The mechanism that achieved this was modeled on Cold War superpower diplomacy of the sort that for so long had prevented an outbreak of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Ultimately it led to both sides’ reducing and scrapping much of their arsenals of nuclear warheads. Known by the acronym GRIT (Graduated and Reciprocated Initiatives in Tension Reduction), the strategy was devised when President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev were in office and it was employed by them a total of sixteen times in the early 1960s.³ Instead of demanding concessions from each other, GRIT involved one party to a conflict making a unilateral and publicly verifiable concession to the other. The prior agreement of the other party was not necessary for this to happen, and the strategy could be employed in the absence of formal talks or contact. The effect nonetheless would be to invite the other party to do the same. Failure to reciprocate meant that the erring party shouldered the blame for lack of progress, while agreement accelerated the process. GRIT was a safe way of pressurizing each party to de-escalate. Ideally the strategy would be progressive, as one academic expert explained: “With each exchange of concessions, trust grows and tension is reduced.”⁴

In the context of Derry’s violent past, the IRA’s decision even to discuss its participation in such an enterprise was extraordinarily significant. Unlike the Provisionals in Belfast, the IRA in Derry was not driven by sectarian considerations or by the need to defend its community. The Derry IRA was instead created and sustained by conflict between the city’s nationalist population and the security forces, first the RUC and then the British army. By agreeing to take part in a process that endeavored to reduce the opportunities for conflict or that softened hostility between its constituency and the British forces, the IRA was in effect offering to cut off the supply of its own lifeblood. It would be difficult to find a more convincing way of signaling a willingness to end the war.

TO GRASP the significance of the events at and after Coshquin, it is first necessary to understand the sanguinary history of Derry itself. Although it is inaccurate to do so, most Northern nationalists place and date the beginning of the Troubles to events in the city on October 5, 1968, when a small civil rights march was batoned and hosed off the streets by a force of RUC men. Their orders from the unionist home affairs minister, Bill Craig, were to stop the crowd marching from Duke Street, on the eastern banks of the Foyle, across Craigavon bridge into the historic, walled center of the city.

The reaction of the police was out of all proportion to the threat posed by the crowd of four hundred or so, but their behavior betrayed the enormous importance unionists attached to retaining their grip on this most nationalist of Northern Ireland’s cities. Built and developed as a commercial venture by the City of London companies in the northwest of Ireland in the early 1600s, the walled city was constructed as a Protestant bastion, a garrison of the Scots-English plantation of Ulster. Its fortified walls made the city a place of Protestant refuge during successive Irish native rebellions. A lengthy siege in 1689 mounted by the Catholic King James II won Londonderry, as Protestants always call the city, a special place in loyalist mythology. The fact that it resisted the siege earned it the title “the Maiden City,” and hard-line Protestants determined that Catholics would never breach its sanctity.

Catholics had lived outside the walls of Derry from the late eighteenth century in a rat-infested collection of hovels called the Bogside. The population nevertheless grew; by the mid-nineteenth century Catholics were in a numerical majority and by 1920 made up a majority of voters, although gerrymandering meant that unionists held on to control of the corporation. The introduction of proportional representation in the same year changed all that, and for the first time in Derry’s history a coalition of nationalists and republicans took control and a Catholic was made mayor. But after partition Derry became part of the Northern Ireland state, and unionists set about reasserting their control. Proportional representation was abolished, electoral boundaries were redrawn so that Catholic votes were devalued, and a property qualification was introduced for elections to local government. According to one estimate, a third of the adult population of the Bogside in 1964 was not allowed to vote in council polls.5

Characterized by discrimination and deprivation and with huge male unemployment rates, Derry symbolized nationalist complaints about life in unionist-dominated Northern Ireland. Things did not begin to improve for the city’s nationalist community until after the Second World War, when the benevolent effects of the British welfare state, especially the availability of college-level-education, filtered through the Catholic population. A more assertive and impatient generation emerged and demanded change.

Anger at the poor quality of public housing and the unionist-dominated corporation’s refusal to build new developments, part of a calculated policy to confine Catholic voters to overcrowded electoral wards, provoked the first mild street protests, led mostly by left-wing activists. The same factors were working on the Catholic psyche elsewhere in Northern Ireland, and in August 1968 the first civil rights march, from Coalisland to Dungannon in County Tyrone, was held but was barred by the RUC from reaching the center of Dungannon. A few weeks later the Derry housing agitators invited the organizers, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, to lead a similar protest in October.

Not everyone in Derry was in favor of such street demonstrations. The Catholic Church exercised the single most powerful influence on the minds of Derry nationalists. The city’s bishop at the time, Dr. Neil Farren, one of the most conservative Catholic clerics in Ireland, consistently aligned himself with the forces of law and order, while moderate Catholics expressed alarm both at the radical politics of those behind the civil rights agitation and at its potential for unrest. John Hume, for instance, was ready to lead a motor cavalcade of Derry people to Stormont to protest the unionist government’s decision to locate Northern Ireland’s second university in the Protestant town of Coleraine but declined to put his name to a document notifying the RUC of the route of the first civil rights march in Derry, something that would have meant accepting legal responsibility for the event.6 Tensions between these conservative elements and Derry’s radicals—and later militant republicans—was to be a defining feature of nationalist politics in the following years, but security force excesses repeatedly drove the moderates into the hard-line camp or neutralized them.

That process began on October 5, 1968. Dozens of marchers were hospitalized by the initial RUC charge, while scores more were forced to run a gauntlet of batons or were drenched by a water cannon operated by policemen whose commander, District Inspector Ross McGimpsie, a local version of Bull Connor, enthusiastically joined the fray. A prominent West Belfast MP, Gerry Fitt, the founder of the Republican Labour Party, was the first to get his skull cracked, while the presence there of a number of British Labour MPs ensured that the events would be impossible to ignore. As it was, a cameraman from the Irish broadcasting service, RTE, captured the police violence on film, and the scenes shocked public opinion in the Republic and in Britain. In the Bogside the events in Duke Street triggered three days of stone throwing, and poorly constructed barricades were erected to keep out the RUC. The October 5 melee was a public relations and political disaster for unionism, but it set Derry’s nationalists on a course of increasingly violent confrontation with the state and its uniformed guardians.

The situation only worsened thereafter. In January 1969 some four score radical students from the Belfast-based People’s Democracy group staged a march from Belfast to Derry in deliberate imitation of the American black civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. The seventy-three-mile route took the students through staunch loyalist areas of Counties Antrim and Derry, and they were constantly blocked and harassed by mobs, some led by associates of the fundamentalist unionist Ian Paisley amid allegations of police collusion. At Burntollet bridge, on the eastern outskirts of Derry, the march was ambushed by an organized gang of stone throwers, many of them off-duty members of the Protestant militia, the B Specials. The RUC fled, leaving the students to the mercy of the loyalist mob. The remnants of the march were again stoned by loyalists as they made their way to Guildhall Square, on the edge of the Bogside, where the arrival of bloodstained survivors sparked five days of fierce rioting. In the early hours of the first night, drunken RUC men went on the rampage in part of the Bogside, smashing windows, shouting sectarian insults, and beating up any Catholic resident unfortunate enough to cross their path. After that, the barricades, this time more effective structures, sprouted throughout the area. Someone painted a slogan on a gable end in the Bogside that read, “You are now entering Free Derry.” A myth had been born.

Derry’s moderate nationalists had condemned the Burntollet march, as it became known, and eventually talked the barricades down, but events were slipping out of their control. In April there was another outburst of violence, and this time the mostly teenage rioters used gasoline bombs as well as stones to fend off the RUC. Again the police went on a late-night rampage and badly beat a Bogside man, Samuel Devenney. He died three months later, and the conviction grew that RUC batons had hastened his death.

There were more riots on July 12, when Orangemen marched through the city on their way to their annual gatherings, but the real crisis came in August, when the Apprentice Boys of Derry staged their traditional parade through the walled city. Founded in memory of youthful Protestant heroes who had defied attempts by their leaders to surrender the city to the Catholic King James in 1688, the Apprentice Boys parade was always an occasion for sectarian coat-trailing, but in 1969, after a year of accelerating nationalist confrontation with the unionist state, the potential for serious trouble was obvious. Attempts by moderate Derry nationalists to get the march stopped failed in the face of a nervous unionist government’s need to appease its extremists. The result was predictable. The ensuing violence pitched not just Derry but the whole of Northern Ireland into the most serious and violent crisis since partition.

In Derry, skirmishes between the Apprentice Boys and Bogside Catholics on August 12 soon developed into a full-scale battle, when the RUC took the side of the loyalists as they made efforts to invade the Catholic area. This time the Bogsiders repulsed the police charges with volleys of stones thrown from behind barricades and gasoline bombs tossed from the top of a tall block of flats, while the police replied by soaking the area in clouds of acrid CS gas, disabling rioter and innocent resident alike. Roused by a communal fear of what defeat might bring, the resistance offered by the Bogsiders was determined and fierce.

After two days the Battle of the Bogside had been won by Derry’s nationalists, and an exhausted RUC was obliged to withdraw. The victorious Bogsiders celebrated as, on the afternoon of August 14, a company of the Prince of Wales Own Regiment took up positions in William Street at the mouth of the Bogside. Elsewhere in Northern Ireland the Derry riots had transformed the political situation. The Irish taoiseach, Jack Lynch, had gone on Irish television the night before to warn that the Republic could not stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse. Lynch’s speech raised unionist fears and nationalist hopes that the Irish army would invade, but arguably the real effect was to oblige the Wilson government in Britain to send in the troops. Meanwhile pleas from the besieged Bogsiders that nationalists in Belfast and other towns stage protests aimed at drawing off police resources had been answered with tragic and fatal results. A Catholic man was shot dead by B Specials in County Armagh, and five people were shot dead in Belfast as rioting engulfed interface areas of North and West Belfast.

The arrival of the British army in Derry was greeted by most Catholics as a huge political victory over the unionist government in Belfast, and although some voices warned against giving the troops a welcome, these were in the minority. What everyone did agree on, however, was that in less than twelve months the nationalists of Derry had been transformed from quiescence to militancy, thanks mostly to the actions of the RUC.

IF DERRY PROVIDED proof that nothing radicalizes people quicker than the thump of a police or army club, then it would be hard to find a better example of this than the experience of Martin McGuinness. A nineteen-year-old apprentice butcher at the time of these turbulent events, McGuinness was later to occupy virtually all the top positions in the Provisional republican movement: Derry IRA commander, Northern commander, chief of staff, chairman of the Army Council, Sinn Fein vice-president, Mid-Ulster MP, and Sinn Fein minister of education. Back in August 1969, though, he was just one of the hundreds of so-called Young Hooligans who would throw stones and gasoline bombs at the police. McGuinness’s journey to militancy was typical of so many of his contemporaries, and his story is the story of the rise and growth of the IRA in Derry.

Born just at the dawn of the welfare state, McGuinness had a background mirroring that of most families in the Bogside. His mother and father were both devout Catholics and daily communicants. Politics, he remembered in a 1989 interview, were “never discussed” in his family, although, like most Bogsiders, his parents voted for the Derry-based nationalist leader Eddie McAteer with as much devotion as they practiced their religion. Militant republicanism was just not an issue. Back in the late 1960s the number of republicans in Derry could be counted on the fingers of one hand. While Belfast had a large network of republican families, Derry republicanism was dominated by just two veteran figures, Sean Keenan and Neil Gillespie, who could trace their involvement back to the 1940s. In the McGuinness household the IRA was a distant and strange thing. “It was never a subject for discussion,” he later recalled.

We had been through what you term the Border campaign, from ’56 to ’62. I do remember vaguely discussions with my friends about what is the IRA and people were saying the IRA is this and the IRA is that. I had no real interest in it and it meant nothing to me. Our lives revolved around attending Derry City football matches, playing football ourselves, playing Gaelic football and hurling and, when we got old enough, having a good time at the weekend.7

Nor were McGuinness and his contemporaries always hostile to the RUC:

The cops were people who came to street corners to chase you away if somebody sent for them because you were playing football on the street… they were never seen as a political thing at all. There was actually a cop, I forget his name, who was fairly involved with the local football club here. The cops were strolling around the Bogside and nobody took a second look at them. The older people had a resentment towards them but it was never really discussed or talked about to us young people. I can never recall my father or my mother or any older people saying “these guys are bad news” or “they’ve done this” or “they’ve done that.”⁸

At the early stage of the civil rights agitation McGuinness shared the moderate views of Catholic leaders like John Hume. Reform, not revolution, was uppermost in his mind:

[I was] very pacifist, absolutely and I agreed with them at the time. I thought it was dead sound because at that time I wouldn’t have been saying let’s fight back, let’s use violence against these people because they’re using violence against us. I never felt that the situation had deteriorated so badly that that could be justified. There was always the hope that somewhere along the lines of government would catch themselves on and grant the Catholic people the demands they were asking for.⁹

The beating and subsequent death of Samuel Devenney began a change in McGuinness’s attitudes. “The innocuous policeman who was involved in our football club had suddenly overnight become a monster because Catholics were demanding civil rights,” he recalled. “So at that stage we regarded our community as being under attack by the RUC, that these people had turned into monsters.”¹⁰ After this he began throwing bricks and stones with the best of them.

McGuinness was neutral about the British army when the Prince of Wales Own Regiment replaced the RUC on August 14, and was ready to be influenced by the way subsequent events unfolded. “[T]here were people saying that the troops eventually would be used against the people [but] I never took sides in that debate at all. I never said this side’s right, we should welcome them. After they arrived I just went home… and took up no position at all on whether the coming of the troops was a good thing or a bad thing.”¹¹

THE BRITISH TROOPS and the nationalists of Derry enjoyed a honeymoon period after the Battle of the Bogside, but like all honeymoons it was fated to be a short-lived affair. At the end of September, the Derry Citizens Defence Association, set up in anticipation of the August riots by the presplit Republican Club, dismantled the last remaining barricades around the Bogside, but almost immediately there were sectarian clashes that developed into running battles between Protestant youths from the Fountain area and Bogside Catholics. In the riots that followed, a middle-aged Protestant man, William King, was beaten, suffered a heart attack, and died.¹² Local unionists, already deeply unsettled by the events of August, demanded that the British troops react vigorously to this incident and to the continued defiance represented by Free Derry.

The British army’s response to the death of King was governed in no small way by the background of the senior military commanders now charged with policing the city. Many had recently served in colonial trouble spots, and this shaped their attitude to the Bogsiders, as the most detailed study of the city at this time noted: “Brigadier Peter Leng, for example, the commander of the British troops in Derry, had been a battalion CO in Aden from 1964 to 1966, when the British withdrew. It is hardly surprising that such officers should draw on their colonial experiences, in Aden, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus or Oman, when dealing with the situation in Derry.”13 Within days of King’s death British troops erected a “peace-ring”, which comprised checkpoints and military barriers, that cut off the Bogside and the Creggan above it from the city center, treating it like an Arab souk that had to be insulated from the rest of civilized humanity. Under pressure from unionists, the British army was beginning to isolate and identify Derry’s nationalists as the problem. That they did so without taking into consideration the objections of the city’s moderate Catholics served only to further isolate this important sector of nationalist opinion and foster the psychological climate for further confrontation.

It was not long after this that Martin McGuinness had his first brush with the law, when he was arrested and charged with a breach of the peace during a confrontation with the RUC and British troops near the Bogside. Accused of shouting abuse at soldiers, he was bound over to keep the peace for two years.¹⁴ Relations between the soldiers and Catholics in Derry gradually worsened in the following months. After clashes between off-duty troops and Catholic youths, often sparked by rivalry over girls at dances, the army banned city center cinemas from showing movies at nighttime. As an example of taking a sledgehammer to break open a nut, it could hardly be bettered.

The number of clashes increased as 1970 wore on. In February a rally by the loyalist leader Ian Paisley sparked confrontations between Catholics and British troops, who pursued stone-throwers into the Bogside, just as the RUC used to do. For the first time the military resorted to snatch squads equipped with long, heavy batons to arrest alleged rioters, often beating them severely. At Eastertime there were more riots and incursions by troops into the Bogside after a protest at Strand Road RUC station, where a Union Jack had been hoisted to coincide with the Official Republican Easter parade. Allegations of beatings, indiscriminate arrests, and the use of fabricated court evidence against accused rioters by British troops multiplied. In one of the most notorious of such cases three teenage girls were jailed for rioting on the word of a soldier whose flirtatious advances, one of the girls claimed, had been spurned some days before.

The worst rioting, three days of it, came in June when the civil rights MP Bernadette Devlin was jailed for her part in the August 1969 violence. When the RUC reneged on an agreement not to take her into custody until after she had addressed a rally in Derry, the frustrated crowd went wild with anger. For the first time since their arrival, British troops used CS gas against the Bogside.

By mid-1970 support for the new Provisional IRA was growing in Belfast, but in Derry the Officials were still the dominant of the two groups. Despite competition between them, the bitter ideological and personal rivalry that characterized the republican division in Belfast was absent in Derry. As in Tyrone and other rural areas, the two groups often acted as one, and recruits were attracted to one or the other by their sense of which group offered the better chance to hit back at the British troops, rather than by political ideas. As relations between the Catholic population and the British military deteriorated, however, that choice increasingly became the Provisionals.

In June 1970 the small group that constituted the Provisional IRA in the city was virtually wiped out in one fell swoop when a premature explosion killed Thomas Carlin, Joe Coyle, Tommy McCool, and his two young daughters. The three men were making a bomb when it blew up in their faces, and the fledgling IRA was decimated. After this, Provisional IRA activity was sporadic and infrequent. Shots were fired at the British army in August 1970 and a bomb exploded in September, but that was more or less the sum of IRA operations. The Easter 1971 republican celebrations revealed that support for the Officials was running at around twice the level for the Provos. The journalist and left-wing activist Eamonn McCann was able to write, “In the spring of 1971 the Provisional IRA in Derry for practical purposes did not yet exist.”15 Despite the rioting and the bitterness that flowed from it, the threat from either IRA was considered to be so slight that nationalist Derry was still regarded at this time as safe for off-duty soldiers; only in May 1971 were the Bogside and Creggan declared off-limits by British commanders.¹⁶

The Provisionals’ fortunes began to change on July 8, 1971, when British troops used live rounds against rioters and in the space of twenty-four hours shot dead two young Bogsiders, twenty-eight-year-old Seamus Cusack and nineteen-year-old Desmond Beattie. Allegations by the British that the two men had been armed or were about to throw gelignite bombs when shot infuriated the small nationalist community, which knew both men well enough to know this was untrue. For Martin McGuinness the shooting of Cusack and Beattie was a seminal moment. He had joined the Officials but had left, disgusted at their inactivity, and defected to the Provisionals not long after the McCool group were killed. He, like others in the city, sensed a turning point had been reached that shifted nationalist opinion firmly against the British army and set the stage for the Provisionals to eclipse the Officials. “[O]f all the incidents that happened in Derry, the shooting of Cusack and Beattie were [sic] the most traumatic and the most decisive in turning people against the British Army in this city,” he recalled.17 Within days John Hume had led the SDLP out of Stormont, much to the barely disguised anger of the party leader Gerry Fitt in Belfast. It was a testament to the intensity of feelings in Derry that Hume and his moderate allies had little choice; not to have taken the step would have risked the political leadership of their community.

The introduction of internment a month later pushed the pendulum even more in the Provisionals’ direction, as Martin McGuinness testified.

Right up until internment… the Provisional Republican movement in the city was in my opinion very, very weak; there wouldn’t have been more than a dozen or fifteen people involved in it. And then when internment was introduced the majority of those people were arrested, the vast majority were arrested. After their arrest the strength of the movement in this town would have been almost at zero, apart from a few isolated people. And… when [the British] introduced internment the floodgates opened. By the end of the week the Republican movement would have risen from about five to twenty and by the end of the next week would have went to thirty. You were [then] into gun battles at this stage and soldiers being killed and IRA [being killed]. You’re talking about membership being into the hundreds then.¹⁸

The first British soldier killed by the Derry Brigade was shot by a sniper a few days after the August 9 internment operation, and the scale of recruitment to the Provisionals in response to internment can be gauged by the fact that in the following sixteen months twenty-eight more soldiers suffered violent deaths,¹⁹ while the commercial center of Derry was subjected to a clinical economic bombing campaign until, as one account described it, the city “looked as if it had been hit from the air.”²⁰ A significant feature of the recruits flooding into the Provisionals was their extreme youth. Martin McGuinness, for example, was only twenty-one when he became the Derry Brigade’s second-in-command, while the adjutant of the Bogside Coy, Eamonn Lafferty, shot dead in August 1971, was only nineteen.²¹ The abundance of young recruits meant that the IRA would have the resources to wage a prolonged struggle in the years to come.

THE ROAD to Bloody Sunday five months later was littered with more examples of British army violence driving recruits into the ranks of the Provisionals. In July 1971 a nine-year-old boy was knocked down and killed by an army Saracen speeding through the narrow, confined streets of the Bogside; the vehicle drove on and left the dead boy lying in the street. In September an army sniper shot a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl in the back of the head. The child’s funeral provided an opportunity for a huge outpouring of grief and anger, and the size of the mourning crowd—put at some ten thousand people—was eloquent testimony to the speed with which Derry was being radicalized. Later that week a speeding armored car knocked down and killed a three-year-old boy and drove on. As in the earlier fatal vehicle incident, the authorities ignored the death. British troops were later accused of firing live rounds indiscriminately in the Creggan district of the city; the pockmarked walls of houses appeared to substantiate the complaint. Derry’s influential Catholic schoolteacher coterie protested as one when it became clear that military operations were being timed to coincide with the passage of children to and from local schools. The teachers alleged that this was being done either to give troops protection or to entice the IRA into mounting operations that could endanger young lives.²² Meanwhile the military abandoned even the pretense of consulting with moderate Catholic opinion, further eroding the influence of the church and figures like John Hume.

On January 30, 1972, the British army’s war against the civilian population of Derry reached its zenith, when soldiers of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, specially drafted into the city for the day, opened fire on a crowd attending a march and rally called by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association to protest against the continuation of internment. Within a few minutes thirteen men, mostly young and none of them armed or involved with either IRAs, had been shot dead. A fourteenth man died of his wounds some time later. In the days afterward young men and women literally queued up to join the Provisionals, while the remaining moral qualms about the use of violence against the British vanished. “People made a holiday in their hearts at the news of a dead soldier,” wrote Eamonn McCann of the atmosphere in the Bogside afterward.²³

The story of the growth and development of the Provisional IRA in Derry is the tale not about how ideology triumphed but about how police and military violence created and nourished the need to retaliate. Martin McGuinness himself put it best: “The British developed republicanism. It was nothing we had done to develop resistance to British rule. They brought about resistance to British rule….”²⁴

IRA support in Derry was disproportionately high because of the events of 1971 and 1972; one authoritative estimate suggests that a staggering 2 percent of the city’s 50,000 Catholic population was imprisoned for IRA activites in the years between 1971 and 1986.²⁵ Many more evaded capture. The Derry Brigade established itself as one of the most active groups in the IRA. Its involvement in sectarian and civilian killings was possibly the lowest of any group in the IRA. At the same time the brigade’s record of attacks against the British army demonstrated vividly that hatred for the military was undoubtedly the strongest force persuading Derry people to join the IRA. Some 17 percent of all British military fatalities during the Troubles in Northern Ireland were caused by the Derry IRA, compared with 30 percent in Belfast, where the pool of potential IRA recruits was perhaps four or five times larger.

THIS HISTORY and the Derry Brigade’s central role in the development of the Provisionals make all the more remarkable the fact that the IRA’s campaign was scaled down earlier there than anywhere else, albeit secretly and gradually. It was even more significant that the IRA leadership, or at least elements of it, chose Derry as the arena for secretly discussing and implementing mutual de-escalation measures with the British authorities.

The story of how this happened has its roots in an earlier peace movement, one that, far from securing support from the Provisionals, was actively and at times violently opposed by them. Inspired by the tragic deaths in Belfast of the three young Maguire children, killed when the driver of a Provo getaway car was shot dead by British troops in Andersonstown and careered out of control, the Peace People movement of 1976 captured a popular mood of fatigue with the Troubles. Led by Mairead Corrigan, an aunt of the young victims, and a neighbor, Betty Williams, the Peace People held rallies and marches throughout Ireland, one of the largest of which traversed Belfast’s Shankill and Falls Roads in a bid to unite Catholic and Protestant. Ultimately the Peace People faltered. The group lost its influence in republican areas when it refused to condemn British and loyalist violence, and it was later embroiled in a financial scandal over the distribution of funds donated by sympathizers across the world and the proceeds of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Corrigan and Williams. But enthusiasm for the project in the initial period was intense, and numerous branches were established in both parts of Ireland.

A support group was set up in Derry, but in 1978 it broke off from the parent body in Belfast in protest against the leadership’s refusal to consult the grassroots membership, and the Derry Peace People became the Peace and Reconciliation Group (PRG). Comprising around a dozen members drawn from both communities in the city, the PRG included former loyalist and republican paramilitary members, some of whom were still in friendly contact with former colleagues even though they had themselves given up violence.

Quaker influence was strong from the start of the Troubles in much peace work in Northern Ireland. Quakers had run a family center for the relatives of republican and loyalist prisoners at the Maze prison from the early days of internment, and the name they earned for neutrality enabled the Society of Friends to mediate between and within paramilitary groups. The PRG was partly inspired by the work of an English Quaker, Will Warren, who had lived in Derry since the early 1970s. Described as “a very good-hearted and honest man” by those who knew him, Warren built up a network of contacts from church leaders to republican and loyalist paramilitaries and was trusted sufficiently to move freely through the Bogside. Those contacts were to prove invaluable when in the early 1980s two other English Quakers, John and Diana Lampen, decided to make their home in Derry. Financially supported by the Rowntree Trust, a Quaker-oriented charity funded by the famous English confectionery and chocolate company, they joined the group. The role John Lampen and two former paramilitary members of the PRG undertook as mediators between republican leaders and the British security and political authorities was to play a largely unreported but significant part in the IRA’s journey to the 1994 cease-fire. Some in the Northern Ireland Office regarded the Lampens “as Derry’s version of Alec Reid,” as one official recalled.26

The PRG was involved in conventional community work, organizing Protestant and Catholic sporting events, vacations, and so on. But it was in their work mediating between the security forces and the Catholic community, especially the IRA, that the real impact was made. Their first moves were meant to improve relations between the Catholic community and the RUC. Derry City Council had established a police liaison committee, but none of the nationalist parties would sit on it. The RUC divisional commander in turn declared that there would be no point in his working with the committee unless nationalists participated, so the PRG chairperson, the County Donegal–born nurse Margaret O’Donnell, and a Catholic friend joined. Their purpose was to persuade the RUC to respond more honestly and intelligently to Catholic complaints of police misbehavior. All too often, the PRG realized, the instinct of the authorities was to treat such complaints as republican progaganda and ignore them.

Slowly the PRG established a reputation among Nationalists as an acceptable and trusted channel of complaints to the RUC about security force misbehavior, often securing results that strengthened the group’s credibility. It had tried to establish the same sort of relationship with the various British army regiments stationed in Derry, but for years met a brick wall of refusal. “Community liaison officers were there to keep the public off the backs of regimental commanders not to liaise with the community,” complained one source.²⁷ In 1989, however, the PRG made a breakthrough when the CO of the Royal Hampshire Regiment, Colonel Paul Davies, asked the group to help his soldiers improve relations with the community. Davies welcomed a suggestion from the PRG that they should talk to rank-and-file soldiers about attitudes, particularly those in the nationalist community, toward the military.

“They would meet in the NAAFI canteen, ten to fifteen soldiers about to undertake a patrol together, and they would talk about the issues of the day and explain how people in the Bogside felt about the army,” recalled one military source.²⁸ Another explained, “A lot of it was really basic stuff, like how the kids who threw stones at them weren’t being made to do it by the IRA and that most of the general public didn’t hate them.” There would be question-and-answer sessions and every six weeks a refresher seminar with the PRG. The soldiers related well to the Derry-born members of the PRG, regarding their views as an authentic reflection of the people they met on patrol. Officers, on the other hand, responded well to John Lampen, not just because he was English like them but because he had served as an NCO during the days of national service in Britain and knew the military mind well.

Slowly, under the PRG’s guiding hand, the British army began to soften its profile in Derry in the late 1980s. The system of civilian complaints was overhauled. “Before if soldiers misbehaved on the streets or abused people or property during searches and a complaint was made, civilians would never be told what the outcome was,” said a source involved in the changes. “Under the new system the CO would ensure that an officer visited the complainants to inform them.”²⁹ Soldiers were discouraged from using the telescopic sights on their rifles to scan streets, a practice that to civilians looked as if they were being aimed at. The local British commanders successfully argued the case for modifying the military instruction that obliged soldiers to wear combat helmets while on duty in Northern Ireland. Troops were allowed to wear soft berets at checkpoints and then gradually the practice was extended to other situations. “The helmets sent a warlike message, so we decided to make our soldiers look more like human beings,” said one senior military source.30

The British military at all levels in Derry increasingly went to the PRG for advice about operational matters. Army commanders had, for example, toyed with the notion of patrolling the Bogside and Creggan in open jeeps, but the PRG dissuaded them on the grounds that the sight of soldiers careering through housing estates in this way would be provocative and an invitation to stone-throwers. PRG advice was also sought on how best to police public order situations such as IRA funerals and the annual Bloody Sunday commemoration march.

The PRG had cultivated excellent contacts with senior Derry republicans, and both the IRA and the British army were aware that the Lampens and their colleagues were in touch with each other. It was due to this relationship that the war in Derry was slowly and gradually brought to an end. “We had agreed ground rules, and these were clear,” explained one senior British officer. “We knew that the Lampens had contact with the IRA, and the IRA presumably knew that they were in contact with us. There was an understanding certainly on our part, and I suspect on theirs too, that the conduit could not be used for intelligence purposes, otherwise it would be undermined and destroyed.”³¹ Not everyone in the British security apparatus liked the arrangement. The RUC objected “to communication with the enemy,” as one source put it, while some in the military were concerned that the army could leave itself open to IRA manipulation. However, local British commanders approved, and so did the Northern Ireland Office and its security advisers. “Their attitude,” remembered the same officer, “was that this was a sensible way to move forward.”³²

By 1990–91 the British army was calling the PRG conduit “the Derry experiment,” and the most senior soldier in Northern Ireland then, the British GOC, Lieutenant General Sir John Wilsey, had personally endorsed the project. During a visit to Derry he assured the PRG that from then on every regimental commander posted to the city on the regular two-year tour would be told to continue the relationship. If they did not, the PRG was authorized to complain directly to British army headquarters in Lisburn.

It was not always clear whether the PRG conduit between the IRA and the British army produced results. Nothing was ever that direct or explicit; the results of the group’s mediation were often expressed indirectly or implicitly. A good example was an IRA decision not to deploy the coffee jar bomb in Derry. An invention of the IRA engineering department, the coffee jar bomb was designed to explode upon impact. Packed with Semtex explosives, nails, and pieces of metal, the devices were deadly. Once they appeared in the IRA arsenal, soldiers in the PRG seminars began to express the concern that they would not be able to distinguish between youngsters throwing bottles or glass jars and those tossing coffee jar bombs, and that an innocent teenage rioter could be shot dead, something that would intensify hostility between the military and the Catholic population.

The bombs were so dangerous that army patrols in Derry would have to resume wearing helmets, and that would be an inflammatory act, a reversal of the GRIT strategy. Lampen and a PRG colleague went to the IRA and were told that this situation could not arise; IRA Volunteers had to be eighteen before they would be allowed to throw any bombs, while IRA standing orders “forbade the use of members of the public as cover for operations.” They passed this reply back to the army, and that was the end of the exchange—or so it seemed. The devices continued to be used by the IRA in Belfast, but after that PRG-mediated conversation between the British army and the IRA, there were no more coffee jar bomb attacks in Derry.33 No formal agreements had been entered into, not even a hint of what would happen. But the results were there for all to see.

The Lampens had become friendly with two Derry republicans in particular: Martin McGuinness, the IRA’s Northern commander at this time, and Mitchel McLaughlin, the chairperson of Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland and a member of Derry City Council. The Lampens had sometimes slept over in McGuinness’s Bogside home when visiting Derry prior to their permanent move to the city; and they occasionally took the McGuinness children away on PRG-sponsored cross-community trips. John Lampen met McLaughlin and McGuinness regularly, and in between there were informal contacts with either or both men. Later the two Provisional leaders tried to minimize the extent and significance of the arrangement, but the truth was that communication between them and the PRG was substantial, sustained, and significant.

The PRG was interested in making the GRIT strategy a vehicle for reducing IRA violence in Derry, something that could pave the way for more ambitious moves elsewhere. While it was easy to see what the IRA could do in terms of unilateral de-escalatory measures, it was more difficult to envisage the measures that the British army might contemplate. So in the autumn of 1990, in the weeks before the Coshquin “human bomb” attack, the PRG compiled a list of de-escalatory moves that the Provisional IRA and the British army and RUC could make in sequence. By this stage the PRG was in regular touch with the Northern Ireland Office, and the list was compiled after discussions with an NIO representative, the British army’s Western Brigade commander, the RUC divisional commander, and Sinn Fein. Built on contributions from all these sources, the list was submitted to the RUC, the British army, and, via a trusted intermediary, to the IRA Army Council, or so the PRG believed.

The list contained eleven moves that the British army or RUC could make and ten that the IRA could make. The measures would be confined to the Derry city area and could be introduced one or two at a time without publicity and further moves made dependent on the response from the other side. If the process succeeded in Derry, then the resulting trust could be used as a basis for a full-fledged IRA cease-fire. The fact that the British government, its security chiefs, and the IRA leadership were all involved in the initiative made it full of significance for the unfolding peace process.

The document suggested the following possible moves toward a more relaxed security situation in the Derry area:

Moves the Security Forces could make immediately:

1. Declare a moratorium on any decision about a [new] police station in Bishop Street;

2. Set up a Lay Visiting Scheme to police stations in Derry;

3. Improve response to complaints against police and army.

Moves if there was a reduction of IRA activity in Derry:

1. End blanket area searches;

2. Remove security barricades etc. from city wall—[to encourage] tourism;

3. Stop trying to recruit teenagers as informers.

Moves if there was an end to attacks etc:

1. Remove Strand Road/Spencer Road (RUC station) barriers;

2. Progressively withdraw Army from streets;

3. Reduce street patrols, road checks and personal searches;

4. Decide against Bishop Street police station;

5. Open a “walk-in” police office in the Richmond (shopping) centre— unarmed and possibly civilian staff—to provide a genuine service re insurance claims, lost property etc—not likely to be used by informers due to public location.

Moves the IRA could make immediately:

1. No street attacks—risk of civilian injuries;

2. No bombings likely to cause fear in Protestant area—especially the Fountain;

3. No attacks on police going to the assistance of the public;

4. Reduction of home takeovers.

Moves if there was a security force response:

1. No attacks on “off-duty” forces;

2. Attempt to avoid targetting Ulster Protestants even in security forces—i.e. a more positive move in the interests of Irish unity;

3. End of house takeovers.

Moves if army was taken off the streets and there was a strong [and] positive RUC response:

1. End attacks on security force installations;

2. Remove arms and explosives stores from the city;

3. Recognise public right to use the police provided the police provide only a genuine service [i.e. do not try to recruit informers].34

Officially the PRG heard nothing more from the IRA leadership about these proposals, although there were private indications that the organization was ready to respond positively to some of the measures, including ending house takeovers, ending bombings that intimidated Protestants, stopping attacks on RUC officers going to the assistance of the public, and removing IRA arms dumps from the city.

The mini–peace process in Derry remained a closely guarded secret, every bit as hidden and furtive as the Reid-Adams diplomacy, which it clearly complemented. But in 1993 the Opsahl report, the product of an independent investigation into the possibilities for political progress in Northern Ireland, was published and inadvertently revealed the PRG’s role as a conduit between the IRA in Derry and the British security authorities.

Not long after the Opsahl report made public the PRG’s role, the author traveled to Derry to interview Martin McGuinness and Mitchel McLaughlin about the claim. In an upstairs room of Sinn Fein’s office in Cable Street in Derry, the two men angrily denied reports of secret mediation moves between the IRA and the British.

Of John Lampen’s role, McGuinness said, “There is just no basis for the claims made. He came to us once with the idea of making Derry a shining light, to make it a bomb-free zone. We told him to go away. There was no way the IRA would free British resources for use elsewhere. He’s either very flaky, has misinterpreted conversations with our people, or something more sinister has been going on.” The PRG, he went on, had been told that Lampen was “virtually persona non grata” with Derry Provisionals.35 In March of the following year family reasons obliged John and Diana Lampen to leave Derry for good, their value as peace workers undermined by Martin McGuinness’s angry public response to the Opsahl revelations.

Despite McGuinness’s and Mitchel McLaughlin’s denials, there was little doubt that the IRA and the British authorities did engage in a mutual de-escalation process in the early 1990s and that the process had been facilitated in no small measure by the PRG and its proposed set of sequenced measures.

The record shows that many of the proposals on the list were implemented, some earlier than others. The planned RUC station in Bishop Street in the heart of the walled city, actually a small post, was never built, for example. Had it been, it would have brought the police presence to within yards of the Bogside, the closest of any RUC base, and have required substantial military protection in order to function, something that would have antagonized Derry’s nationalists. By not building it, the British sent an important signal to the IRA. Blanket army house searches also ended, and the military presence in Derry, in accordance with the PRG-inspired strategy, continued to soften. The British government also set up a lay visiting scheme to check that detainees in police cells, including IRA suspects, were being properly treated throughout Northern Ireland. In Derry the PRG members Margaret O’Donnell and Diana Lampen were appointed to the local team.

An analysis, by the author, of operations carried out by the Derry Brigade shows that the IRA also responded to the PRG paper. Figures supplied by the IRA itself in the weekly columns of An Phoblacht–Republican News, reveal a dramatic falloff in activity in the months and years after the PRG de-escalation proposals were submitted. Between 1986 and 1989 the Derry IRA accounted for an annual average of 13 percent of all IRA operations, whereas between 1990 and 1993, after the PRG initiative had been launched, the average fell to just under 5 percent, a reduction of more than 60 percent.36 British military sources also confirm that the process had gotten under way: “The upshot was that when we started discussing various de-escalatory measures [throughout Northern Ireland], it was possible to say that we have already done that in Derry,” recalled one senior officer.³⁷

The PRG never heard back officially from the IRA leadership regarding the proposed de-escalation measures, but the group did eventually get confirmation that the GRIT strategy had been adopted by the republican leadership in the city. “A couple of years later,” remembered a source familiar with the episode, “maybe at the end of 1992 or the beginning of 1993, John Lampen asked Mitchel McLaughlin if there was a chance that this agenda could be implemented, and McLaughlin replied, ‘What do you think we have been doing for the last two years?’”³⁸ The British army, McLaughlin added, had been responding in kind. Derry had become the principal laboratory for the peace process.

The problem that figures like Martin McGuinness had with the revelations in the Opsahl report, the reason they had so angrily and brusquely disavowed the Lampens, was that the truth about the contacts between the IRA, the PRG, and the British and the proposals to run down the war in the city were kept a secret not just from the IRA rank and file, as would be expected, but from the Army Council as well. The Derry experiment was never sanctioned by the IRA leadership, nor was it ever told that it was happening.³⁹

To the public and to their grassroots supporters, the message from the Provisional leaders at this time was a very different one from that communicated privately to the British from Derry. The war, they regularly assured their people, would continue until victory. At almost exactly the moment when the PRG was compiling its de-escalation proposals and preparing to submit them to the Northern Ireland Office and, so it thought, to the Provo leadership, an IRA spokesperson gave a lengthy interview to the Independent newspaper in London. Asked about cease-fire speculation, the spokes-person was blunt: “It’s a tired old subject and it’s one that comes up with predictable regularity. But the only debate within the IRA is on how best to prosecute the war against the British. We can state absolutely, on the record, that there will be no ceasefire, no truce, no cessation of violence short of a British withdrawal. That, as blunt as that, is our position.”⁴⁰