These views persisted well into the 1970s when more and more IRA members found themselves in jail, where debates on left-wing politics became more frequent. Those who espoused such views would be hounded. One former prisoner can recall a member of the IRA jail staff sending a priest to see him because he had been spotted reading a book by James Connolly.⁶ The 1916 leader, badly wounded in the Rising and then strapped into a chair and executed by a British firing squad, was in the pantheon of IRA martyrs, but he had been a Marxist and trade union leader as well. The Provisionals’ rivals in the Official IRA revered Connolly, and so any Provo Volunteer who showed an interest in his writings automatically came under suspicion. Even as late as 1975 the leadership had a knee-jerk attitude to left-wing politics. When some IRA inmates of Long Kesh internment camp started dabbling with socialism, an order was issued, according to the former Belfast IRA commander Brendan Hughes, to burn all Marxist books.⁷

MacStiofain regarded men like Roy Johnston as godless atheists who were more interested in undermining the influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland than in ending British occupation of the North. When Johnston wrote a letter to the Sinn Fein paper the United Irishman criticizing the practice of reciting the rosary at republican commemorations, calling the practice “sectarian,” MacStiofain, then living in County Kerry in the deep southwest of Ireland, stopped the offending issue from being circulated and sold, for fear that the letter would be used against the IRA by its enemies. Interfering in the distribution of the United Irishman cost MacStiofain his place on the Army Council, the automatic consequence of a six-month suspension from the IRA imposed by Goulding as punishment.

MacStiofain’s tilts against Goulding earned him plaudits south of the Border, but in the North the way to the hearts of the hard men in Belfast was by a different route. Throughout the eventful and threatening year of 1969 MacStiofain liaised closely with the dissident Northerners and shared their concerns that the increasingly demilitarized IRA would be unable to defend Belfast’s Catholic areas. At one point, according to his own account, he went behind Goulding’s back and secretly supplied guns to some Belfast units.⁸ A shrewd if somewhat uncomplicated tactician, MacStiofain realized that the engine of the upcoming war would be in Belfast, and throughout his IRA career, until his fall in 1972, he strove to ensure that his relations with the Belfast IRA were always the best.

Two other figures dominated the new Army Council, both then in their thirties and both Southerners who had distinguished themselves during the Border Campaign. Ruairi O Bradaigh, a schoolteacher from County Roscommon in the west of Ireland, was chief of staff at the end of that campaign. He had written the famous IRA statement ending the campaign and ordering IRA units to dump arms, conceding that lack of popular support from Northern nationalists had dealt the IRA the final blow. O Bradaigh inherited his republicanism from his father, who had been badly shot up by the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1919 and who died when O Bradaigh was only ten. O Bradaigh’s military credentials were impeccable—he had led an arms raid in England that netted five tons of British army hardware—but he was not as opposed to political activity as others were. In 1957 he was one of four Sinn Fein members elected to the Irish parliament on an abstentionist ticket, and throughout his career with the Provisionals he favored selective and tactical electoral interventions. In 1970 he became the first president of Provisional Sinn Fein, and as the custom was that Sinn Fein always had one seat on the Army Council as of right, O Bradaigh automatically qualified.

The other major personality was Daithi O Conaill from County Cork, also a schoolteacher by profession. Unlike Sean MacStiofain, his new chief of staff, O Conaill did not mind if people used the English form of his name, and most Provisional associates and the media called him Dave O’Connell. Like O Bradaigh’s, his military record was beyond criticism. He was interned by the Dublin government early on in the Border Campaign and was incarcerated in the Curragh camp in County Kildare, once the British army’s headquarters in Ireland, and there he met O Bradaigh. In 1957 the pair devised a successful escape plan, and they went on the run together. When O Bradaigh became chief of staff, he chose O Conaill to be his director of operations. It was the start of a long and close relationship.

O Conaill was a hands-on commander and fought in Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone, where he was badly wounded by the RUC. Confined to Crumlin Road prison, Belfast, he appears at first glance to have been an unlikely candidate for leadership of the Provisionals. In jail he had edited the Saoirse magazine, which had first floated the idea of IRA involvement in social and economic agitation, and after the campaign he became interested in the cooperative movement, often a route into left-wing politics. But his time in Belfast jail had also convinced him that the removal of partition had to be the republican priority, and he believed strongly in the need for armed struggle. The job he undertook with the new IRA emphasized that; he was the Provisionals’ first quartermaster general, charged with rearming the organization and giving it the sinews to fight the impending war against the British.

The remaining four Army Council members were also veterans of the 1956–62 campaign: Sean Tracy from County Laois; Leo Martin from West Belfast, who was OC of the Northern IRA; Patrick Mulcahy from Limerick; and Joe Cahill from Belfast. At a second Convention, held in September 1970, Billy McKee joined the Council. The presence of three Northerners on the Council, all Belfast men, serves to dispel the myth that the Provisionals were Southern-dominated from the start and that it was not until Adams and his allies captured the Army Council in the late 1970s that the Northern voice was allowed to be heard at the IRA’s highest levels.

The first Provisional leaders were sure of the rightness of their cause and the reasons for breaking with the Officials. The initial statement from O Bradaigh’s breakaway Sinn Fein in January 1970 listed five reasons for splitting with Goulding: his recognition of the Irish and British parliaments; the move to embrace extreme socialism; illegal internal disciplinary methods; the failure to defend Belfast; and the policy of defending the Northern parliament at Stormont.9 The list demonstrated that the Provisionals were essentially a coalition of differing grievances; for some, Marxism was the major problem with Goulding, and for others the military rundown of the IRA. One characteristic of the new IRA above all others that united the coalition—the glue that held it together—was a distrust of politics, parliamentary politics in particular, and an unshakable belief in the correctness of armed struggle.

The early Provisional leaders were determined that they would not stray down the path of parliamentary reformism trod by other nationalist and republican leaders. Each previous generation of freedom fighters had been betrayed, they believed, by leaders seduced by the siren call of parliamentary politics. They would be the exception. For this reason they defined the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA in simple and traditional terms. The military wing, the IRA, was in charge, and Sinn Fein would obey and be subservient to the Army Council. That was the case in the South and also in the North, where, according to one veteran party activist, Sinn Fein was secondary to the IRA from the outset: “Sinn Fein was the poor relation. It wasn’t worth bothering about. Sinn Fein in the 1970s was an organization without clout; it supported the ‘campaign’ and held lofty ideas of a united Ireland but nothing else. The IRA was boss.”¹⁰

As the war intensified and more and more Northerners joined up, the antipolitical nature of the Provisionals intensified, as one of the Provisionals’ founding members recalled:

When the resistance began, Northerners came in droves, and they were reacting to events for a number of years. The Northern guys were quite slow to be politicized. They looked down on Sinn Fein and dismissed it saying, “We’re Army men,” I shared a cell with them in Mountjoy, and that was their view. They were quite happy sitting in their cells reading the Sun or the Mirror boasting about operations. They were purely militaristic—hit, hit, keep on hitting.11

Whereas the first IRA commanders were Southerners, the foot soldiers in the war, the Volunteers, came overwhelmingly from the North and at first mostly from Belfast, where the attempted loyalist pogroms of August 1969 had taken place. Many IRA units elsewhere in the North, in republican heartlands like Tyrone, Armagh, and Derry, were slower to take sides in the republican split; in some cases months went by before they decided whether to follow Goulding or MacStiofain. The Provisionals were born in Belfast and sustained by the city’s bitter sectarian politics.

Some of those outside Belfast were repelled by the Provisionals’ simplistic politics. Typical of this category was the Derry republican Mitchel McLaughlin, who stayed with the Officials for several months before joining the Provisionals, later rising to become a key Adams aide and advocate of his peace strategy. “At the time of the split,” he once told an interviewer, “I actually stayed with the Official Republican Movement. Mainly because of their politics which undoubtedly were more progressive than the more kind of nationalistic rhetoric that I was hearing [from the early Provisional leaders].”¹² Gerry Adams and the Ballymurphy unit were not the only IRA members to hesitate before taking sides in the split. Not surprisingly, many were waiting to see who came out on top, and so what happened in Belfast was crucial. When Belfast republicanism went over to the Provos, as it did during the crucial year of 1970, many of the rural units followed, and soon if angry young Northern Catholics wanted to hit back at either the loyalists or the British army, they knew they would find a warm welcome in the Provisionals.

The IRA before August 1969 was an organization kept going by family tradition. Membership was passed from father to son, mother to daughter, but the recruits who flocked to the ranks of the Provisionals were a new breed, motivated by an atavistic fear of loyalist violence and an overwhelming need to strike back. Known as Sixty-niners, they joined the IRA literally to defend their own streets, were resolved that the near-pogroms of August 1969 would never be repeated, and were ready, if the opportunity arose, to retaliate. They joined the Provos because the Officials had failed to defend their communities in the way that was expected, and they automatically associated the Officials’ obsession with politics with military weakness and betrayal. From the outset abhorrence of politics and the requirement for defense and armed struggle were just different sides of the same coin.

Typical of the new Provisional IRA Volunteer was Bernard Fox, an apprentice coach-builder from the Falls Road who joined the IRA in 1969, when he was just eighteen years old. He is now a senior figure in the leadership and was named in 2001 in the British media as a senior figure in the Provisional IRA’s GHQ staff. In 2006 he was appointed to the Army Council. He spent nineteen years in prison, either jailed or interned, for IRA activity. His motive for signing up was straightforward, as he once explained in a newspaper interview after the peace process reforms had secured his release from prison: “I was almost shot in a gun attack at Norfolk Street. I came away wanting a gun. It was survival. You wanted to protect your own people… my family and myself. When the barricades went up I wanted a gun so I approached this fella who was in the IRA and asked for gun and he said: could I shoot a British soldier? At that time I hadn’t the idea that it was the British government’s fault….”13

Brendan Hughes from the Lower Falls Road district, a figure who later became an IRA legend, was similarly affected by the violence of August 1969. “At that time it was simply ‘Here we are being attacked by Loyalists, by B Specials, by the RUC, by the British army,’ and there was a need to hit back,” recalled the former Belfast commander. “I mean I was in Bombay Street the morning after it was burned out, helping people out, and I went to the bottom of the Falls Road and seen all the burnt-out homes. I had relatives in Bombay Street who were burnt out, and I felt the desire to get back at these people who were doing it.”¹⁴ Micky McMullen, a former long-term IRA prisoner, came under similar pressure but managed to resist it: “Up to 1969 there was nothing, but August 1969 was the turning point. I became involved in community defence you know and stuff like that, helping families to move after they had been burned out. At that time a lot of my friends would have been trying to join the IRA and the rationale would be just to get stuck into the ‘Orangies’ you know. It was a defence thing but something stopped me from getting into that.”¹⁵

Fox, Hughes, and McMullen and the many hundreds who followed them into the Provisional IRA in the first years of its existence were part of a Northern Catholic tradition that went back nearly two hundred years, when another armed uprising had very nearly ended British rule in Ireland. The United Irishmen’s rebellion of 1798 is celebrated as the moment when modern, secular Irish republicanism was born, but it also coincided with the birth of sectarian politics in Ireland and left a scar that would mark Northern society for centuries to come.

The United Irishmen were mostly Presbyterians whose determination to sever the link with England had been partly inspired by the American and French revolutions but which was also forced upon them by the penal laws, harsh anti-Catholic measures that also penalized Protestants who were not members of the established Anglican Church in Ireland. The leader of the United Irishmen, the Dublin-born lawyer Theobald Wolfe Tone, defined his objectives in heady language that inspired future generations of Irish freedom fighters: “To break the connection with England… and to assert the independence of my country—these were my objects. To… substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter—these were my means.”¹⁶

These were noble sentiments, but the reality on the ground in the late eighteenth century was the reverse of what Tone wanted to happen. Ireland was beginning to divide very deeply on religious and sectarian grounds, nowhere more so than in the North. The cause was simple—land. Protestant planter tenant farmers in the North had enjoyed superior rights over native Catholics since the 1600s when the plantation settlement had accelerated. A practice known as the Ulster Custom gave them security of tenure as long as they kept up their rent payments, and it also entitled them, if they decided to quit the land, to receive compensation for improvements they had made to the land or property. They had an incentive to work and invest that was denied their Catholic countrymen, and the rewards made their sacrifice worthwhile. But in the early 1780s the English began to relax the penal laws, Catholics were allowed to hold leases on the same terms as Protestants, and the planters’ privileged lifestyle came under threat. Catholics, who were used to a lower standard of living, were also ready to pay higher rents, with the result that Protestant planters saw more and more of their farms falling into the hands of their native rivals.

Around the mid-1780s the worm began to turn. The first secret Protestant societies appeared and announced that they were dedicated to preserving privilege and driving the Catholics out. The largest was the Peep O’Day Boys, so called because its members would appear at dawn to burn or intimidate Catholic families. This Protestant violence stimulated a Catholic response, and rival secret societies devoted to defending Catholics were formed. Inevitably they became known as Defenders, and as they toured the countryside raiding for arms and skirmishing with troops, they adopted a strategic dictum that would have been familiar to the Provisional IRA leadership: the best means of defense, they preached, was attack. Although their roots lay in what are now the Border counties between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, the Defender phenomenon spread throughout Ireland. The objectives of the Defenders varied from place to place; in the South discontent over high rents and low wages combined with an insurrectionary and defiant politics animated by events in America and France to swell their ranks. But the Defenders were less inspired by the idea of freeing Ireland from British rule and more by the hope that life in Ireland could be improved.

In the North there was a sharp sectarian edge to the Defenders’ activities, and as Protestant anxiety over land losses intensified, clashes with the Peep O’Day Boys became more and more frequent and bloody. One confrontation was to have momentous consequences for Ireland’s history. In September 1795 just outside the city of Armagh, at a place called the Diamond, over twenty Defenders were killed in a pitched battle with a much smaller force of Peep O’Day Boys. The victorious Protestants then decided to re-form themselves into the Orange Society, later called the Orange Order, named after the Protestant hero King William of Orange, who had defeated the Catholic King James in the late 1690s and secured the Protestant crown and succession in England and Ireland.

As the thoughts of the leaders of the United Irishmen moved increasingly to violent rebellion, they turned to the Defenders for the muscle they would need to take on the English redcoats, and the two groups coalesced in 1796. The ensuing rising in 1798 was brutally put down by Lord Cornwallis, who had just lost the American colonies and was determined not to suffer another humiliating defeat at the hands of impudent rebels. Too late to help his associates, Wolfe Tone returned to Ireland with a force of French troops but was captured, arrested, and sentenced to death. Determined to cheat the English hangman, Tone took his own life in prison. The 1798 rebellion went down as another glorious defeat, and Wolfe Tone became known as the founding father of Irish republicanism. His grave at Bodenstown, County Kildare, has become a place of pilgrimage for all shades of Irish republicanism. The Provisionals’ commemoration takes place each June, and the keynote speech is invariably used by the Army Council to spell out current IRA policy.

Tone’s influence survived his death, and so too did that of the Defenders. The Defenders and the early recruits to the Provisional IRA two centuries later shared a number of important characteristics. In both organizations the prime motive for taking up arms was to defend their people from Protestant attack, not to free Ireland. The Defenders organized themselves to protect Catholic farms and land in rural Ulster; the early Provisionals did so to defend Catholic streets and ghettos in Belfast. Both believed that the best defense was attack, and both put the need for guns or other instruments of defense before political ideas.

Both were reactive responses to the iniquities of British rule. In 1795, for instance, a Kildare schoolteacher, Laurence O’Connor, sentenced to death for administering a Defender oath, told his judge, “[P]rosecutions were not the means of bringing peace in the country but if the rich would alleviate the sufferings of the poor, they would hear no more of risings or Defenders and the country would rest in peace and harmony.”17 Two hundred and five years later Eamonn McDermott, an IRA Volunteer from Derry sentenced to life imprisonment in 1979 for killing a policeman, expressed not dissimilar sentiments: “Its a cliché now but the British Army created the IRA…. They brought the national question into it, before then it wasn’t really an issue. Republicans would argue that it was there from the start, but that’s a load of rubbish. Initially [we] were trying to reform the state; the national question and partition came later.”¹⁸ In their different ways both men were saying the same thing: if the British had behaved sensibly and fairly, they and their communities would probably have been content.

AS CATHOLIC Belfast recovered from the shock and bloodshed of August 1969, the need for defense was uppermost in the minds of republicans in Ballymurphy, where in November 1969, after the death in a car accident of the local IRA commander, Liam McParland, Gerry Adams took charge. In those days the vast sprawling Ballymurphy housing project was divided by the Springfield Road, one of the city’s main arterial routes. The lower, southern side was Catholic, while the upper, northern side, New Barnsley, which dominated the rest of the district from the slopes of hills that overlook the city, was Protestant. Tension, suspicion, and fear were rife after the August riots, and barricades set up then by Catholics were still in place. Ballymurphy Catholics were worried that loyalists could direct sniper fire on them from the high ground of New Barnsley. Eager to acquire weapons of their own, locals turned to the as yet nonaligned IRA unit, as Adams later recalled: “Many people involved with the defence committees flocked to the IRA, which speedily mushroomed out of all proportion to its previous numbers.”¹⁹ There was little doubt that in Ballymurphy defense against loyalist attack was the main motive for those who joined the local unit, as one Volunteer explained: “It was a gut reaction. The Loyalists were attacking our ones and we knew that sooner or later it would come to the ’Murph. The Brits didn’t really figure in those days. They just didn’t belong in the fight.”²⁰

At its first meeting, in January 1970, the MacStiofain-led Army Council devised a three-stage strategy that initially placed the emphasis on the need to defend the Catholic areas of Belfast. “All our energies would be devoted to providing material, financial and training assistance for the Northern units,” MacStiofain later explained in his autobiography. “The objective was to ensure that if any area where such a unit existed came under attack, whether from Loyalist extremists or British forces, that unit would now be capable of adequate defensive action.”²¹

As soon as possible thereafter, according to the MacStiofain plan, the IRA would go into a second phase, a mixture of defense and retaliation, the latter designed to deter loyalists from mounting attacks. When the IRA was strong enough and political circumstances suitable, the IRA would move into the third phase, an offensive war designed to bring Britain to the negotiating table to agree to the final withdrawal of its forces from Ireland. Within weeks the Army Council also approved the design for the new IRA’s icon, one that would symbolize the determination that the killings and burnings of August 1969 would never happen again; a phoenix rising from the ashes—meant to be the ashes of Bombay Street—soon adorned lapel badges and ties worn in bars and drinking clubs in West Belfast.

The political circumstances quickly began to move in the Provisionals’ favor. The deployment of troops ended half a century of effective British non-engagement in Northern Ireland. The Harold Wilson cabinet in London realized it had no choice but to force the pace of political change. A reform program was announced. The B Specials, hated by the Catholics, would be disbanded and replaced by a militia to be drawn from both communities. It would be called the Ulster Defence Regiment. The RUC would be disarmed and reorganized in the hope of attracting more Catholic recruits. The allocation of public housing and other powers were taken away from Northern Ireland’s unionist-dominated local councils, while plans were laid to outlaw public expressions of sectarian hatred and to improve community relations. The British home secretary was given oversight of Northern Ireland, and that was a dark hint to Unionists that London could take away their powers entirely; if they didn’t clean up their act, their parliament at Stormont could be suspended and the days of exclusive Protestant rule brought to an end. Although the government of Major James Chichester-Clark had little choice but to accept Wilson’s diktat, the unionist grassroots were alarmed and restive. The disarming of the RUC had led to rioting on the Shankill Road, and three people were killed in gun battles between British troops and loyalist snipers. One of the fatalities was an RUC constable, the first police death of the Troubles. Early in 1970 the Reverend Ian Paisley, already a fairly reliable barometer of grassroots Protestant discontent, won Terence O’Neill’s old seat at Stormont in a by-election called after the unseated prime minister’s retirement from politics. Chichester-Clark was under constant attack from right-wingers on his backbenches, some motivated by hostility to the reform program, others by fear of losing their seats to Paisley supporters. Events on the streets also contributed to the sour unionist mood. In the wake of the August riots, the RUC had been expelled from nationalist areas in Belfast and Derry, and the British army had taken over control of law and order. The defense committees—in many cases controlled by either the Provisional or the Official IRA—banned the police from their areas and refused to dismantle the August barricades. Their behavior infuriated the unionists.

There is little doubt that most Northern nationalists welcomed Britain’s reinvolvement in Irish affairs, especially since it came from a British Labour government, some of whose leaders were known to be sympathetic to the nationalist cause. To the discomfort of many early Provisional leaders, relations between Catholics and British soldiers were, if not friendly, then certainly not hostile, mirroring this new, hopeful mood.

As unionist angst grew, the need to buttress Chichester-Clark against his right-wingers brought a change in British policy. The honeymoon between nationalists and the British began to end in Easter that year, when there were clashes between British troops and republicans at commemorations of the 1916 Rising in Armagh and Derry. But the worst trouble was in Ballymurphy in riots that finally forced republicans there to align with the Provisionals. As in other parts of West Belfast, day-to-day control of law and order in the estate was in the hands of the British army, at first the Royal Scots Regiment, which set up headquarters in a deserted school on the Springfield Road. To the astonishment of Ballymurphy Catholics, at the end of March the commander of the Royal Scots gave Orangemen from New Barnsley permission to parade down the Springfield Road past their estate. As outraged nationalists heard the flute-and-accordion bands striking up sectarian, anti-Catholic tunes, the first stones were thrown. This time the troops sided with the Orangemen. As Catholic rioters hurled rocks and gasoline bombs, the troops replied with CS gas, which seeped through the housing estate, disabling young and old, rioter and non-rioter indiscriminately. Military snatch squads charged the crowds to arrest and beat stone throwers. Ballymurphy nationalists contrasted this tough response with the more low-key and measured reply to loyalist rioters. Chichester-Clark’s critics had demanded that the British army remove its kid gloves in Catholic areas, and this had now happened.

The Easter 1970 Ballymurphy disturbances were significant not just because they pushed the local unaligned IRA unit into the arms of the Provisionals but because, for a sizable section of Belfast Catholic opinion, they began to put British soldiers on the same side as the unionists and Protestants. It was this development, repeated elsewhere with increasing frequency and ferocity in the coming weeks and months, that transformed matters to the advantage of the Provisionals. And no one was better able to take advantage of this than Gerry Adams, the new commander of the Bally-murphy IRA.

By the time of the Easter 1970 riots the Provisional IRA in the city had grown so quickly that it was obliged to reorganize. At that time the IRA operated at three levels. At the bottom were local defense committees, in effect vigilantes who patrolled areas at night to warn of loyalist incursions. Above them was the Auxiliary IRA, men whose job was to defend their own areas, should the loyalists attack. They were in practice part-time IRA members whose services could be called upon in an emergency and who, in the meantime, provided the IRA with ears and eyes. Above them was the full-time IRA unit or company, modeled on the British army’s structure. Each company was recruited from within its home area.

With their ranks swollen by new recruits, the IRA expanded from one Belfast battalion to three, each with its own complement of companies. The First Battalion was based in Andersonstown and the Upper Falls Road area. The Second Battalion encompassed Ballymurphy and the Lower Falls Road area. The Third Battalion took in the rest of Catholic Belfast, principally the isolated and often besieged ghettos of Ardoyne in North Belfast, the Short Strand in East Belfast, and the Markets district in South-central Belfast.

Nearly all Gerry Adams’s family went with the Provisionals. Only one sister, Margaret, whose husband was in the Official IRA, refused; the rest— father, mother, siblings—all gave their allegiance to the reborn phoenix. Adams was well placed to rise in the new movement. At the time of the split there were no more than forty to sixty IRA members in the whole of Belfast and even fewer of Gerry Adams’s youth and ability. The Provisional leadership in Belfast naturally turned to able republicans to show the way to the newcomers, among them Adams. Talent-spotted by the pre-split Belfast commander, Billy McMillen, the young Adams was already headed for leadership, but the Troubles gave him the opportunity to utilize his special skills with deadly effect. Other IRA leaders rose because of their record as “operators,” as gunmen and bombers. But not Adams. Although he was to dominate the IRA for the next thirty years, there is no evidence that he ever fired a shot in anger against the British or their local allies. “I have never met anyone who has ever been on an operation with him,” recalled one early colleague. “Usually you get to hear about people, that so-and-so is a nerveless operator or this one’s a wreck and so on, but never with Adams. He was never on a robbery, never on a gun crew, a bombing or anything.”22

The key to his rise lay in other qualities, prime among them the skills of a ruthless general. The first opportunity to display his strategic dexterity came during the Easter riots of 1970. The new Provisional Belfast commander was Billy McKee, a confirmed bachelor and devout Catholic who had devoted his life to the republican cause. Like other conservative critics, he had quit the Goulding IRA in protest against its policies but rejoined when the riots of August 1969 broke out. He became the first commander of the Second Battalion and then, after the split, took over command of the entire Belfast Brigade.

Deeply affected by the IRA’s failure to defend nationalist areas in August 1969, McKee was determined that the Provisionals would make up for that lapse. When the Ballymurphy riots erupted, he ordered an armed unit from D Coy in the Lower Falls Road to go to Ballymurphy and take on the British army. When Adams found out, he was furious and detained McKee’s men at gunpoint. “Adams put us all in this house and wouldn’t let us out,” recalled an IRA colleague who was impressed by this first encounter with the Ballymurphy leader, “and there we sat with all our guns stacked against the wall. McKee wanted a gunfight, but Adams didn’t. Adams wanted ordinary people involved in the rioting as a way of radicalizing them. That impressed me. He seemed to be very competent and capable; he knew what he was talking about.”²³ The rioting lasted for four days and affected thousands of West Belfast people. Had the IRA opened fire on the first day, the trouble would have possibly been over in a few hours and could have ended with the IRA’s defeat at the hands of superior British firepower and Ballymurphy’s substantial Catholic community rendered less angry, less willing to take up guns.

Three months later the chance came to repeat the exercise. The months of June and July 1970 were to witness a series of historic blunders by the British military and the unionist government which catapulted the Provisionals into an organization large and strong enough to embark on the second and third stages of MacStiofain’s strategy. The riots of that summer also made the Ballymurphy IRA the most militant in Belfast and helped ensure that Gerry Adams would rise through the ranks.

The spark that lit the fire came on June 18, when in Britain a general election ousted Harold Wilson’s Labour government and installed a Conservative administration led by Edward Heath. The result buoyed the unionists in Northern Ireland. Harold Wilson’s cabinet had been openly sympathetic to the civil rights agenda, whereas the British Tories had historical and cultural ties to unionism. Encouraged by the result, unionists began to press for harsher security measures, including internment, the measure that they believed had crushed the IRA during the 1956–62 campaign. But there were warning signals from the election as well. The Reverend Ian Paisley was elected to the Westminster parliament at the expense of a more moderate unionist, and there was a fear that mainstream unionism might lose control unless it was bolstered. It was in this atmosphere that Chichester-Clark secured the agreement of the British army commander in Northern Ireland, Lieutenant General Sir Ian Freeland, that a number of impending Orange parades would be allowed to go ahead. The unionist premier believed he could not survive much more grassroots antagonism, and the British, desperate to sustain Chichester-Clark, agreed.

Two controversial parades were scheduled for June 27. One was due to march past the Ardoyne district of North Belfast, where some of the worst loyalist violence of August 1969 had happened. Another would go through Ballymurphy, as the Easter march of that year had done with such disastrous consequences. Predictably both marches degenerated into violence. In Ballymurphy fierce rioting broke out, again between British troops and local Catholics, but in Ardoyne things took a more serious turn. The Ardoyne parade was attacked with stones and gasoline bombs, and the guns quickly came out on both sides. In August 1969 the loyalists and RUC had given local nationalists a bloody nose, but this time it was the Provisionals who meted out the punishment. Three loyalist snipers were shot dead by gunmen from the IRA’s Third Battalion and several more were wounded.

As news of the killing spread, angry loyalist mobs gathered in East Belfast and began moving in on the small Catholic ghetto of Short Strand, situated on the banks of the river Lagan. Inexplicably the British army made no effort to stop them, although it was clear that the loyalists were intent on death and destruction. It was a heaven-sent chance for the Provisionals to demonstrate they could defend their community, and a small group of IRA Volunteers took up position in the grounds of the local Catholic church, St. Matthew’s, and opened up on the Protestant crowds. Loyalist snipers returned fire, and soon a full-scale gun battle was raging. The IRA squad was led by the Belfast commander, Billy McKee, his presence testimony not just to his devotion to the Catholic church but to his determination to expunge the shame of August 1969. Although McKee was badly wounded in the five-hour-long exchange, his mission succeeded. The loyalist mobs retreated, carrying two of their number home dead. One local Catholic, who IRA leaders claimed was a member of the Auxiliaries, was also killed, but there was no doubt that the events in Ardoyne and the Short Strand— “the siege of St. Matthew’s” in Provisional folklore—had established the Provisionals as the Catholics’ only reliable defenders. The British army was discredited. The importance of the gun battles did not escape the IRA, as one of those involved in the Short Strand battle recalled: “It was very significant. On our way over to the [Short] Strand that night there was a lot of Brits and peelers [police] just sitting outside the area. Did they allow that battle to develop to sicken the Protestants and Catholics? A lot of people joined the Republican Movement after St Matthew’s. It finished the business of IRA equals ‘I Ran Away.’ If that trouble had not broken out the IRA was dead.”24

The IRA’s success cleared the way to implement the offensive stage of MacStiofain’s battle plan. In the past small Catholic areas like Ardoyne and the Short Strand had been held hostage by unionism for the good behavior of republicans elsewhere. This was one of the reasons the IRA had confined its 1956–62 campaign to rural Border areas. But now that the loyalists had been repulsed in East Belfast, the most vulnerable Catholic district in the city, the IRA could contemplate taking the war to the British, knowing areas like it could be adequately defended.

There then followed one of those events that historians may never be able to properly explain but whose consequences were plain for all to see even at the time. On Friday, July 3, British troops descended on a small, four-room house in the Lower Falls Road district and began tearing it apart in a search for arms. These they soon discovered, and it was obvious they had been tipped off. The puzzling question, though, was why the military had acted on the intelligence. The arms dump belonged to the Official IRA, the Provisionals’ rivals, and the area was at the time largely sympathetic to the Goulding faction. Although forced by events to adopt a more militant pose, the Official IRA’s leadership was not spoiling for a fight with British troops. The arms raid risked forcing the Officials into retaliation but did the Provisionals no harm at all. If the British were unable to distinguish between the two IRAs, as some observers have suggested, then they made a monumental blunder, for it was the Provisionals who gained most from the ensuing events.

As the troops prepared to leave the Falls Road, they came under heavy stone-throwing from a large and angry crowd. Some soldiers were trapped in the maze of narrow unfamiliar streets, and reinforcements were sent for. Soon three thousand troops were deployed in the area that was now cloaked in CS gas and littered with rubble and exploding gasoline bombs. Freeland ordered a curfew, and troops began house-to-house searches, in many cases wrecking homes, bars, and businesses. The soldiers looted virtually every public house in the area. Gun battles broke out between the Official IRA and the British, and then the Provisionals’ D Coy joined in. The curfew lasted until Sunday afternoon, when it was broken by over one thousand women, many with babies in carriages, who marched from Andersonstown with milk and bread to feed the besieged inhabitants. Four men, all civilians, were killed by the British army that weekend, three by bullets and one crushed by an armored car in circumstances that made the Provisionals’ violent strategy seem unavoidable, appealing, and even necessary to many West Belfast Catholics. The Falls curfew, as the events of that weekend became known, marked a victory for the tactic of armed struggle.

Provisional IRA gunmen had opened up in the Falls Road, Ardoyne, and East Belfast; in Ballymurphy, however, Gerry Adams’s constraining order on the local unit still applied. As the Protestants of New Barnsley evacuated their homes, the riots that had started on June 27 continued almost nightly and lasted for the next six months. Ballymurphy republicans were in the thick of the fighting, but not once did they break open their arms dumps. The Belfast Brigade was unhappy at the rioting and wanted to see some armed action, but Adams persisted, determined to radicalize his own people.

The strategy was effective, but it was also ruthless. During the six months of riots that followed, hundreds of people were injured or arrested and imprisoned; others, old and young alike, suffered from the effects of CS gas. Dozens of young people joined the IRA to seek revenge against the soldiers; some were to end up in jail, others in early graves. But the effect of the rioting was profound, as Adams later boasted: “Every man, woman and child was involved. They didn’t fire a shot but for months, the British army had the hell beaten out of them. The women were humiliating and demoralising them. The kids were hammering them. You had the whole community organised right down into street committees, so that you had a sort of spider’s web of regular coordination.”²⁵

The result was that Ballymurphy became the most militant republican district in the city, and its IRA units made the Second Battalion area the most active and ferocious in the Belfast Brigade. One crucial consequence of this was that, as the IRA’s war intensified, the brigade leadership in Belfast relied heavily on figures drawn from the Second Battalion area. This was Gerry Adams’s route to the top of the IRA.

BY CHRISTMAS 1970 the Provisional IRA was just a year old, but it was a vigorous and rapidly growing infant. A unique combination of events had come together to create the Provos, and during its first year of existence another series of extraordinary, unpredictable incidents—the siege of St. Matthew’s, the Falls Road curfew, and the Ballymurphy riots prime among them—had given the organization an undreamed-of boost. It would be tempting to conclude that fate was playing an awful trick on the people of Northern Ireland by arranging matters in such a disastrous fashion, but there was a common factor in all these happenings that explained why events were spiraling out of control. Just as unionist obduracy had played the role of midwife to the new IRA, so the same need to placate Protestant extremism and prop up the Stormont government led Britain to take an increasingly tough line against the communities from which the IRA sprang. As that conflict worsened, the notion that as long as unionists held power and were supported by Britain, nationalists could expect no fair dealing gained more support and sympathy. The events of 1970 nourished the view that Northern Ireland was incapable of being reformed and that only its destruction could end the nationalists’ nightmare. For the first time in the history of the state the extreme republican agenda and the IRA’s violent methods were winning the allegiance of a sizable section of the Catholic community. Unionists had created the Provos, and now they were sustaining them. Only in Ballymurphy had republicans manipulated events; everywhere else there was no need to.