What I understand by ‘philosopher’: a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.
Nietzsche
THE STORY OF the IRA from the collapse of the Whitelaw talks is one of evolution from a rather hobbledehoy movement, fuelled by a schoolboy enthusiasm as much as anything else, and unlimited recruitment, into one of the most tightly focused, disciplined and ruthless guerrilla movements the world has seen. This is how the Provisionals’ HQ in Derry’s Bogside no-go area appeared to me in 1972 before Operation Motorman shut it down:
…It was more like a youth hostel than a terrorist headquarters. The place was filled with young boys and gjrls, and Martin McGuinness, the blond, six-foot leader of the IRA in the city, at the time was himself only twenty-one. There was laughter and chat in the headquarters as though those who came and went were going on mountaineering excursions instead of setting out to kill someone or blow up something. The house was full of boxes of clothes either for use in disguise or to be passed out to needy people in the area, while other cartons contained fuses, ammunition, and some weapons. In the kitchen chattering girls sat around a fire and made tea for anyone who wanted it…
McGuinness wore a scapular that his mother had given him around his neck and went regularly to Mass: ‘It really puts it up to the priest if he has been giving out about you from the pulpit to see you going up there to Communion.’1
The often horrible catalogue of events listed in the previous chapter serves to demonstrate both the other face of the ‘youth hostel’ activities, and how, from the ‘rape of the Falls’ to the declaration of the 1994 ceasefire, the IRA continued to be the motor force of the Northern Ireland situation. The Provisionals were able to maintain this strength of continuity for two principal reasons: one, the IRA’s own reorganisation; the other, the manner in which policies directed against the movement created not a weakening effect, but a tremendous accession of strength.
The first factor, the IRA’s reorganisation, became public knowledge on 2 December 1977 when its then chief of staff, Seamus Twomey, was captured and documents found on him revealed what the IRA had in mind.2 Although few people realised it, either at the time or subsequently, the IRA’s blueprint was a quite extraordinary example of how history repeats itself. One of the most significant things that Michael Collins did in the post-1916 reorganisation of the Volunteers, who subsequently became the IRA, was to restructure the existing set-up while at the same time attempting to present a philosophy to the recruits. In the first two issues of the Volunteer paper, An tOglach, he wrote:
…we have to place before ourselves a definite aim and then make arrangements to achieve it. Let us accept the words of a great Prussian – adapted by Ruskin – ‘I desire for my own country to secure that her soldiers should be her tutors and the captains of her armies – captains also of her mind.’
Collins stated that what he had in mind called for a
complete organisation for the Company, for the Battalion and for the Brigade. It ensures the recognition by Headquarters of smaller units than the Company in special districts… lays down the manner of electing officers… discipline and courts martial… Forget the Company of the regular army. We are not establishing or attempting to establish a regular force on the lines of… standing armies. If we undertake any such thing we shall fall.3
It is unlikely that the originators of the scheme unearthed by Twomey’s capture studied Collins closely. They were northerners, and at that stage writing about him still tended to promote the view promulgated by those who supported de Valera, that he had sold out the north by agreeing to partition.4 Obviously, like Collins, who was influenced in his time by the South African farmers’ guerrilla tactics against the British, they took note of what lessons there were to be learned from contemporary guerrilla movements. But like Collins there was something almost genetic in the young northerners’ approach to warfare. As in his case, they were responding instinctively to the duress of the circumstances.
Their formula combined the Collins approach of both a new type of military organisation, in which they too would ‘Forget the Company’, and the advocacy of a new philosophy. The Provisionals also intended to become ‘captains of the mind’. Militarily, their response to the pressures being exerted on the movement was the creation of a cell system. Speaking on the BBC’s Panorama programme5 one of Britain’s foremost counterinsurgency experts, General James Glover, who as we shall see shortly knows more than most of his countrymen about the IRA, said that the cells were ‘based on the communist system’. In fact the cell system pre-dates the devotees of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. It was in reality a reversion to the methods favoured by Continental secret societies in the 1840s. Irish refugees from the failed Young Ireland upheaval of 1848 came into contact with these groupings during their exile in Paris. The original Irish Republican Brotherhood, or Fenian movement, founded (by a Protestant, James Stephens) on St Patrick’s Day 1858, modelled itself on these conspiratorial exemplars. In time, Michael Collins would become president of the IRB.
The cells advocated by the Provisionals over a hundred years after the formation of the IRB, and fifty years after Collins’ death, also replaced, as Collins had suggested, the old brigade and battalion structures. The names of those generally credited with furthering the new departures are Gerry Adams, Ivor Bell, Brendan Hughes and Martin McGuinness. Outside the ranks of these younger men, who gained an ascendancy in the Republican world from the seventies onwards, there were some older figures who helped to refine some of their other ideas. These bore fruit in the Green Book, which we will shortly discuss. The Republican community operates very much as a clan. Men and women each have their roles. The elders are consulted when occasion warrants. Since the middle seventies the Adams-McGuinness faction have encouraged incessant discussion. Ideas and new policies are dissected and teased out to the nth degree before being accepted or rejected. Adams in particular is mentioned as being keen to encourage internal debate, as a means of strengthening both understanding and the resolution to carry through whatever course is finally decided upon. In the Republican University of Long Kesh, he and his comrades demonstrated that, whatever their formal education, they fully understood the significance of the fact that the word education stems from the Latin educare, meaning to draw out. They ended the decade very different people from the young men who had been flown to Cheyne Walk to meet William Whitelaw. They had been hammered out on the anvil of circumstances.
Put simply, a cell, or active service unit (ASU), generally, but not inevitably, consisted of four people, of whom only one, the leader, was in contact with higher authority. Thus, operating on the need-to-know principle, security leaks were cut down and effectiveness was increased. The ‘Staff Report’ found on Twomey stated:
The three day and seven day detention orders are breaking volunteers and it is the Republican Army’s fault for not indoctrinating volunteers with a psychological strength to resist interrogation. Coupled with this factor which is contributing to our defeat, we are burdened with an inefficient infrastructure of commands, brigades, battalions and companies.
This old system with which the Brits and Branch are familiar has to be changed. We recommend reorganisation and remotivation, the building of a new Irish Republican Army. We emphasise a return to secrecy and strict discipline. Army men must be in total command of all sections of the movement… anti-interrogation lectures must be given in conjunction with indoctrination lectures. The ideal outcome should be that no volunteer should be charged unless caught redhanded… we must gear ourselves towards Long-term Armed Struggle based on putting unknown men and new recruits into a new structure. This new structure shall be a cell system.
Ideally a cell should consist of four people. Rural areas should be treated as separate cases to that of city and town brigade/command areas. For this reason our proposals will affect mainly city and town areas where the majority of our operations are carried out and where the biggest proportion of our support lies anyway… From now on all new recruits are to be passed into a cell structure.
Interestingly, the new IRA blueprint also envisaged a greater role for women. It stated: ‘Women and girls have greater roles to play as military activists and as leaders in sections of civil administration, in propaganda and publicity.’ Later, when the movement developed a political wing, women were given an enhanced status. There was positive discrimination on a gender basis, and women held important positions in the party’s ruling body, the Ard Comhairle. When the declaration of the 1994 ceasefire ultimately led to Sinn Fein taking part in talks at Stormont Castle, it was noticeable that the negotiating teams always included one or more woman.
The document made the significant point that a political wing must be developed:
Sinn Fein should come under Army organisers at all levels. Sinn Fein should employ fulltime organisers in big Republican areas. Sinn Fein should be radicalised (under Army direction) and should agitate around social and economic issues which attack the welfare of the people. Sinn Fein should be directed to infiltrate other organisations to win support for and sympathy to the Movement. Sinn Fein should be re-educated and have a big role to play in publicity and propaganda departments.
That paragraph says all that is required by way of answer to the frequently asked question, what is the relationship of Sinn Fein to the IRA?
Along with this mechanical change in operation, the IRA also developed a philosophical text: the Green Book, which set forth the history, aims and methodology of the movement for the benefit of new recruits. Like the cell system, its detail was worked out in the prisons. The ‘Sandhurst of Terror’, as Long Kesh became known in British circles, was a not inappropriate sobriquet.
The Green Book set out to give the recruit a firm ideological grounding. In the first lecture contained in the work a recruit learned that:
Commitment to the Republican Movement is the firm belief that its struggle both militarily and politically is morally justified. That war is morally justified and that the Army is the direct representative of the 1918 Dail Eireann Parliament, and that as such they are the legal and lawful government of the Irish Republic, which has the moral right to pass laws for, and to claim jurisdiction over the territory, airspace, mineral resources, means of production, distribution and exchange and all of its people regardless of creed and loyalty.
Thus, a recruit is informed:
All volunteers are and must feel morally justified in carrying out the dictates of the legal government, they as the Army are the legal and lawful Army of the Irish Republic which has been forced underground by overwhelming force. The Army as an organisation claims and expects your total allegiance without reservation. It enters into every aspect of your life. It invades the privacy of your home life, it fragments your family and friends. In other words claims your total allegiance. All potential volunteers must realise that the threat of capture and of long jail sentences are a very real danger and a shadow which hangs over every volunteer. Many in the past joined the Army out of romantic notions, or sheer adventure, but when captured and jailed they had afterthoughts about their allegiance to the Army. They realised at too late a stage that they had no real interest in being volunteers. This caused splits and dissension inside prison and divided families and neighbours outside.
The recruit is enjoined clearly that:
Before any potential volunteer decides to join the Irish Republican Army he should understand fully and clearly the issues involved. He should not join the Army because of emotionalism, sensationalism or adventurism. He should examine fully his own motives, knowing the dangers involved, and knowing that he will find no romance within the Movement. Again he should examine his political motives bearing in mind that the Army are intent on creating a socialist republic.
And, most starkly of all, the recruit is told:
Volunteers are expected to wage a military war of liberation against a numerically superior force. This involves the use of arms and explosives. Firstly the use of arms. When volunteers are trained in the use of arms, they must fully understand that guns are dangerous, and their main purpose is to take human life, in other words to kill people and volunteers are trained to kill people. It is not an easy thing to take up a gun and go out to kill some person without strong convictions or justification… convictions which are strong enough to give him [the volunteer] the confidence to kill someone without hesitation and without regret. The same can be said about a bombing campaign. Again all people wishing to join the Army must fully realise that when life is being taken, that very well could mean their own. If you go out to shoot soldiers or police you must fully realise that they can shoot you.
Life in an underground army is extremely harsh and hard, cruel and disillusioning at times. So before any person decides to join the Army he should think seriously about the whole thing.
By way of making a recruit think ‘seriously’ before joining the IRA, a section on interrogation was included in the Green Book. This warned would-be recruits that on arrest they could expect physical torture, psychological torture and humiliation, all aimed at breaking down their resistance and getting confessions or information from them.
The volunteers were warned that from the moment of arrest, their natural feelings of anxiety and failure at having allowed themselves to be caught would be exploited and that physical torture ‘in the form of beatings, kickings, punching and twisting of limbs… even burning from cigarette ends are all part of what one may expect’. The psychological torture would include as a matter of course threats to ‘his family, his friends and himself e.g. threats of assassination and threats to castrate him’.
Under ‘humiliation’ the volunteers were warned to expect to be stripped of their clothes and to hear remarks passed about their sexual organs. Volunteers were warned to expect periods of interrogation lasting for two hours at a time, sometimes ending with them being confronted by a real or faked confession from some associate. They were told that a normal ploy at this stage, if the volunteer refused to comply, was for interrogators to leave the cells, promising to be back shortly to break every bone in the recruit’s body: ‘This process can continue for seven days without a break, the minimum of sleep is allowed and if they deem it necessary no sleep would be allowed. Lack of sleep causes the prisoners to become confused.’
One of the Green Book’s key passages is:
Before we go on the offensive politically or militarily we take the greatest defensive precautions possible to ensure success, e.g. we do not advocate a United Ireland without being able to justify our right to such a state as opposed to partition; we do not employ revolutionary violence as our means without being able to illustrate that we have no recourse to any other means… we do not mount an operation without first having ensured that we have taken the necessary defensive precautions of accurate intelligence, security, that weapons are in proper working order with proper ammunition and that the volunteers know how to handle interrogations in the event of their capture etc…. and of course that the operation itself enhances rather than alienates our supporters.6
The points about resisting interrogation and alienating support merit comment. Taking the last first: the IRA on occasion have enlarged their list of ‘legitimate targets’ at will and sometimes with disastrous effects. They have indulged in kidnappings to raise funds; forced informers to drive proxy bombs to targets, where the bombs blew up killing both bomber and victims; shot contractors who carried out work on barracks for ‘helping the enemy war machine’; and enforced order in ghetto districts by dropping concrete blocks on the limbs of alleged criminals. All this, of course, in addition to judges, policemen, soldiers, members of the UDR, innocent victims caught in crossfire, and so on. Even the IRA would not claim that most of these actions ‘enhanced’ anything. The fact that the movement has survived these actions of its own, rather than the onslaughts of its enemy, probably says more for the strength of its support than any claim that has ever appeared in An Phoblacht.
In attempting to assess how well the Provisionals’ preparations enabled IRA members to withstand interrogation and pursue these activities, including awful, bloody blunders like Enniskillen and the overall attrition of a guerrilla’s life, one could simply point to the sheer continuity of the movement. But a more enlightening assessment comes from a British general charged with confronting the IRA, General J. M. Glover, an intelligence expert. At a time when the cell system and Green Book techniques were only just beginning to make their effects felt, Glover drew up a paper on the likely future of the IRA: Northern Ireland: Future Terrorist Trends. It was a top-secret document, completed on 2 November 1978, reviewing the IRA’s progress to that date and its likely activities to the end of 1983. It was captured in the mail by the Provisionals and, after study in IRA intelligence, published in the Republican News, the IRA newspaper.7 Not surprisingly, after being at the receiving end of this practical display of the IRA’s ‘future trends’, General Glover, Commander of Land Forces in Northern Ireland, reorganised British Army intelligence operations in the province. It was he who, during 1980, set up one of the most secret of the army’s undercover operations, the Force Research Unit or FRU (see Chapter 10), which handles what are known in intelligence jargon as ‘human sources’ or sometimes, depending on their worth, ‘national assets’. In other words, spies and informers.
Glover said frankly: ‘Even if the present system of government is maintained the current muted support for the forces of law and order will remain delicately balanced and susceptible to any controversial government decision or security force action.’ The accuracy of this assessment can be judged from both the hunger strike issue, described below, and any one of a number of incidents cited in Chapter 9. Glover made a number of other highly charged and courageous assessments in his paper. For example, though he avoided stating flatly that the Provos would continue to exist in the vacuum created by London’s policies, or lack of them, he made his point by saying: ‘The Provisionals’ campaign of violence is likely to continue while the British remain in Northern Ireland… We see little prospect of political development of a kind which would seriously undermine the Provisionals’ position.’
Glover came in for considerable criticism, both for his judgement and, in particular, for the following:
Our evidence of the calibre of rank and file terrorists does not support the view that they are merely mindless hooligans drawn from the unemployed and unemployable. PIRA now trains and uses members with some care. The active service units (ASUs) are for the most part manned by terrorists tempered by up to 10 years of operational experience.
The General was correct in the foregoing assessment and in a number of others, particularly that dealing with the IRA’s ability to withstand being, as he put it, ‘hard hit by security force attrition’:
Trend and calibre: The mature terrorists, including for instance the leading bomb makers, are usually sufficiently cunning to avoid arrest. They are continually learning from their mistakes and developing their expertise. We can therefore expect to see increased professionalism and a greater exploitation of modern technology for terrorist purposes. PIRA’s organisationn is now such that a small number of activists can maintain a disproportionate level of violence… there is a substantial pool of young Fianna aspirants, nurtured in a climate of violence, eagerly seeking promotion to full gun carrying terrorist status and there is a steady release from the prisons of embittered and dedicated terrorists. Thus, though PIRA may be hard hit by security force attrition from time to time, they will probably continue to have the manpower they need to maintain violence during the next five years.
Leadership: PIRA is essentially a working class organisation based in the ghetto areas of the cities and in the poorer rural areas. Thus if members of the middleclass and graduates become more deeply involved they have to forfeit their lifestyle. Many are also deterred by the Provisionals’ muddled political thinking. Nevertheless there is a strata of intelligent, astute and experienced terrorists who provide the backbone of the organisation. Although there are only a few of these high grade terrorists, there is always the possibility that a new charismatic leader may emerge who would transform PIRA again.
Technical expertise: PIRA has an adequate supply of members who are skilled in the production of explosive devices. They have the tools and equipment and have the use of small workshops and laboratories.
Another of Glover’s assessments which proved accurate was:
Although the Provisionals have lost much of the spontaneous backing they enjoyed early in the campaign, there is no sign of any equivalent upsurge in support for the security forces. There are still areas within the province, both rural and urban, where the terrorists can base themselves with little risk of betrayal and can count on active support in emergencies. The fear of a possible return to Protestant rule and oppression will underpin this kind of support for the Provisionals for many years to come. Loyalist action could quickly awaken it to a much more volatile level.
The most famous of the ‘areas within the province’ referred to by Glover was Crossmaglen in South Armagh. This self-contained market town in the shadow of Sliabh Gullion Mountain had been a Catholic and Gaelic stronghold for centuries. In earlier periods of hostilities against the English South Armagh had acquired a well-deserved reputation for ferocious resistance to the Crown. This was revived by the Fourth Northern Division of the IRA in the pre-partition war. However, a U-shaped loop from a cartographer’s pen enclosed it within the Six Counties’ territory as the area was being partitioned. It was a decision the British Army and the RUC must have cursed a thousand times. Prior to the troubles, the district, which is crisscrossed by tiny roads fringed with high ditches, was known only as a smuggler’s paradise. The terrain and its proximity to the border made it a classic example of what Lord Gowrie, then Minister of State at the Northern Ireland Office, had in mind when he said: ‘The Border is an economic nonsense, anyone with initiative can laugh all the way to the bank.’8
The laughing stopped when the army and the RUC moved in and started roughing up the inhabitants. This was partly because ‘Cross’, as it is known, had a reputation for being a Nationalist stronghold, which led the RUC Special Branch to make the same sort of assumptions that had led to the out-of-date internment lists being prepared. Partly also because it was suspected that the smuggling expertise might be devoted to ‘the cause’. It was, but not because the people of Cross had originally intended it that way. Initially the locals wanted to keep clear of the troubles because it was feared the consequences would bring police attention to their smuggling trade. However, perceptions were altered by the internment era with its rough-handed searches, planting of weapons in houses, where they could be ‘discovered’ in subsequent visits, and abrasive encounters at checkpoints.
The turning point came when a Crossmaglen resident was shot by the army on the Falls Road because his car backfired. His companion was badly beaten up. From then on, Crossmaglen became a no-man’s-land to the security forces. The army post in the town could only be serviced by helicopter. One of the IRA’s folk heroes is Michael McVerry, who was killed in a raid on Keady RUC barracks in 1973. He was the first to exploit the terrain by staging ambushes, being chased by army vehicles, guns blazing like something out of a film, until his knowledge of the district enabled him to shake off his pursuers. In between inveighing against their tormentors in ‘bandit country’, as the security forces’ spin doctors christened South Armagh, Unionist apologists changed the argument sometimes to say that it was the security provided by the Republic which made South Armagh so dangerous.
South Armagh is the IRA’s safe haven. It is provided by the fathers and mothers, sons and brothers, uncles and aunts of the volunteers. So deep is the clan tradition that even the writ of the IRA leadership sometimes has to contend with the authority of the local chieftains. The phrase ‘Tell Them Nothing’ hangs invisible and omnipresent over the fields of South Armagh.
Glover’s report was attacked in decision-taking circles in both Dublin and London; in London because of the unwelcome admission that the Provos were not mindless terrorists, mindless criminals, at a time when the entire thrust of British policy (as we shall see in Chapter 9) was directed towards criminalising the IRA in the public mind. Glover, concerned merely with the facts of the situation, not the politics, in fact included a balance sheet in his report to indicate the scale of IRA finances. This gave completely the opposite impression: IRA volunteers were risking their lives for ‘pay’ of only £20 a week.
Glover’s estimate of the Provisional IRA’s annual income and expenditure probably underestimated the movement’s income from bank robberies and donations, particularly from Irish-American sympathisers. For example, in the year he attempted the exercise (1978), the Provisionals had already netted £1m by mid-June through an application of their particular philosophy of banking – based on withdrawals only. The General defined the Provisionals’ other main illegal source of income as ‘protection payments from shops and businesses and fraud involving dole money and “lost” pension books’. He reckoned this brought in about £250, 000, but thought the figure likely to decline ‘in the face of RUC countermeasures’. He reckoned that ‘incompetence and dishonesty’ had been the hallmarks of the Provisionals’ business activities, with the possible exception of the Black Taxis, whose operations he thought the police would also inhibit. At the time of writing, seventeen years later, the Black Taxis still offer the cheapest and most efficient taxi service in Belfast.
However, from my own knowledge I can say that the General was accurate in his assessment of what the IRA was paying its members as of June 1978 – £20 a week. He said:
We estimate that some 250 people would draw this and perhaps 60 would get , £40 per week… Apart from arms expenditure the Provisionals have to bear the cost of their prison welfare work including payment to prisoners’ dependants, travel and transport costs and propaganda expenses, especially the Republican newspapers whose sale does not cover their cost.
The balance sheet guesstimate was as follows:
| Theft in Ireland | £550, 000 |
| Racketeering | £250, 000 |
| Overseas Contributions | £120, 000 |
| Green Cross (Prisoners welfare fund) UK & Eire | £30, 000 |
| Total | £950, 000 |
Expenditure, under all the headings covered above, pay, prisoners, etc. – was reckoned to be £780, 000, leaving a balance of £170, 000 for arms purchases. All these figures would have to be revised upward, in line both with inflation and with the growth in efficiency of IRA fund-raising in the US and amongst its supporters in Ireland by way of socials, raffles, dances, bingo, even poitin-making! The constant black propaganda about drug-trafficking may be discounted. But, unless the peace process takes deep root, I would certainly not advise any aspirant builder to open up in west, or for that matter east, Belfast. Between material going missing, and collectors being only too omnipresent, bankruptcy for all but government contracts was, and to a degree still is, a constant hazard. However, this said, it has to be pointed out that the IRA in Collins’ time also partly financed itself by a system of levies, which, despite some abuses, were generally paid willingly enough. The same sort of system existed in the Glover period. While there was some extortion, most of the contributions to the IRA were voluntary. What Glover’s figures do indicate is that the Provisionals have been remarkably successful in running a cut-price revolution, for all the talk of godfathers and racketeering. The House of Commons was informed on 28 April 1994 by Michael Ancram, the Minister for Political Affairs and Education, that the cost to the British taxpayer of running the Six Counties was three billion, eight hundred million pounds, and this did not include the cost of the army.
Along with the foregoing there was of course the equally uncomfortable acknowledgement by Glover that the IRA could not be militarily defeated. Nor did either the RUC or the army welcome the publication of the fact that there were areas in the Six Counties wherein the Provisionals could operate with relative impunity. The Republic for its part was somewhat underwhelmed by the fact of Glover’s including in his report the statement that the ‘south provides a safe mounting post for cross-border operations and safe training areas’.
Having said that the Republic provided a safe transit area for the IRA’s guns and ammunition, explosives and operations of all sorts, Glover went on to claim that ‘terrorists can live there without fear of extradition for crimes committed in the North. In short the Republic provides many of the facilities of a classic safe haven so essential to any successful terrorist movement. And it will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future.’
Ironically as Glover was writing this in 1978, the IRA were moving towards becoming a solidly northern-based organisation, cutting away much of the southern apparatus to which Glover and his colleagues mistakenly attached such importance. The British military appreciation of the IRA’s origins and strengths was flawed in other respects too. But it is valuable for an understanding of how, through the period under review, there was frequent tension between Dublin and London over extradition. London either could not or would not accept Dublin’s difficulties in this regard, and regarded objections over issues such as inaccurately prepared warrants as hair-splitting. When the law got in the way the British, as we shall see, simply changed the law.
The Glover Report states flatly that:
Republican sentiment and the IRA tradition emanates from the South. Although the Fianna Fail government are resolutely opposed to the use of force, its long term aims are, as Mr Lynch himself admits, similar to those of the Provisionals. Any successor to Lynch in the ruling party will probably follow at least as Republican a line of policy. Fine Gael though traditionally less Republican is also now committed to a roughly similar line. We have no reason to suspect that PIRA obtains active support from government sources or that it will do so in the future, but the judiciary has often been lenient and the Gardai, though co-operating with the RUC more than in the past, is still rather less than wholehearted in its pursuit of terrorists… We believe that the Republic will continue to act as a haven for terrorists.
One could probably argue that the Glover thesis proceeds from the fact that the 1916 rebellion was staged in Dublin not Belfast, but apart from the fact that it overlooks the broader sweep of Irish history, it is and was centrally deficient in the human factor. The British Army simply did not, and do not, understand the psychology of the IRA. The military men persisted in attempting to apply to Ireland the lessons of their colonial experience in other countries. What they should have done was to apply to the Irish situation the lessons learned in Ireland over the centuries. A sentence in the Glover Report dealing with the effects of growing up under unionism in an area like Ballymurphy, where the basin of vinegar was always to hand to ward off the worst effects of CS gas, would have been more enlightening for its insight into the sources of recruitment to, and the sustainment of, the IRA campaign than the animadversions on the Irish judicial system.
In fact the IRA, whose principal thinker at this period, far from looking on the south with favour, once told me that he regarded ‘a garda as a British soldier in another uniform’, had moved towards their own recognition of the realities of the northern struggle, i.e. that it was a northern struggle, based in Northern Ireland, conducted by northerners. For the IRA was reorganised in the autumn and winter of 1976, with the Northern Command holding its first meeting in the November, almost two years to the day before Glover completed his report.
The Northern Command soon had an impact on IRA operations. In addition to the cell system, ASUs were set up which operated partly on a target of opportunity basis, and partly on predetermined planning, striking across the entire rural area of the Six Counties. Martin McGuinness first took over the Northern Command and subsequently, on Seamus Twomey’s arrest, became chief of staff, being succeeded in 1979 by Gerry Adams.
The younger McGuinness was frequently referred to as ‘The Cool Clean Hero’. Red-haired, slim and tall, wearing a tweed jacket, an Aran sweater and a friendly smile, he caught the imagination of the younger Derry Nationalists. A devout Catholic, I have known him to be denounced from the pulpit and applauded by the congregation. His principal relaxations are his family and fishing. He is also an extremely tough, hard-minded military and political thinker. The northern security forces never succeeded in recapturing him following his release after a short sentence from the Curragh. During the period of his leadership the Provisionals managed to bomb, and rebomb, economic targets in Derry without causing any loss of civilian life, though there were numerous casualties amongst the security forces. It was this selectivity that ensured that the women of Derry never marched on the Provisionals as they had done with the Officials, to demand that they call off their campaign.
Other younger stars in the Republican firmament who were moving upward at this period included Joe Austin, Jim Gibney, Mitchell McLaughlin, Tom Hartley, and Danny Morrison, who specialised in publicity, becoming editor of the Republican News and transforming it into an effective, well-laid-out, hard-hitting propaganda organ. The Republican News soon had more influence on Republicans than the Dublin-based An Phoblacht, which was more responsive to the O’Bradaigh–O’Conaill faction. One of the Republican News’s most popular features was a column written from Long Kesh by ‘Brownie’, Gerry Adams.
These changes were furthered by two developments which were initiated from outside the ranks of the Provisionals and which, for a time, appeared to spell disaster for the movement. The developments, which will be described shortly, may be summarised as the truce route and the H Block route. These intertwined, culminating in the hunger strikes of the 1980–1 period. The strikes elevated Sinn Fein to a plane of influence which led to the party becoming a major player – at times, in fact, the most significant one – in the Anglo-Irish drama.
The first of the two processes, the truce route, may be said to have begun at Feakle, Co. Clare, on 10 December 1974. A courageous group of Protestant clergymen braved the wrath of not only Paisley and his ilk, but even moderate members of their congregations, to meet a Provisional delegation. My information is that while the motives of the clergymen were of the highest, those of the British were somewhat lower. There would appear to have been an effort to use the churchmen to inveigle the Provisionals into a damaging situation. I have been informed that the churchmen were encouraged in their Feakle approach by the Northern Ireland Office, under the tutelage of Sir Frank Cooper. Cooper, a mandarin’s mandarin, was effectively the head of the Northern Ireland civil service. He was regarded by many people as the man who actually ran Northern Ireland while Merlyn Rees was there.
The clergy were Dr Arthur Butler, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Conor; Dr Jack Weir, the clerk of the Presbyterian Assembly; Revd Ralph Baxter, Secretary, and Revd William Arlow, Assistant Secretary to the Irish Council of Churches; Revd Eric Gallagher, former president of the Methodist Church in Ireland; Dr Harry Morton, Secretary of the British Council of Churches; Right Revd Arthur MacArthur, Moderator of the United Reform Church in England; and Stanley Worrall, a former headmaster of Methodist College, Belfast. The Provisionals were Ruairi O’Bradaigh, Daithi O’Conaill, Maire Drumm, Seamus Twomey, Kevin Mallon and Seamus Loughran.
The clergymen wanted to talk peace. To their surprise and gratification they found that the Provisionals apparently wanted to do so also. Dr Butler later said: ‘We were all most impressed with their attitude, with their fair-mindedness, and we were so pleased to find that they were talking seriously and deeply and with great conviction and had listened very carefully to what we had to say.’9 However, the Dublin Government was not at all pleased. There had been virtually no contact between London and Dublin since the collapse of the power-sharing executive earlier in the year. Dublin, set in a rigid law-and-order mode, regarded talking to the Provisionals as something akin to deliberately spreading a life-threatening infection. Even before the Sunningdale experiment collapsed, members of the Government had reacted with fury to an earlier British overture to the Provos.
Feakle was in fact the fourth attempt at peace talks which the Provisionals had taken part in. That involving Whitelaw we have already discussed. The first of the other three was the unveiling of the Eire Nua (New Ireland) proposals on 5 September 1971. In return for British acceptance of this idea, and one or two other small matters such as ending internment, abolishing Stormont and leaving the country, the Provisionals were prepared to declare an immediate halt to violence. Of course the Eire Nua concept of setting up a group of regional parliaments in each of the four provinces would have meant a diminution not only of Belfast’s power, but also of Dublin’s. This fact, which the Provisionals never had to confront because London ignored their plan anyhow, would probably have killed the initiative even without Loyalist opposition.
The second peace initiative of the decade involved Harold Wilson. Through the intermediacy of the Dublin Labour politician John O’Connell, he met a group of Provisional leaders at O’Connell’s house on 13 March 1972, while on a visit to Dublin ostensibly to make governmental contacts and appear on a TV programme.
To prepare the atmosphere the IRA had declared a seventy-two-hour ceasefire. This, in Sean MacStiofain’s words, was to ‘demonstrate that the IRA was under effective control and discipline’.10 Socially they were under more control also than Wilson had bargained for. He apparently had expected them to be hard-drinking, hard-swearing toughs. He accordingly peppered his language with oaths and was considerably taken aback to find that few of his hearers drank and none of them swore. Quite politely they informed him of their demands, which included a withdrawal of British troops to barracks (in preparation for ultimate withdrawal), the abolition of Stormont, and a declaration by Britain that she had no right to interfere in Irish affairs. Not surprisingly, Merlyn Rees, whom Wilson had brought along in his capacity as Northern Ireland spokesman, subsequently wrote in his memoirs: ‘There was no sign of compromise.’11
There was none on the part of Dublin either. As Wilson was meeting the Provos, Stan Orme was presiding over a British Embassy reception for Irish Labour Party figures. At the conclusion of his meeting Wilson rang Orme to inform him of what he had been doing. The thunderstruck Orme thought it best to inform his guests before the media did. They were aghast. Orme has said that: ‘Conor Cruise O’Brien did his nut and they all walked out.’12 Now, at Feakle in 1974, the fourth peace overture of the period, O’Brien was a cabinet minister. Not surprisingly, the meeting was broken up by a tip-off that the Irish Special Branch were on their way.
However, Feakle afforded the churchmen the opportunity of giving the IRA a policy document.13 It was aimed at eliciting a ceasefire from the Provisionals based on the acceptance of the following five points which had been cleared with the British Government:
1. The Government stated it had no political or territorial interests in Ireland beyond its obligations to the Northern Ireland citizens.
2. The Government’s prime concern was the achievement of peace and the promotion of such understanding between the various sections of Northern Ireland as would guarantee to all its people a full participation in the life of the community, whatever be the relationship of Northern Ireland to the EEC, United Kingdom or the Republic.
3. Contingent on the maintenance of a declared ceasefire and effective policing, the Government would relieve the army as quickly as possible of its internal duties.
4. Until agreement about the future government of Northern Ireland had been freely negotiated and guaranteed, armed forces would be retained in Northern Ireland.
5. The Government recognised the right of all those who had political aims to pursue them through the democratic process.
The IRA’s reply to these points was as follows:
1. Until the Government clearly stated that it had no claim to sovereignty in any part of Ireland, the statement was meaningless. ‘We accept that economic commitments must be honoured.’
2. ‘A noble wish with which we concur but we believe can only be realised in the full community of the people of Ireland.’
3. The IRA had no difficulty in maintaining community peace, if a bilateral truce were agreed between the army and the IRA. On this point it stated that discussions with Loyalist groups in maintaining the peace would be welcomed.
4. The IRA said that if a declaration of intention to withdraw were made, the IRA would accept that there should be a limited army presence during the negotiation period pending an agreed settlement.
5. The IRA stated that it ‘is meaningless to talk of democratic processes while… 2, 000 political prisoners are in jail’.
The jail question was one which was shortly to burst on to the public consciousness in particularly shattering fashion. At the time, in the flurry of controversy occasioned by the mere fact of the churchmen’s talking to the IRA, public attention was diverted to the issue of the rights and wrongs of having such discourse. However, on 20 December, the IRA declared that a temporary ceasefire would hold from 22 December until January 1975. This public declaration fuelled speculation that a British declaration of intent to withdraw from Northern Ireland was imminent. Merlyn Rees has stated, in a letter to the London Times in July 1983, that the proposal was considered by the Cabinet but that there was no agreement on it. But, despite the obvious discrepancies between the churchmen’s document and that of the Provisionals, there was sufficient common ground for the truce to be extended on 2 January (to the 17th) as a result of talks between the Provisionals and NIO civil servants.
On 17 January the ceasefire apparently ended. Ten days later there were four bomb explosions in London and one in Manchester which injured nineteen people. However, the talks got back on the rails and later Ruairi O’Bradaigh would write (in the Irish Times of 30 April 1992):
Resulting from Feakle a unilateral truce by the Irish Republican Army was declared and observed on December 22nd 1974 until January 16th 1975. Following the expiration of this and renewed army activity by both British forces and the IRA, talks were entered into – at the request of the British – for three weeks and the outcome was a bilateral truce on written terms on February 10th with monitoring mechanisms in place.
The ‘written terms’ to which O’Bradaigh referred consisted of the following:
1. The release of a hundred detainees within two weeks.
2. The phasing-out of internment within a specific period.
3. The effective withdrawal of the army to barracks, meaning 3, 000 to 4, 000 troops returning to Britain within six months.
4. An end to the system of arrests and screening and large-scale searches in Catholic areas.
5. The establishment of incident centres manned by Sinn Fein members and connected with an incident room at Stormont to monitor the ceasefire.
6. Provision for army-to-army discussions at local level.
7. The ending of military checkpoints and roadblocks at the edge of Catholic areas.
8. Immunity from arrest for specific persons.
9. Firearms licences for specific persons.
10. No immediate attempts to introduce the RUC and UDR into Catholic areas.
11. A form of ceasefire agreement to be drawn up by the British.
12. Further talks to take place between IRA leaders and senior British representatives.14
While there is little doubt that the IRA leaders of the period (O’Bradaigh, O’Conaill, etc.) believed these terms to be genuine, there is considerable reason to doubt whether or not the British were ever sincere about delivering. Possibly MI6 favoured a political solution, but certainly MI5 and the army did not. However, the publication of the foregoing touched off an angry debate in Dublin and Belfast. Dublin was horrified at the prospect of negotiation taking place with the Provisionals, and Loyalist paramilitaries stepped up the assassination campaign against Catholics. The moderate SDLP party was dismayed to find that its Sinn Fein rivals had been given power bases, the incident centres, from which to influence local opinion.
The so-called incident centres did rapidly become advice centres and sources of political propaganda for Sinn Fein. The security forces also adopted a low profile in Catholic areas and a blind eye was turned when leading Provisionals were sighted. But this last provision was certainly not observed by the Dublin authorities, who made a particular point of hunting down Daithi O’Conaill. He was captured and jailed in July of 1975.
Ruairi O’Bradaigh gave three reasons for the failure of the truce (Irish Times, 30 April 1992). These were the increase in the activities of the Loyalist death squads; the fact that Dublin indicated to London that a British withdrawal must not be contemplated; and the capture of O’Conaill. All these reasons are valid in themselves. The Dublin Government was increasingly suspicious of London’s intentions. Dublin moreover was deeply disturbed by the kidnapping of a Dutch industrialist by what were suspected to be Republican elements. The industrialist, Dr Tiede Herrema, was eventually released unharmed after a seventeen-day siege at a house at Monasterevin, Co. Kildare, on 6 November 1975. And the Loyalist death squads did claim an unprecedented toll. The ‘truce’ was in reality one of the most bloodstained periods in the history of the troubles. Two hundred and forty-seven people were killed in 1975 alone. On 22 September 1975, the IRA devastated towns all across the Six Counties with a series of bomb blasts. The UVF took a hand in the game on 2 October by killing twelve innocent Catholics. On top of that there was a renewal of vicious feuding between the Provisional IRA and the Officials. Hostilities also broke out between the two major Loyalist paramilitary groupings, the UDA and the UVF. (The violence and feuding will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 10.) The sectarian killing reached its nadir in January 1976 when after five Catholics were murdered on the 4th, the IRA was involved the following day in the slaughter of twelve Protestants. The ‘truce’ had been effectively over for months, but the incident centre experiment could be said to have been officially disowned on 18 March 1976, when the army closed the Falls Road centre.
All these things played a part in the revolt of the younger Republicans who took over from O’Bradaigh and O’Conaill. Adams in particular could see clearly that, apart from the lack of military, moral or political justification, the course of events was heading towards disaster. Special Category status was clearly under threat and the atrocities of the period were giving the British sufficient propaganda to justify its removal. On top of all the incidents which have been and will be described, the IRA degenerated into pub bombings at this stage. In response to the Miami Showband atrocity, the IRA staged one of their own the following month. A bomb planted in the Bayardo bar on the Shankill Road killed five Protestants.
But, apart from the violence and the reasons stated by O’Bradaigh, there is evidence to suggest that the truce, on the British part, was seen largely as a tactical ploy. Readers might care to re-examine point 3 of the churchmen’s proposals when they have had an opportunity to study the implications of ‘police primacy’ discussed in Chapter 10. The bait of withdrawing the army in return for ‘effective policing’ does appear to contain a barb. Policing to the British did not merely mean consigning the army to barracks and, ultimately, boat, and replacing the soldiers with bobbies on the beat. It involved armed, native-born counterinsurgents, who under the ‘Ulsterisation’ policy also to be shortly discussed would remove the burden of the war against the IRA from the army. Over the years other pieces of evidence point so strongly to a hidden agenda on the part of the British negotiators that the British themselves came to be eager to distance themselves from the ‘truce’ episode.
In 1993, when British officials were again talking to the IRA, the Provisionals’ negotiators were assured that the nineties talks would not be a repetition of those of the seventies. A letter from Merlyn Rees to Harold Wilson was quoted by the British side. In the letter, Rees said that the purpose of the talks had been to con the IRA: ‘we set out to con them and we succeeded’.15
I also know that Daithi O’Conaill cited an example of British goodwill which was highly dubious. He had asked for a public sign that the British meant what they said privately about cracking down on the Unionists. He was told that one would be forthcoming, that the British Government intended not to nationalise the Belfast shipyards, as was being done in the UK. The ‘mainland’ British were in fact hoping that the separate and highly favourable terms provided for the Belfast yards would make nationalisation unnecessary. However, nationalisation was duly announced by Stan Orme on 26 March 1975. But the background was not as O’Conaill had been led to suppose. An incident involving Sir Frank Cooper had occurred several months earlier.
Approaching 6.30 p.m. on a normal Monday in the Northern Ireland Office, the two top executives of Harland and Wolff unexpectedly appeared in Cooper’s office. They had a disturbing message. If money were not forthcoming immediately, the yards could not pay the following Friday’s wages. Cooper was aghast, not least because one of the executives concerned, a Dane, had been hired at a princely salary to prevent just such an eventuality occurring. This incident was the genesis of the government takeover. It finally brought to a head the feelings of dismay in Whitehall at the way money seemed doomed to pour into a black hole where Harland and Wolff was concerned.16 (After a period of nationalisation and further losses, it was announced, on 28 June 1988, that the yard was to be privatised. A management buyout ensued the following December.)
But more tangible evidences of a hidden agenda were available to the Republicans. This was the period when three policies which were vitally to affect the Six County security policy and the situation in the jails were put into effect. The setting-up of the Diplock courts has already been adverted to. Diplock’s Report was presented to and accepted by the House of Commons on 20 December 1972.17 In it, he made a distinction between detention and internment. The report stated:
The only hope of restoring the efficiency of criminal courts of law in Northern Ireland is to deal with terrorist crimes by using an extra-judicial process to deprive of their ability to operate in Northern Ireland those terrorists whose activities result in the intimidation of witnesses. With an easily penetrable border to the south and west the only way of doing this is to put them in detention… It does not mean imprisonment at the arbitrary dictat of the executive government which is to many people a common connotation of the term internment. We use it to describe depriving a man of his liberty as a result of an investigation of the facts which inculpate the detainee by an impartial person or tribunal by making use of procedure, which, however fair to him, is inappropriate to a court of law because it does not comply with Article 6 of the European Convention.
Diplock defined the types of ‘scheduled offences’ which would be dealt with by the juryless courts which he set up – murder, grievous bodily harm, explosive charges, possession of arms – and stated that where these offences were concerned a ‘confession made by the accused’ should be admissible as evidence unless it was obtained by torture or inhuman or degrading treatment. Diplock decreed that:
A signed written statement made to anyone charged with investigating a scheduled offence should be admissible if the person who made it cannot be produced in court for specific reasons and the statement contains material which would have been admissible if that person had been present in court to give oral evidence.
The provision about the admissibility of confessions was so liberally availed of that over 80 per cent of those convicted in the Diplock courts were detained as a result of confessions, which despite the proviso made as to torture were certainly extricated by sometimes very brutal methods. But obtained they were, with the result that prison populations shot up from around 700 at the start of the troubles to over 3, 000 in the period under review. In order to make it appear that the IRA was simply a criminal organisation, and to allay Unionist and Tory backbench anger at the prisoner-of-war status enjoyed by Special Category prisoners, the British throughout the 1975–6 period also began developing what became known as the ‘criminalisation policy’.
This was paralleled by the ‘Ulsterisation’ and ‘normalisation’ approaches. Under Ulsterisation, security was progressively handed over to the RUC and Ulster Defence Regiment in a Six County version of what the Americans used to refer to during the Vietnam War as ‘Vietnamisation’: in other words, letting the natives do the fighting. Normalisation was intended to return the province to a normal way of life as soon as possible. This entailed making it look normal also. One result of this policy was that practically as soon as the echoes of an IRA bomb blast died away, builders were at work repairing the damage. Abnormality thus set in, because the amount of building, at government expense, drew the attention of gangsters to the potential for extortion. The plethora of leisure centres, cultural events, road-building, and other forms of imparting an air of ‘normalcy’ to the Six Counties all, in their way, provided rich pickings, be these legal or otherwise.
‘Criminalisation’ meant what it said: that the Provisionals were henceforth to be regarded and treated as common criminals. Central to the operation of this strategy was the Gardiner Report.18 The author of the report, Lord Gardiner, a former Lord Chancellor, considered ‘in the context of civil liberties and human rights measures to deal with terrorism in Northern Ireland’. By this time there were some 1, 119 Special Category prisoners and a further 535 detainees. The Gardiner Report condemned the granting of Special Category status, saying:
Although recognising the pressures on those responsible at the time, we have come to the conclusion that the introduction of Special Category status was a serious mistake… it should be made absolutely clear that Special Category prisoners can expect no amnesty and will have to serve their sentences… We recommend that the earliest practicable opportunity should be taken to end the Special Category.
Gardiner objected to the fact that under the existing circumstances Special Category prisoners were
…allowed to wear their own clothes and are not required to work. They receive more frequent visitors than other prisoners and are allowed food parcels and can spend their own money in the prison canteen. They have segregation in compounds according to the paramilitary organisation to which they claim allegiance…
Gardiner recommended that the way to deal with this problem was to build more conventional prisons in Northern Ireland along the normal cellular lines. It was as a result of his report that the H Blocks were constructed in the Long Kesh complex which as a result of the new policy was renamed the Maze Prison. Six days after the report was published, Merlyn Rees announced in the House of Commons that the new prisons were to be built. There thus arose a situation in which the British were conducting a Janus-faced set of talks: one, ostensibly at least, aimed at holding a truce and conferring a certain political status on Sinn Fein by conceding the incident centres; the other, which began secretly with the prisoners’ leaders, aimed at doing away with Special Category status and identifying the IRA as criminals.
The H Blocks were built during the talks period, so there was ample tangible evidence before the IRA leadership’s eyes of what was planned. However, all sorts of baits were offered to distract the IRA’s gaze from what was taking place. For example, a house in Rosemary Street, in downtown Belfast, was proposed to both the IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries as a sort of HQ for terrorists where they could all meet (and be bugged) under the one roof. At first sight the idea appears ludicrous, but I suppose one must take it in conjunction with the fact that at the time everyone in Belfast appeared to be aware that the British secret service, MI6, was housed in Laneside, a large house overlooking Belfast Lough. The scheme progressed to a point whereby, despite the fact that sectarian assassination was rampant at the time, the four paramilitary organisations entered into an agreement that they would not attack any of their rivals in the vicinity of the Rosemary Street premises. In the event the terrorist HQ idea collapsed because the IRA, mistrusting British involvement in the scheme, ultimately vetoed the so-called ‘welfare centre’.
As part of this negotiation process, the prisoners’ leader, David Morley, was shown a copy of a speech which Merlyn Rees was to deliver in the House of Commons on Thursday 25 March 1976. Morley had been warned beforehand that it would contain some strong language and that it would have a bearing on the Special Category issue. He was allowed to make some changes in the script before Rees actually delivered the speech, a remarkable circumstance in itself. One wonders what the Unionists and Tory backbenchers would have said had they known that an Irish ‘felon’ had been given the right to alter a speech made in the House of Commons by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland!
However, neither Morley nor the IRA had any power to alter the substance of the speech, a decision to remove Special Category status. Days after Rees spoke, the IRA handed over a document to the prison authorities stating that negotiations were being broken off. This document said: ‘We are prepared to die for the right to retain political status. Those who try to take it away must be fully prepared to pay the same price.’19
At the time this seemed like a piece of braggadocio, but both the IRA and the British were serious about their respective policies. Prison Officer Cassidy was one of the warders subsequently shot (on 16 April 1979). He was attending a wedding at the time. As he emerged from the church with his three-year-old daughter he was shot in the body. He fell to the ground, squirming, his screaming child standing over him. Another gunman pushed through the crowd and shot him in the head. With the ending of Special Category status and the closing of the incident centres, the British also stepped up their campaign against the IRA. The combined effect of the new policies is reckoned to have cut the active service life of an average IRA volunteer to around three months in the 1975–6 period.
Rees was succeeded by Roy Mason in August 1976. He pursued a hard-line policy with vigour. He launched an advertising campaign, ‘Seven years is enough’, and spoke about ‘squeezing the IRA like toothpaste’.20 The IRA countered this with a slogan campaign of their own: ‘Seven hundred years is too much’ appeared on many a Belfast gable wall. What did not appear in public was the fact that a new form of warfare had broken out in the Six County prison system.
Special Category status had been abolished from 1 March 1976. From that day on, no further prisoners were admitted to the compounds, which retained their prisoner-of-war status. New prisoners were expected to serve their sentences in the H Blocks and to wear prison uniform and conform to prison discipline. However, on 14 September 1976, four days after Mason arrived in the province, Kieran Nugent, a young IRA volunteer who had been sentenced for hijacking a van, proceeded to make history. He informed the prison authorities that if they wanted him to wear the prison uniform, ‘they would have to nail the clothes to my back’. This defiance caused Nugent to become the first of the ‘blanket men’.
As a punishment, all furniture was removed from his cell and he remained from 7.30 a.m. until 8.30 p.m. each day on a concrete floor with no mattress, bed or reading material. His diet was also adversely affected, and, as he would not wear the uniform, his only clothing became a blanket. As other prisoners began to follow Nugent’s example, a general ‘no-wash’ protest spread amongst the prisoners. They wore their prison clothes to accept visits only, but at other times had only a towel to cover themselves. When they went to the showers they had to use this towel, so they asked for a second. When this was refused they also refused to wash, on the grounds that they should not be forced into nakedness. The sole item of furniture in their cells was a chamber pot. It was shortly to assume a degree of significance in the situation.
The prison routine was ‘food in – slops out’. A trolley would come around with food for the prisoners, followed by another trolley for their slops. The prisoners claimed that the warders only half-emptied the pots and sometimes up-ended them on the floors. From this ‘the Dirty Protest’ evolved.
The prisoners began throwing their solids out of the windows of the cells, and the warders started throwing them back in again. Later, the prisoners began disposing of their faeces by smearing them on the walls. By 1980 there were some 400 protesters ‘on the blanket’ in both the Long Kesh complex and the women’s prison in Armagh jail. The protest received curiously little publicity for some years, until Cardinal O’Fiaich visited the prison and on 1 August 1978 issued a lengthy statement detailing what he had seen. It included the following:
Having spent the whole of Sunday in the prison I was shocked by the inhuman conditions prevailing in H Blocks 3, 4 and 5 where over 300 prisoners are incarcerated. One would hardly allow an animal to remain in such conditions let alone a human being. The nearest approach to it that I have seen was the spectacle of hundreds of homeless people living in sewer pipes in the slums of Calcutta. The stench and filth in some of the cells, with the remains of rotten food and human excreta scattered around the walls, was almost unbearable. In two of them I was unable to speak for fear of vomiting.
The prisoners’ cells are without beds, chairs or tables. They sleep on mattresses on the floor and in some cases I noticed that these were quite wet. They have no covering except a towel or blanket, no books, newspapers or reading material except the Bible (even religious magazines have been banned since my last visit), no pens or writing materials, no TV or radio, no hobbies or handicrafts, no exercise or recreation. They are locked in their cells for almost the whole of every day and some of them have been in this condition for more than a year and a half.
The statement also included the point that these prisoners had been treated by special courts in a very special way. Their convictions were secured by methods which by the time of the Cardinal’s visit had aroused the condemnation of Amnesty International.21 But having been put into prison in a very special way, a deeply burning resentment was created by the taking away of their special category. Another factor which added to the tensions in the prison was the fact that while the prisoners were Nationalists and Catholics, the warders were Protestants and Loyalists.
However, neither the Cardinal’s protest nor increasing pressures from Dublin brought any change in the official position, which was defined by an NIO statement as follows:
These criminals are totally responsible for the situation in which they find themselves. It is they who have been smearing excreta on the walls and pouring urine through cell doors. It is they who by their actions are denying themselves the excellent modem facilities of the prison… Each and every prisoner has been tried under the judicial system established in Northern Ireland by parliament. Those found guilty, of the due process of law, if they are sent to prison by the courts, serve their sentence for what they are – convicted criminals. They are not political prisoners. More than 80 have been convicted of murder or attempted murder and more than 80 of explosives offences.22
This view was shared by leading Protestant churchmen. The Presbyterian governing committee condemned the Cardinal’s statement and the Church of Ireland Gazette said he had left ‘the rest of us in little doubt about where his loyalties lay’.
The prisoners stayed in these conditions for a further two years. I described a visit I paid to the prison in 1980, two years after the Cardinal’s statement, as follows:
I was allowed to pick the two cells I wished to visit at random after a tour of the prison led by the Governor. The Governor placed no barriers in my inspection save warning the two occupants of the first cell I came to that there was to be no conversation…. as if to underline this, two enormous warders, either of whom would dwarf me (and I am not a small man), entered the cell and stood behind the cell’s occupants. They were aged 21 and 22, as I afterwards learned, serving ten and twelve years respectively. When the cell door opened they both looked frightened. They looked anxiously at us for a moment. They were pallid and naked except for a blanket draped over their shoulders. They stood silently, fear hardening into defiance, I felt, as we looked at the cell.
It was covered in excrement almost to the ceiling and all four walls. In one comer there was a pile of rotting, blue-moulded food and excrement and the two boys had evidently been using bits of their foam rubber mattresses to add to the decor as we entered. There wasn’t much of a smell but the light was dim and the atmosphere profoundly disturbing and depressing. I felt helpless and angry as I stood and looked at these appalling and disgraceful conditions, prevented by bureaucracy and by history from talking to two of my fellow human beings who had brought themselves and been brought to this condition of self-abnegation.
I couldn’t speak for a few minutes after visiting the cell and had to compose myself before entering a cell which the well known Republican, Martin Meehan, was occupying. Meehan was attempting to bring some variant into the monotony of his days by drawing palm trees on his cell walls with his own excreta using pieces of foam rubber mattress. By the time I met him I had recovered sufficiently to disregard the rules about no conversation and at least had regained my composure to the extent of shaking hands with him and exchanging the normal greetings. But for several days afterwards the memory of the cells abided with me and I would have said that the visit to Long Kesh was one of the worst and most shocking experiences of my life had I not subsequently paid a visit to the women’s prison in Armagh.
Here the cells were gloomier, because the prison was an old one and the effect of seeing young women caked in grime through not having washed for several months added to the appalling conditions in their cells. In addition to smearing urine and faeces on the walls they disposed of their menstrual fluid in this way also.23
How some mass epidemic did not break out I could never understand. It was commonplace for the prisoners to wake up in the morning with their eyes, ears, mouths and anuses filled with tiny white maggots. Seeing these conditions later helped me to understand what it was that led Mairead Farrell, whom I interviewed during the Armagh visit as the leader of the protesting women, to go on the mission to Gibraltar which led to her death at the hands of the SAS in 1988 (see Chapter 10). But of more long-term significance politically, experiencing those conditions even fleetingly and as a non-participant did help one gain an insight into how so much of the Nationalist population of Northern Ireland later came to support Sinn Fein.
The bulk of the prison population were not only drawn from the smaller section of the community, but were also drawn from a subdivision of it, i.e. the Catholic ghetto districts in the urban areas, and some rural heartland areas also. Therefore the impact of the Dirty Protest was concentrated and magnified.
This was true of the Troubles’ effect generally. The deaths, the shootings, the beatings, the jailings, daily and weekly, gave a new meaning to Yeats’ line about ‘great hatred little room’. The prisons came to be the focus of that intensity of feeling. There is a strip of roadway in the Andersonstown district of Belfast, between Shaw’s Road and Stewartstown Park, which is about the same length as the road I live on in Dublin. Thirty-five of the families living along the Andersonstown road have someone in jail at the time of writing. At times of crisis the number went even higher. No family in that district has been untouched by the Troubles in some way.
As the Dirty Protest continued, the atmosphere in the Catholic areas gradually sharpened into one of widespread defiance coupled with fear. At the time of writing, Patrick McGeown is a leading member of Sinn Fein. In 1980 he was in Long Kesh. I interviewed his wife, Pauline, about the situation. She had none of the knee-jerk propaganda one meets with amongst some Republican supporters. Indeed, she was prepared to talk about issues arising from jail, and the protest, that other women at the time would never mention to a journalist. The Valley of Squinting Windows syndrome of the ghetto pertained: ‘They watch every move you make when they know your husband is away in the Kesh. The gossip is terrible, ’ she said. She was able to articulate the attitude of the families of the men on the Dirty Protest while at the same time expressing her reservations about the use of violence. Describing how Pat came to be in the situation he was in at the time, she said:
He was always interested in politics and he used to talk to me about what he read. The trouble is he was too bright. When they sweep the areas, they lift the brains. They know he has got a political mind, that he reads a lot and could see ahead, therefore he is a threat. Talking is not enough to change the system. You must take action. What type, though, is another matter. I wonder does it have to be violence but you can’t walk away from it. We are all in a prison here. If you try to run away you are only running away from yourself.
You don’t leave H Block behind you. I worry about Pat’s mental condition. I think he is deteriorating but I know he will stick it out. I am afraid hunger striking is only around the corner. They can’t give up the protest, it is part of them. They would lose their spirit, lose their soul. By failing to resist and admitting the criminal status, they would admit that the whole cause is criminal. It goes back to the moment you were born. Pat was 10 when he was on the barricades.
Pauline was right: the hunger strike was just around the corner. Hunger-striking is the obverse side of the IRA’s medal of infliction: endurance. It is a practice which has its roots deep in Irish history and is found also in Hindu tradition. Both the earlier Celts and the Hindus used self-immolation by starvation as a means of discrediting someone who had done them wrong. An unpaid poet or tradesman would starve himself to death, if necessary, outside the home of an uncaring patron, achieving satisfaction either through their wrong being rectified or through death sullying forever the reputation of the wrongdoer.
The period of the hunger strikes could be taken as epitomising the cultural and religious differences between the Irish and the English. The Irish demonstrated both their defiant natures and their sense of identity in a manner which gave a new definition to the term ‘back to basics’. For example, throughout the Dirty Protest, the prisoners continued to hold Irish classes. They tapped out a word on the central-heating pipes and then inscribed it on to the walls of their cells in their own excrement, sometimes using the crucifixes on their rosary beads as stylos. Throughout the strikes and protests the prisoners communicated with the outside world in a variety of ways, all basic but efficient. It was quite commonplace for a prisoner to receive a communication from the outside world in the morning, reply to it in an early afternoon visit, and possibly receive another message in response before the end of the day. Men secreted coms (messages written on cigarette papers) in their anuses, behind their testicles or in their foreskins. Women did likewise in their vaginas, sanitary towels, under their breasts or in their hair. One prisoner is alleged to have transported some forty coms in his foreskin. Another told me of a colleague who secreted a pen, a comb and a lighter in his anus.24
The British fought with order, rule book, discipline, their propaganda conveying a sense of disdain at this bizarre and repellent behaviour in the surroundings of one of the most modern prisons in Europe. Insofar as physical facilities were concerned, the H Blocks were indeed models of cellular confinement. They took their name from the cluster of individual H-shaped blocks which formed the prison. The cells were of the most modern design known to penology. But it was demonstrated literally in Long Kesh, not for the first time in Irish history, that prison bars and walls do not a prison make.
The most famous hunger-striker in Irish Republican history, up to the time of the building of the H Blocks was Terence McSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, who died, after seventy-four days, during the Anglo-Irish war of 1919–21. McSwiney became the inspiration for W. B. Yeats’ play, The King’s Threshold, in which Seanchan, a poet, starves himself to death. During World War II, de Valera had allowed IRA men to die on hunger strike rather than concede them the right of political status. Hunger-striking was not a feature of the 1956–62 IRA campaign but it reappeared significantly with Billy McKee’s fast in 1972 which led to the truce and the concession of Special Category status in the first place, and to the flying of Adams and company to meet Whitelaw.
Sean MacStiofain, the then chief of staff, who had been arrested in the Republic, subsequently lost face within the movement as the result of coming off a hunger strike in 1973 after fifty-seven days. But by 1980, two hunger-strikers had gone the full way down the agonisingly slow path that leads to a starvation death. The first hunger-strike fatality of the contemporary troubles was Michael Gaughan, who died in Parkhurst Prison on 3 June 1974, the sixty-fifth day of his strike, and was buried in his native Mayo. His partner on the strike, Frank Stagg, lived and later went on strike again, dying in Wakefield prison on 12 February 1976.
Stagg’s death precipitated a bizarre incident involving the Government of the Republic. The IRA had intended to stage a military funeral for Stagg and bury him alongside Gaughan. But the Government had the plane carrying the coffin diverted to Shannon, where Special Branch detectives ensured that the body was buried without Republican ceremony, and under a layer of concrete to prevent re-internment. However, six months after the fuss had died down, Stagg was dug up under cover of darkness and reburied, with the blessing of a priest, alongside his friend.
Both men had died for the same cause, the right to be transferred to Ireland to complete their sentences. The two Price sisters, Dolours and Marian, were more successful. After more than 200 days on strike, during which they were force-fed, they were repatriated to Armagh jail. However, the publicity surrounding the force-feeding process caused the then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, to decide that from then on (June 1974) any prisoner who went on hunger strike would not be force-fed. The process is a fairly brutal one involving the clamping of a metal device around the mouth and the insertion of a tube into the patient’s stomach. If, as sometimes happens, the tube enters the windpipe, the patient can die.
Jenkins’ decision was to make Sinn Fein a powerful political party in Ireland. The IRA did not welcome hunger strikes. They created an emotional focus which detracted from a military campaign, and there was always the risk of an adverse effect if the strike failed, as it had in the case of MacStiofain. However, a current of opinion built up in the H Blocks in favour of a strike. One prisoner, Martin Meehan, despairing of effecting change in his position through drawing faecal palm trees, went on an unauthorised strike which lasted for sixty-five days before he was cajoled off it by the intervention of Cardinal O’Fiaich.
The IRA leadership attempted to control the prison issue by backing the National H Block/Armagh Committee, which involved not only Sinn Fein, but a number of civil liberties groups. This became active throughout the month of October 1979. Its most prominent member was Bernadette McAliskey, the former Bernadette Devlin, who was one of the six members of the committee to be shot in highly controversial circumstances. McAliskey and her husband were two of the lucky ones; the other five H Block Committee leaders died. The committee did, however, generate a good deal of publicity on behalf of the prisoners’ demands, which could be summarised as follows:
1. The right to wear their own clothes.
2. The right to abstain from penal labour.
3. The right to free association. (This at the time meant, not moving from their cells, but freedom of association within their own prison area, i.e. in a cell block.)
4. The right to recreational and educational facilities in conjunction with the prison authorities.
5. Restoration of remission. (The Dirty Protest meant that this concession had been withdrawn.)
Cardinal O’Fiaich, and a number of bishops, backed the Five Demands, as they became known, and throughout 1980 the Cardinal held a series of meetings with the Secretary of State, Humphrey Atkins, but to no avail. Apart from relying on the publicity work of the H Block Committee, the IRA broadened its campaign to include warders. Eighteen of them, and the wife of one, were murdered before the movement was prevailed upon to stop the killings in the unrealised hope that this would give Cardinal O’Fiaich’s efforts a better chance of success.
Two events which occurred in 1980 brought the matter to a head. One was the Meehan strike, the other the threat of a hunger strike in Wales. Gwynfor Evans, the president of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, announced that he would start a hunger strike to the death on 6 October unless the Government honoured its manifesto pledge to give Wales a Welsh-language station on the proposed new television channel. On 17 September William Whitelaw announced that Wales was to get its service. So far as the Long Kesh prisoners were concerned, this decision, coming on top of the example set by Meehan, was the turning point.
Brendan Hughes, the prisoners’ leader, sent out word that the IRA leadership was out of touch with the intensity of feeling in the prison; that the National H Block Committee had proved ineffectual, as had the Cardinal and others. The only thing that would resolve the crisis one way or the other was a hunger strike. Adams and the other newer figures in the Republican leadership were opposed to a strike, not least because of what might happen if it failed. ‘Break the lads in prison, and you break the lads outside’ is an old IRA maxim. Also, a prison defeat creates a knock-on effect on families and supporters outside the jails.
Far from urging on a hunger strike for publicity purposes, the outside leaders at first tried to prevent one occurring. Danny Morrison, who accompanied me on a visit to the H Blocks during the height of the crisis, remarked wonderingly to me that: ‘The IRA were very slow to see the potential of the situation.’ But the sheer weight of the prison population, abnormally swollen by the ‘conveyor belt system’, meant that those inside the prisons now constituted too large a proportion of the IRA as a whole to be ignored. The Army Council agreed to back a strike. Sinn Fein announced on 10 October that a strike would commence seventeen days later. It was led by Hughes himself, who went on the protest with six other prisoners. The total of seven was chosen because there had been seven signatories to the proclamation issued by the rebels during Easter 1916. Moreover, the strikers came from all of the Six Counties.
Before his capture, Hughes had been charged with devising a new ‘cover’ apparatus for the IRA and had hit on the idea of setting up a series of businesses. It was based on the oft-proved thesis that security forces never suspect a man in a pinstriped suit of being a terrorist. He took on the name and identity of a dead man, Arthur McAllister, dyed his hair and grew a moustache. He posed as a toy salesman, kept a diary of ‘business appointments’ and went out each morning to call on shops from a house in Belfast’s Knockbreda area. To complete his disguise he had a seemingly equally ‘yuppie’ wife, an IRA woman. He rented premises in exclusive parts of Belfast, like the Malone Road, with a view to both storing arms and explosives and installing IRA operators from the ghetto areas.
Hughes had also drawn up maps and plans against a ‘doomsday situation’ in case of all-out sectarian war. When he was captured, on 10 May 1974, the army suppressed the contingency nature of the plans, both for general propaganda reasons and in particular for Harold Wilson’s benefit. The idea, which for a time succeeded, was to make it appear that the IRA was preparing an onslaught on Protestants. This both helped to heighten the tension during the Loyalists’ strike and provided an argument why the army should not engage the Loyalists while such a threat existed from the IRA.
I visited Hughes in Long Kesh when he had been on strike for a month, the purpose of the visit being to attempt to evaluate for Charles Haughey whether the strike was rooted in a real jail problem or was merely an IRA publicity stunt. Given Hughes’ reputation, I had expected to find a cross between James Bond and Al Capone, but instead found only an unobtrusive, middle-sized man, who talked about the strike as though it were happening to someone else. His hands were slightly clammier than normal, and despite his nickname, ‘Dark’, because of his complexion, he seemed pale. But though he told me he had lost twenty pounds, there was nothing in his speech or movements to show he had not eaten for more than thirty days. He had walked from his cell to meet me. His only problem, he said, was that he woke up drenched in sweat. Apart from the presence of warders in the visiting room we might have been in a hospital anteroom chatting about fasting. Danny Morrison added the only touch of drama to the occasion by passing him a com under the noses of the guards.
The strike lasted until 18 December. The intervening period was one of remarkable intensity. On the one hand, there was the public drama of the hunger strike itself. On the other, there was a secret but intensive high-level negotiation between London and Dublin. Haughey was increasingly anxious that destabilisation might occur in the Republic as well as the north if the hunger strike persisted to the death. There was considerable evidence in the conversation of the Sinn Fein activists of the period that the word ‘destabilisation’ had a high place in their vocabularies. All the ground of prison defiance and resistance had been gone over many times in the histories of both the Republic and the Six Counties.
The most recent chapter in the Republic’s prison history had ended in a compromise only three years before, in 1977. It had defused one of the worst threats to the stability of the Republic in the history of the troubles. The IRA regards jail either as another battlefield or as ‘the Republican university’ wherein one may either fight on or obtain a higher education, not all of it of an academic nature. As they regard themselves as prisoners of war, not criminals, they will inevitably come into conflict with prison regulations if a spirit of compromise does not prevail.
After a particularly vicious spell of rioting and conflict in Portlaoise jail under the Fine Gael–Labour coalition government which fell in 1977, the incoming Fianna Fail administration moved along the compromise route and the situation in Portlaoise returned to normality. Inside the jail the Republican prisoners achieved de facto political status. They wore their own clothes, communicated with the authorities through their own elected officers, and were segregated from other prisoners into their own groupings – Provisionals, Officials, INLA, and ‘mavericks’, who had either never belonged to any of the three or had been expelled from them. But in all other respects the prisoners conformed to prison discipline and served out their sentences in a peaceful atmosphere.
During the period of tension there were attempts on the Governor’s life, a number of explosions, escapes, and attempted escapes during which a garda and a prisoner lost their lives. Outside the jail there was continuous and increasingly angry agitation on the prisoners’ behalf. Inside the perimeter walls, the normal army presence was greatly increased, as was the number of warders. I once counted sixteen warders on duty on each landing of the prison. This was in addition to a heavy warder presence at every strategic door, gate or assembly place in the jail. Sixteen warders per shift represents a total of something in excess of three times that many per week. So the financial cost of trouble in prisons is something to be avoided if at all possible. Then, in the light of Irish history, a factor which continually has to be weighed in the balance between law and order is the question of how much potential for destabilisation, through the arousal of public sympathy, is contained in any given prison protest.
The answer, in the six north-eastern Irish counties in the early 1980s, could be summed up in one word – enormous. However, Thatcher was in no mood for a Portlaoise solution. Reports on episodes like Airey Neave’s death and Warrenpoint figured larger in her reading list than did The King’s Threshold. She summed up the British position on 20 November:
Let me make one point about the hunger strike in the Maze Prison. I want this to be utterly clear. There can be no political justification for murder or any other crime. The government will never concede political status to the hunger strikers or to any others convicted of criminal offences in the Province.25
The dispute escalated sharply throughout December, with three of the women prisoners in Armagh joining the strike on the 3rd of the month and twenty-three of the men in Long Kesh joining on the 15th. It could in fact have been resolved very simply by one concession – on clothing. Of my own knowledge I know that the IRA would have accepted a face-saving formula whereby they were allowed to wear even tracksuits and runners supplied by their families, for a portion of their day, as a symbol that they were not ‘criminalised’.
But a Portlaoise-type compromise solution was not to be had. There were serious riots in Armagh, Belfast and Derry. However, the Government continued to be unyielding. On 10 December, Humphrey Atkins again took a hard line. Speaking in the House of Commons, he said:
The protest movement within the prisons, from which the hunger strike stems, is one important arm in the strategy of the Provisional IRA. Its struggle to destroy law and order and overthrow democratic institutions in Northern Ireland does not stop at the prison gates; it is continued through other means inside. The Protest is designed to contribute to its objective of securing political legitimacy for a movement whose only weapon is violence. It is also part of a wider attempt to discredit the measures which the government have been compelled to introduce to protect society from terrorism.26
The strike ended on 18 December 1980 in a burst of prison poker, which the authorities at first believed they had won. One of the prisoners, Sean McKenna, whose eyesight was failing, a sure sign that death was near, also showed signs of psychological deterioration, sometimes defiant, at others wanting to come off the strike. To my knowledge, the British authorities repeatedly told Dublin that there was no need to worry about destabilisation: the strike would collapse because of McKenna. Then, to heighten the pressure on the remaining strikers, on 18 December McKenna was unexpectedly switched from Long Kesh to Musgrave Military Hospital outside Belfast. There was a secondary purpose to this move.
Apart from removing McKenna from his colleagues’ purview, thereby creating uncertainty as to whether he had died or was about to die, it also set the scene for the introduction of a document from the Foreign Office to the prison. This was conveyed by a priest, a Redemptorist, who had been in touch with the prisoners, the British, and Haughey. He was so generally trusted that he was given an Irish name: an Sagairt Mait, the Good Priest. When the document’s approach was made known to Hughes he was faced with a dilemma. He had been prevented from keeping in touch with McKenna’s condition but he knew he could not last long. Hughes was in a bad way himself, as were his other five comrades. The fact that the document was on the way might mean that McKenna was dying uselessly, for concessions which had in fact been granted. Hughes called off the strike. But the concessions had not been granted. When the thirty-four-page document arrived it spoke in vague diplomatic terms of the possibilities of movement once the strike ended.
Knowing nothing of what had happened, the nation heaved a sigh of relief. Haughey summed up the situation by issuing a statement which said: ‘A potentially dangerous and tragic situation has fortunately been averted and all who have contributed to the ending of the strike deserve the gratitude of the Irish people.’ Few had worked harder to prevent the strike reaching the point of tragedy than two Redemptorist priests, Fr Alec Reid, whom we shall meet later in our story, and an Sagairt Mait, Fr Brendan Meagher. Fr Meagher was not deceived by the seemingly happy ending to the affair. He called at my house for what should have been a celebratory drink on Christmas Day but became instead a worried speculation as to what might lie ahead.
Inside the prison it soon became apparent that the prisoners had been outmanoeuvred. A confusing situation arose which basically still revolved around whether or not the prisoners could wear their own clothing. There were all sorts of compromise formulae floating about: that their own clothes would be delivered by their relatives and simultaneously they would be issued with ‘prison-style’ clothing which they would wear for part of the day, using their own clothes at other times, and so on. All this was contingent on good behaviour, the ending of the Dirty Protest, and on its being clearly seen that the Governor’s writ ran in the jail.
Mrs Thatcher was still not in a mood to countenance any compromise. By the middle of January the conflicting versions of what the ending of the strike meant were out in the open. From the outset, Bobby Sands, who had succeeded Hughes as the prisoners’ leader, had been clear that the strike had ended in defeat. He wanted to go on strike himself, immediately. He was restrained by the outside leadership, who felt that the public would not support a strike so soon on the heels of what had happened. Nevertheless, within the jail, preparations went on. Sands took names from volunteers who wished to go on strike, and communications went out from the jail, all over the world, seeking information on hunger strikes. Palestinians proved to be a fertile source of information, not only on hunger strikes, but on thirst strikes also.
Inside the prison, morale amongst the Republican prisoners was falling by the hour. Their cells were still filthy, but their Dirty Protest was going nowhere. They were getting increasingly abrasive treatment from the warders. Sands feared for a collapse of the prisoners’ organisation within the jail. In response to a communication from the Army Council, counselling against a strike and warning that the military campaign could not be suspended for its duration on this occasion, he sent out the following:
We have listened carefully to what you have said… we do not deny your or criticise your extreme cautiousness. But, however distressing it may be, we regret that our decision to hunger strike remains the same and we re-confirm this decision now with the same vigour and determination. We fully accept and in full knowledge of what it ‘may’ entail, the right of the army to carry on unlimited operations in pursuance of the Liberation struggle and without handicap or hindrance. We accept the tragic consequences that most certainly await us and the overshadowing fact that death may not secure a principled settlement… We realise the struggle outside must also continue. We hope that you accept that the struggle in H Blocks, being part of the overall struggle, must go on in unison.27
The outside leadership reluctantly conceded that a strike was inevitable, and it was decided that Sands would begin it, followed at intervals by other prisoners, including INLA prisoners. On 5 February 1981, a statement was issued to the press by Sinn Fein on behalf of the prisoners, announcing the decision. It said: ‘Our last hunger strikers were morally blackmailed… Where is the peace in the prisons, which like a promise, was held before dying men’s eyes?’
There was to be no peace. The references in the communications between Sands and the IRA Army Council to the continuation of the campaign help to explain why. The continuing violence, heightened and intensified because of the strike, made the summer of 1981 into one of the bloodiest periods of the troubles. In all, some sixty-one people died during the protest. Thirty-four of them were civilians. Seven of these, including two girls aged eleven and fourteen, died from injuries inflicted by plastic bullets. The IRA killed fifteen members of the RUC, eight soldiers, and seven members of the UDR. In one incident, at Camlough, Co. Armagh, the home of a hunger-striker, Raymond McCreesh, an IRA bomb killed five soldiers in a single explosion. As has been said before, the IRA’s coin is two-sided: on one side is imprinted endurance, on the other infliction. The summer of 1981 illustrated both sides as rarely seen either before or since.
Bobby Sands came to epitomise the type of young Catholic who got caught up in the troubles. He was twenty-seven at the commencement of the strike. He was born in Rathcoole in northern Belfast, a Protestant district. At an early age his family were intimidated out of their home. In their second house, the young Bobby survived both a knife attack and several incidents in which the Sands’ residence was surrounded by chanting Protestants. Finally, after a Protestant ‘welfare worker’ – she was in fact a UDA activist – had been seen indicating the house to a young Protestant couple, a dustbin came through the window one night. It was an indication that the welfare officer had found new tenants for the Sands’ home. The family then moved to Twinbrook, a Catholic district in west Belfast, in June 1972. Here Sands was apprenticed to a coach-building firm; here, too, he joined the IRA. He got married, but his marriage did not survive his arrest, as part of a team that had bombed a furnishing company at Dunmurruy. I understand that he only joined the unit by accident, volunteering when he discovered that one member had not turned up. Those were the pre-cell days of the IRA, when there was a wasteful use of manpower. It was not uncommon for ten or twelve operatives to be sent out on a job which could easily have been carried out by two, or even one.
Sands’ impulsive offer to join an operation in which he had not originally been included, but for which he received a fourteen-year sentence, helped to change Irish history. He was feisty, argumentative and showed considerable potential, as both a poet and a prose writer, his considerable output being set in a revolutionary mould, reflecting both his surroundings and his taste in reading material: Fanon, Guevara, Jackson, Torres. He is remembered amongst other things for having had a prodigious memory. In the prisons, ‘talking books’ are a feature of the entertainment. Sands memorised Leon Uris’ mammoth Trinity and was able to pass it on to his cell mates in instalments each evening. Fr Meagher described him as a ‘human dynamo’.
On 1 March 1981, chosen because it was the fifth anniversary of the ending of Special Category status, Bobby Sands went on hunger strike. To focus attention on his protest, the rest of the prisoners called off the Dirty Protest.
Sands died at 1.17 on the morning of Tuesday 5 May. On the previous Friday, Don Concannon, Labour’s spokesman on Northern Ireland, had visited him in Long Kesh. Concannon had been the minister of state who presided over the withdrawal of Special Category status. His message for Sands was that Labour was supporting the Government over the strike. He gave a press conference afterwards at which he said that he did not want Sands to misunderstand Labour’s position.
Sands’ condition was described by Owen Carron, his election agent, who saw him for the last time later that day:
He found Sands in no shape to talk. He was lying on the waterbed, his left eye was black and closed, the right eye nearly closed and his mouth twisted as if he had suffered a stroke. He had no feelings in his legs and could only whisper. Every now and then he started dry retching. He managed to ask Carron if there was any change. The Fermanagh man said no, there was no change. Sands said: ‘Well, that’s it.’ He told Carron: ‘Keep my Ma in mind.’ Carron bent over the bed, hugged him and kissed him.28
Later still that evening, Lord Carrington, the Foreign Secretary, said on independent radio: ‘Do not tell me the IRA represent people in Northern Ireland. They have no status, they are not accepted by anyone.’ Carrington was quite wrong. By that time the IRA represented quite a number of people in Northern Ireland, or at least Sands did. A death which had preceded Sands’ – that of Frank Maguire, the independent MP for South Tyrone – had changed the Northern Ireland political scene dramatically, creating a necessity for a by-election. Still pursuing the traditional abstention policy, Sinn Fein saw no opportunity in an electoral contest and it was generally assumed that Maguire’s brother, Noel, would stand for and probably win the seat. Then Bernadette McAliskey took a hand. Although still suffering from her wounds (sustained as recently as 16 January), she announced her candidacy, saying that she would only stand down in favour of an H Block candidate. This suggestion was taken up by a prominent Sinn Fein member in Belfast, Jim Gibney, who succeeded in persuading his colleagues to nominate Sands. In the vortex of emotion generated by the hunger strike, the SDLP withdrew Austin Currie’s nomination and with less than ten minutes remaining on the closing day for nominations (29 March), Noel Maguire also withdrew. His last-minute decision made it impossible for Currie to re-enter the race, and the stage was set for an historic campaign.
Sands won the seat on 9 April, beating Harry West. By then he had been on strike for forty days and had lost nearly thirty pounds. The British reaction was to produce on 12 June an amendment to the Representation of the People Act prohibiting prisoners from standing for Parliament. But the reaction for Sinn Fein was far more significant. Gerry Adams analysed the significance of the 1981 Fermanagh by-election as follows:
It was educational for us. We learned about presiding officers, impersonation officers, how to campaign. It was exhilarating. Sometimes we would come into a little town with the Catholics coralled away up at the top as usual, the loyalists living along the main street with the businesses and so on. We would have the tricolour flying, the music blaring – and the Catholics up on the top of the hill would come out to us as though we were the relief cavalry.29
Sometimes the cavalry had to fight its way through Indian territory being ambushed by posses of hostile Loyalists. But in the fervour of the moment, with a candidate wasting away in a cell by the hour, against a background of Irish history, Sinn Fein won the seat.
And, after Sands died, they won it again, on 20 August, when Owen Carron stood as ‘An Anti–H Block Proxy Political Prisoner’. By now the fevered atmosphere generated by the hunger strike had completely converted Sinn Fein to ending the abstention policy. In the Republic, in an election held on 11 June, two H Block prisoners, Kieran Doherty and Paddy Agnew, had both been elected to the Dail. Their victories, and the erosion of the Fianna Fail vote because of the strikes, returned a Fine Gael–Labour minority coalition government in place of Fianna Fail.
Following Carron’s victory, Sinn Fein decided that henceforth it would not merely campaign on H Block tickets but would act as a normal political party to take on the SDLP full-frontally. Gerry Fitt, who had opposed the hunger strike vehemently, was to be targeted in West Belfast by Gerry Adams.
In all, ten hunger-strikers died between May and August 1981, seven Provisionals and three from INLA. The long-drawn-out agony of the ‘Ten Men Dead’, as they became generally known, had something of the same effect on Six County nationalism as did the long-drawn-out executions of the 1916 leaders on the twenty-six counties. The Ten Men Dead were:
Bobby Sands, 27, after sixty-six days, on 5 May; Francis Hughes, 25, after fifty-nine days, on 12 May; Raymond McCreesh, 24, after sixty-one days, on 21 May; Patsy O’Hara, 23, the leader of the INLA men, after sixty-one days, also on 21 May; Joe McDonnell, 30, after forty-six days, on 8 July; Martin Hurson, 27, after forty-six days, on 13 July; Kevin Lynch, 25, INLA, after seventy-one days, on 1 August; Kieran Doherty, 25, after seventy-three days, on 2 August; Thomas McElwee, 23, after sixty-five days, on 8 August; Michael Devine, 23, INLA, after sixty-six days, on 30 August.
The circumstances and the impacts of their deaths varied. Kieran Doherty, for example, who had been elected as a TD in an election held in the Republic in June, created a particular reaction south of the border, as well as north. All ten were young men and their ordeal occasioned a high degree of emotional stress and suffering, both for them and for their families. As the skeletal figures passed away into the pantheon of Irish history, sometimes being followed to their graves by as many as 100, 000 people, the stories of how they had endured, and how they died, spread around not only the Six Counties and Ireland, but throughout the world.
The last hunger-striker to die was Michael Devine, a member of the INLA and a convinced socialist. David Beresford described his final hours as follows:
Father Pat Buckley took Mass in the hospital and went in to see Mickey, who had been too ill to make it. There was an awful smell – almost cancerous of the eating away of flesh mainly from his mouth, but so pervasive that his whole body seemed to be breathing it. Mickey confessed that he was scared, afraid to die. Buckley asked him why he was afraid – he was a free agent; if he was not happy he did not have to do it. Mickey said he felt it was the right thing to do but he was still scared. His eyes were wet and Buckley, taking out a handkerchief to mop his cheeks, could feel the tears in his own eyes. Mickey asked if he could take his confession. Buckley put an arm around him and listened. Red Mickey was finding comfort in the ancient faith.30
Ironically, the turning point in the strike probably came when Pauline McGeown authorised taking Patrick off the strike after he lapsed into unconsciousness on the day Devine died. McGeown, who had had reservations about the strike, had been fasting for forty-two days.
Although Mrs Thatcher won the battle of the hunger strikes, she lost the war. The victory was to prove a pyrrhic one not only for her policy but for the cause of unionism. Against the accusations of racketeering, drugs-dealing and godfathering, the IRA could now make the irrefutable point: the Mafia don’t starve themselves to death for an ideal.
Throughout the strike the Iron Lady remained impervious both to international gestures of solidarity with the strikers and to high-level appeals for compromise. The Pope showed his concern by sending his secretary, the then Monsignor John Magee, to entreat with Sands to end his protest, while at the same time senior Irish church figures asked Thatcher to be flexible. However, she turned down approaches from Cardinal O’Fiaich, Bishop Daly of Derry, and the Irish Commission of Justice and Peace, a body representing the Irish hierarchy. Airey Neave’s death had stiffened an already inflexible character.
In the Indian parliament, the opposition party observed a minute’s silence on Bobby Sands’ death. In New York Union Jacks were pulled down and burned. In Le Mans a street was named after Sands. In Cuba Fidel Castro said: ‘The Irish patriots are in the process of writing one of the most heroic pages in human history.’31 In Paris, the French Foreign Minister, Claude Cheysson, spoke publicly of the ‘supreme sacrifice’ which the hunger-strikers had made, going on to state that their courage demanded respect. The French Government also offered the Dublin Government two gestures of solidarity which Dublin declined. One was to boycott the British royal wedding, the other that President Mitterrand attend Bobby Sands’ funeral.
In April Mrs Thatcher had publicly turned down a request from three Irish MEPs – Neil Blaney, John O’Connell and Sile de Valera, who had all visited Sands – to meet the British Government to discuss the situation. She said, speaking in Saudi Arabia on 20 April 1981: ‘It is not my habit or custom to meet MPs of a foreign country about a citizen of the United Kingdom.’ As we shall see, the following year the British put something of a coach and four through the ‘United Kingdom’ argument. But while the strike continued, Thatcher, and her mouthpiece Humphrey Atkins, maintained a relentlessly hostile line to the prisoners’ demands. While still in Saudi Arabia Thatcher stated (on 21 April): ‘We are not prepared to consider Special Category status for certain groups of people serving sentences for crime. Crime is crime, is crime. It is not political.’ And she greeted Sands’ death with a statement in the Commons: ‘Mr Sands was a convicted criminal. He chose to take his own life. It was a choice that his organisation did not allow to many of its victims.’32 Her words provided a potent recruiting slogan for the young men and women amongst the 100, 000-strong cortège which followed Bobby Sands to the grave two days later in Belfast.
An important turning-point was reached on 13 September when Humphrey Atkins was replaced as Secretary of State by James Prior. Throughout the strike, Atkins, ‘Humph the bumf’, as the Republicans called him, had been regarded as something of a puppet’s glove, the hand in which was Margaret Thatcher. Prior did not want to go to Northern Ireland, and indeed threatened to resign, but Thatcher insisted. When he eventually got to Belfast the strike was nearing its end and he was able to inject some of the ‘Portlaoise spirit’ into the situation. Sinn Fein was under pressure to use its influence to end the protest. The Dungannon priest Fr Denis Faul was becoming increasingly effective in his efforts to persuade the families of the strikers to use their influence to end the strike. As a consequence he was nicknamed ‘Denis the Menace’ and some IRA men took to walking out of his Mass. But he allowed this to disturb him as little as did the hostility of the security forces to his dossiers on their misbehaviour.
The end came on 3 October. The five strikers still fasting were ordered off and the following statement was sent out from the H Blocks on behalf of the Republican prisoners:
Mounting pressure and cleric-inspired demoralisation led to interventions and five strikers have been taken off their fast. We accept that it is a physical and psychological impossibility to recommence a hunger strike after intervention [by the families]. A considerable majority of the present hunger strikers’ families have indicated that they will intervene and under these circumstances, we feel that the hunger strike must for tactical reasons be suspended.33
Three days later the beginnings of the ‘Portlaoise solution’ began to be put into effect. Prior announced that prisoners would be allowed to wear their own clothes. Subsequently all the prisoners’ demands were conceded, to a point where at the time of writing they have been issued with the keys of their own cells and are free to come and go within their wings at any hour of the day or night as they wish, watching videos, reading or playing chess.
Outside the prison walls these gains were paralleled and magnified, in political terms. Scenting the wind, Sinn Fein’s director of publicity, Danny Morrison, speaking at the party’s Ard Fheis on 31 October 1981, announced that the party would contest elections and argued in favour of this step by saying: ‘Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object, if, with a ballot paper in one hand and the armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?’ Using this formula, Sinn Fein pressed on into the electoral arena, although to balance the sentiments of the old anti-abstentionist thinkers in the party, at the next Ard Fheis, on 29 October 1982, the following resolution was passed: ‘Candidates in national and local elections must be unambivalent in support of the armed struggle.’
The armalite and ballot box strategy worked, in the north. In the south, the hunger strike peak of emotion was never again achieved. By 1987 Sinn Fein’s share of the poll fell to only 2 per cent. In the north it took some 10 per cent of the vote in the assembly election which it contested in October 1982, and in the June 1983 Westrninster election won 43 per cent of the Nationalist vote (13.4 per cent of all the Northern Ireland vote). The most important aspect of this upsurge was the defeat of Gerry Fitt by Gerry Adams. Fitt, who had strongly opposed the hunger strikers’ demands, had left his own party and was becoming increasingly estranged from his constituents. On 10 November 1980, he had declared his opposition to concessions for the Blanket Men, saying:
I have to tell the House that I bitterly regret having made those representations [the concession of Special Category status in 1972]. At that time there were 80 Republican prisoners and 40 Loyalist prisoners. I believed that because of the special circumstances at that time, the granting of political special category status would end the strife. I was terribly wrong… the government should make it clear to those engaged in the hunger strike that they will not obtain political status. By telling the truth, and telling it in such a way that it cannot be misunderstood, it is possible that the men on hunger strike will realise the error of their ways and bring the strike to an end… The government must show their resolution and not allow themselves to be blackmailed by people giving support to the hunger strike…34
Then, opposing the moving of a writ for the by-election caused by Sands’ death, proposed by the Welsh Nationalist MP Daifydd Thomas, Fitt said:
Have you taken into account, Mr Speaker, that the emaciated, dead or dying body of an IRA hunger striker is a more lethal weapon than an armalite rifle in the arms of the men of violence? By accepting the motion now, the house may be condemning hunger strikers and others to death.35
Fitt became increasingly unpopular in West Belfast, to the extent that he had once to eject protestors from his home by drawing a revolver. On 3 July 1983, his house was virtually burned down. Demonstrators broke in, piled his furniture in the back yard, burned it and then set fire to the house. It was the final act in a drama of political evolution which had seen Fitt enter parliamentary politics as a Republican Socialist. He was to leave Belfast politics as a member of the House of Lords. Nineteen days after the burning of his home, it was announced that he had been offered and accepted a life peerage. What was not announced was the fact that Margaret Thatcher had herself nominated him. Fitt had originally been proposed on Michael’s Foot’s list. However, Thatcher was so impressed with his stand during both the hunger strike and the period of the Falklands War, when he also supported her against the Dublin Government, that she told Foot that he could have another peer for his list and included Fitt’s name in her own.36
If Fitt’s elevation to the peerage may be taken as symbolising the Tories’ attitude towards its supporters in the hunger strike, that towards its opponents at Westminster had been exemplified the previous December. Ken Livingstone, the Labour MP, had invited Adams and Morrison, then newly elected assembly members, to London to explain their policies. Both were banned from the UK mainland under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Mrs Thatcher was silent on the position of citizens of the UK on this occasion. The exclusion order did nothing to check the rise of the northern Sinn Fein leaders. At the November 1983 Ard Fheis Ruairi O’Bradaigh and Daithi O’Conaill had stood down as president and vice-president of the organisation. Their stated policy reason was that the party was now contesting elections. Adams became president and the party moved to build on its hunger-strike-gained election expertise to set up advice centres throughout the north and to broaden its electoral base, to the extent that by 1991 the party was the second largest on Belfast City Council.
In 1992 Adams suffered a personal reverse when he was defeated by the SDLP’s Joe Hendron. Tactical voting on the part of Loyalists in support of Hendron rather than a Unionist candidate ensured Adams’ ousting in electoral terms, but it did nothing to stem his rising popularity. Ironically, by 15 November 1985 even Mrs Thatcher had come to obliquely concede that Sinn Fein had become a power in the land. She had been forced to agree to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, a concealed effort to shore up the SDLP against the Sinn Fein tide.