The year 1970 was without doubt a seminal one for the IRA, as an early Volunteer recalled in vivid terms: “At the start of it I remember picketing outside British Army dances with placards and being spat at by local [Catholics] who attended those dances. We were nothing at that point. By the end of the year we had an organisation capable of taking on the British Army.”1 A few months later the war between Britain and the Provisional IRA was raging, and the most violent conflict in the tangled and tragic history of Britain and Ireland was under way.
As 1970 drew to a close, the IRA’s leaders could be confident that their fortunes were improving and that 1971 would almost certainly see that trend continue, although not even the wildest-eyed IRA man could have foreseen just how sharply the curve would rise. In Gerry Adams’s home estate in Ballymurphy, as elsewhere in Belfast, the realization that a new plateau had been reached forced a change in tactics.
The riots in Ballymurphy faded around Christmas 1970, but in the middle of January 1971 they flared again with greater ferocity. Now, however, Adams and the Ballymurphy republicans were ready to bring them to an end, to patch up their differences with the Belfast Brigade leadership, and to unleash the gunmen. The local historian Ciaran de Baroid explained why: “The Ballymurphy republicans felt that [the riots] had served their purpose; the people were cemented together; the British army was humiliated and demoralised; alienation between the people and the state was complete and irreversible; and self-confidence and an efficient infrastructure of organisation had been developed within the area.”2 Ballymurphy IRA members moved to quell the rioting, and British army commanders were not slow to notice the change in tactics.