 1978 there were over 300 prisoners involved in the ‘dirty protest’. Regardless of the fact that the squalor was self-inflicted and the Provisionals on the outside were carrying on a campaign of assassinating prison officers, in which eighteen were killed between 1976 and 1980,157 the strongly nationalistic Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All-Ireland, Dr Tomás Ó Fiaich, denounced the H Blocks at the Maze as ‘unfit for animals’ and compared them unfavourably with the sewers of Calcutta. Yet, potent though the mixture of religion and nationalism that Ó Fiaich embodied was, it did not acquire an overwhelming power until the IRA prisoners decided, against the advice of their leaders on the outside, to go on hunger strike. The strike, which began in October 1980, was called off after fifty-three days when it seemed that concessions were coming. When they did not materialize, a second, more determined strike led by Bobby Sands, the Provisionals' Commanding Officer in the Maze, began in March 1981.
Marches in support of the prisoners, which prior to the hunger strikes had brought out a few hundred from the republican heartlands, now numbered tens of thousands motivated by what one commentator described as a ‘tribal voice of martyrdom deeply embedded in the Gaelic, catholic nationalist tradition’. 158 By dying for their cause in this way, Sands and his comrades succeeded in overlaying the reality of the Provisionals’ role as the main agency of violent death in the North with the cloak of victimhood. The death of Frank Maguire, the MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone who was a republican sympathizer, provided an opportunity for a political breakthrough.
The usually cautious Adams was extremely nervous about putting forward a prisoners' candidate and decided to do so only after Bernadette McAliskey had expressed an interest in running as an independent. Bobby Sands was the choice. In a constituency evenly balanced between nationalists and unionists, a decision by the SDLP to stand would have denied the hunger striker victory. Instead, responding to the emotional upsurge of support for the hunger strikers, the party decided not to enter the contest. With a turnout of 87 per cent, Sands won by 30,492 votes to 29,046 for the Ulster Unionist Harry West.159 Sands's victory was a propaganda coup of major proportions, and it was soon followed by more gains as first Sands and then nine of his comrades died. By the time the hunger strikes were called off in October 1981, two hunger strikers had been elected to the Dáil and Sands's election agent, Owen Carron, had won the by-election caused by his death. Thatcher had kept an inflexible position throughout, maintaining ‘Crime is crime is crime, it's not political.’ In doing so, she may have won the battle and lost the war. A more flexible position would have exposed the increasingly rigid position adopted by Gerry Adams and the republican leadership, who sabotaged various attempts by clerics and the Irish government to broker a compromise.160 Instead the 100,000 who turned out for Sands's funeral on 7 May demonstrated the political harvest that republicans would reap from this series of agonizing and drawn-out suicides. In the election for a new Assembly in Northern Ireland in 1982, Sinn Féin won 10 per cent of the vote to the SDLP's 18 per cent. In a politically even more significant result, they won 13 per cent in the 1983 Westminster election to the SDLP's 17 per cent, and Gerry Adams defeated Gerry Fitt to become MP for West Belfast. The party of constitutional nationalism had paid a heavy price for its loss of nerve in Fermanagh and South Tyrone.
Fears of the imminent demise of constitutional nationalism propelled Thatcher towards the most radical British initiative on Ireland since partition. Ironically, although it was her mishandling of the hunger strikes that had done so much to transform the political fortunes of republicanism, it would be the unionist community, many of whom had applauded her hard line, who would be the main losers from the political repercussions of the ten deaths.
The fact that Thatcher's close friend and former Northern Ireland spokesman Airey Neave had been a staunch ally of the Ulster Unionist Party and a supporter of integration had encouraged James Molyneaux in an uncritical faith in Thatcher's self-proclaimed ‘Unionist instincts’.161 However, there is some evidence that he was aware of the dangers posed to the Unionist position by the return of a Conservative government with a substantial majority. The high point of his time at Westminster had been before he became UUP leader, during the Callaghan administration (1976–9), when the votes of the UUP MPs had been eagerly sought by Labour. This had allowed him to extract a number of concessions, most importantly the increase in Northern Ireland seats at Westminster from twelve to seventeen. He explained to those with an anti-Labour bias in his party that it was not necessarily in Unionists’ interest that a Tory government be returned: ‘The Unionist Party aimed to hold the balance of power. The position could be destroyed by a general election. Do you really believe that we would be listened to by the Conservatives if they had a majority of 200?’162 Prior to the 1979 election he warned that ‘If the Conservatives win we will have to be on our guard and avoid falling into a carefully baited trap. We might be faced with a nicely coated pill in the form of a type of Sunningdale.’163 Both Molyneaux and Powell were convinced that the Atkins conference was part of a NIO–Foreign Office strategy of extrication from Northern Ireland and that Paisley's participation in the talks would undermine support for the DUP.164 Molyneaux's self-confidence was maintained despite grass-roots concern that the UUP's focus on Westminster and lack of activism in Northern Ireland was playing into the hands of the DUP. He was encouraged when the Reverend Martin Smyth defeated the DUP's William McCrea in the by-election for South Belfast after the IRA had murdered the sitting MP, the Reverend Robert Bradford, in November 1981. In 1982 the new Secretary of State, James Prior, who had been banished to Belfast because of his leftist brand of Toryism, proposed elections for a new assembly and a scheme of ‘rolling devolution’. The SDLP boycotted the assembly because no ‘Irish Dimension’ was included, and the UUP's attitude was much less enthusiastic than that of the DUP. Ironically for Molyneaux, who persisted in seeing the Prior initiative as part of the extrication process, Thatcher herself had little faith in it and was considering a much more radical approach. But, although she shared Neave's scepticism about a power-sharing deal between parties who had such conflicting national aspirations, she did not believe in the feasibility of any policy initiative that would, like integration, be rejected by the Dublin government. Concerned above all with the fact that Northern Ireland was the only place in the world where British soldiers were losing their lives, she looked to political leaders in the Republic for more cooperation in the intelligence, security and judicial fields. It was this that had motivated her 1980 summit with Haughey and the subsequent agreement with Garret FitzGerald to establish an Anglo-Irish Inter-Governmental Council in November 1981. Although the refusal of Haughey's government to support European Union sanctions against Argentina during the Falklands War in 1982 had temporarily disrupted the emerging Anglo-Irish axis, FitzGerald's return to power, coinciding as it did with the eruption of Sinn Féin into Northern Irish politics, led to a renewed and more intensive engagement.
The negotiations that led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement by Thatcher and FitzGerald at Hillsborough Castle on 15 November 1985 had taken two years to complete, and, although the leader of the SDLP was kept in close touch with their contents by the Irish government throughout, the leaders of Unionism were excluded from the process. For Thatcher the prize was to be enhanced security cooperation from the Republic and the possibility that the majority of northern nationalists would support or acquiesce in the constitutional framework of the state in which they lived. The price she was willing to pay was a new role for the Republic in the governance of Northern Ireland.
Thatcher was adamant that formal British sovereignty over Northern Ireland was untouchable and ruled out FitzGerald's favoured option of joint authority. However, senior British officials, including the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, and the Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, were in favour of a radical initiative that would undermine the republican challenge even at the cost of unionist outrage. They represented a section of opinion in Whitehall that saw the initiative as a first step in the process of decoupling Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK, precisely because the province was a drain on the political and economic resources of the British state.
At the time of her summit with FitzGerald in November 1984, when she publicly rejected all three constitutional options proposed by the New Ireland Forum, it appeared that Thatcher had turned her back on any notion of a new departure in Northern Ireland policy. It was certainly the case that her increasing conviction that the Republic would not be able to offer constitutional recognition of a new dispensation in Northern Ireland by removing Articles 2 and 3 from its constitution had made her more reluctant to innovate. The IRA's bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the Tory Party conference in October, which nearly killed her and did kill several leading Conservatives, had the same effect. It was Thatcher's ardent pursuit of the ‘special relationship’ with Washington that allowed the Anglo-Irish initiative to be resurrected.
Up until the 1960s the ‘special relationship’ had made US presidents reluctant to voice opinions on Northern Ireland, and the State Department was regarded by Irish diplomats as having a pro-British bias on the issue of partition. However, during the 1970s the Department of Foreign Affairs under FitzGerald had made a concerted effort to increase Irish influence in Washington in order to marginalize support for the IRA and increase the influence of constitutional nationalism. Together with John Hume, FitzGerald and Seán Donlon, the Irish Ambassador, had built up a powerful support base on Capitol Hill centred on four influential Irish-American politicians: Senators Edward Kennedy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Governor Hugh Carey of New York and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, ‘Tip’ O'Neill. The ‘Four Horsemen’ had issued a joint statement on St Patrick's Day 1978 criticizing the lack of political progress under direct rule and alleging violations of civil rights by the security forces. They had been responsible for President Carter's unprecedented declaration that the US would support a deal in Northern Ireland involving the Irish government. Most worryingly for London, it was their pressure that was behind the decision of the State Department in 1979 to suspend the sale of handguns to the RUC.165 It was US pressure too that had led Thatcher, very much against her own instincts, to promote all-party devolution talks under her first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Humphrey Atkins, and that proved decisive in getting stalled negotiations restarted after Thatcher, post-Forum fulminations. Speaker O'Neill wrote to Reagan shortly before a Thatcher–Reagan summit in December 1984 urging him not to tolerate British retrenchment. O'Neill had unprecedented leverage with Reagan because of his record of opposition to US funding of the ‘Contras’ – the counter-revolutionaries fighting against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The muting of O'Neill's criticism on Nicaragua was the price of the Irish state's most important political advance in relation to Northern Ireland since partition.166
At the core of the Agreement was the creation of an Anglo-Irish Inter-Governmental Council jointly chaired by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs. It was to be serviced by a joint secretariat of Irish and NIO officials based in Belfast. The conference was to deal on a regular basis with political, security and legal matters, including the administration of justice and the promotion of cross-border cooperation. The British government committed itself, in what was an international treaty, to make ‘determined efforts’ to resolve any differences that arose within the Council. Although all this fell short of joint authority, the British claim that it was simply an ‘institutionalization’ of normal consultation with Dublin was not taken seriously in the Irish capital, where the Agreement was accurately characterized as giving the southern state ‘a foothold in decisions governing Northern Ireland’.167 Writing in August 1985, John Cole, the BBC's political editor, referred to the ‘booby prize’ that awaited Anglo-Irish strategy: ‘The booby prize is when the Agreement is not good enough to attract the Nationalists and worrying enough to send the Unionists over the top.’168
It was soon clear that Thatcher had indeed won the booby prize. The unionist community in Northern Ireland was united in angry rejection of the Agreement, or ‘Diktat’, as it was almost instantly christened. At the same time, although the expanding Catholic middle class greeted direct rule with a Dublin input as an ideal political framework, the core areas of working-class support for the IRA showed little sign of being impressed with the new dispensation. Although support for Sinn Féin had peaked before the Agreement, there was no indication that it was now threatened by an electoral meltdown, while IRA activity continued unabated and the actual level of violence increased. However, while the Agreement was initially denounced by republicans as part of a British counter-insurgency strategy, it would soon contribute to a major republican rethink of the role of armed struggle.