Part 5

Obviously, the idea put about in August 1969 that the army had come because British cabinet ministers were upset by the prospect of innocent people being slaughtered in considerable numbers is nonsense. The British army came because British interests in Ireland were threatened. When the slaughter of innocents had not threatened British interests in the twenties and thirties for example—there had been no intervention.

British interests were threatened by the apparent inability of the existing political structures—shaken by the adjustments and attempted adjustments of the previous decade—to assimilate and articulate the emotions now being aroused. This was true in the South as well as in the North. There were tens of thousands of people on the streets of Dublin and other Southern cities demanding that Mr Lynch’s government move to protect the Northern Catholics from what looked like an impending pogrom. Demands were voiced that British property be taken over and held in ransom for the safety of Northern Catholics. Workers at many factories struck. It subsequently emerged that at least two members of Mr Lynch’s cabinet had been in favour of sending the army across the border. Some officers of the army were momentarily more than enthusiastic about doing just that. Had a stop not been put to what was happening in Belfast and Derry it might well have proved impossible for Mr Lynch to ‘hold the line’ against the gut-Republicanism suddenly surging again, not least in his own party.

The situation in the North was such that it threatened the stability of both Irish states. The Army arrived to restore stability and to supervise and insist on reforms—now unmistakably overdue—which would take cognizance of the new pattern of economic relationships. The ‘Downing Street Declaration’, issued on 19 August 1969 over the names of Wilson and Chichester-Clark but penned by Wilson alone, spelled it out. It ‘reaffirmed that in all legislation and executive decisions of Government every citizen of Northern Ireland is entitled to the same equality of treatment and freedom from discrimination as obtains in the rest of the United Kingdom, irrespective of political view or religion’.

What this had to mean—if it was to mean anything—was that the power of the Orange machine was to be broken. Initially there were indications that the Labour government was indeed intent on doing that. The disarming of the RUC and the disbandment of the B Specials were interpreted by both Catholics and Protestants as earnest of a determination to render the machine incapable of reimposing itself. However Mr Wilson’s government, never characterized by the whole-heartedness of its commitments, did little to follow through this initiative. Sir Arthur Young was brought from London to replace the
Inspector-General of the RUC, Anthony Peacocke. But none of the senior police officers responsible for the thuggery of the previous twelve months was dismissed. Some were promoted. Oliver Wright, formerly British Ambassador in Copenhagen, was installed in an office in Stormont Castle to keep an eye on Chichester-Clark and his government. But there were no enforced changes in governmental personnel, no shake-up of the civil service, no interference with the local government administration. In other words Wilson’s government did not pursue with any semblance of determination even the very limited, non-revolutionary objective it had set itself and which the majority of Catholics at that stage might have been prepared to accept.

It began gradually to dawn on the Catholics that when Callaghan talked about ‘new structures’ what he meant was that two Englishmen would be given supervisory positions at the top of the old structures. That was all; and because it was all, the ‘reform programme’ was doomed.

It is comparatively easy to put reforms on to the statute book. All one needs is a parliamentary majority. To put the reforms into effect, however, requires much more. One needs a police force, a magistracy and an army of officials: an administrative apparatus capable of putting them into effect and willing to do so. The administrative apparatus of which Stormont was the lynch-pin was simply not available for that task.

For example: when, in July 1970, Chichester-Clarke’s government, with the connivance of all Catholic MPs, simultaneously passed the Criminal Justice (Temporary Provisions) Act and the Incitement to Religious Hatred Act it probably seemed to British ministers exactly the type of legislative package which was required. The Criminal Justice Act, providing for mandatory prison sentences for rioters, was clearly aimed at the ‘hooligan element’ constantly disrupting the peace of the Catholic ghettoes. Equally clearly, the Incitement to Religious Hatred Act was intended to deal with the various demagogues who were stirring it up in the Protestant ghettoes. One law against the Catholic trouble-makers and one against the Protestant trouble-makers. ‘Firm but fair government,’ commentators kept calling it.

By the end of 1970 109 persons had been brought before the courts charged with offences under the Criminal Justice Act. 105 went to prison. Only one prosecution was brought under the Incitement to Religious Hatred Act, that of Mr John McKeague for the publication and distribution of a book of songs of which the following verse is a fair example:

If guns were made for shooting
Then skulls were made to crack
You’ve never seen a better Taig
Than with a bullet in his back.

Mr McKeague was found not guilty.

The law against the Catholic trouble-makers worked. The law against the Protestant trouble-makers did not.

The arrests of those jailed under the Criminal Justice Act were, of course, effected by the British army. The instinct of the Bogside rioters in 1970 that ‘the Orangemen are still in power’ was soundly based. The power-structure which the British army was defending was not, in any essential, different from that of which the RUC had traditionally been the repressive arm. The pusillanimity of the Wilson government had made it certain that its army would become part of the apparatus of Orangeism. Once that happened the emergence of the Provisional IRA was inevitable.

Much has been written about the emergence of the Provos, almost all of it silly moralizing. The Provisional IRA was not created by a section of the Fianna Fail Party, although some money from Fianna Fail sources did ensure that it was better financed at the outset than would otherwise have been the case. Nor was it the creation of a few blood-lusting Catholic Nationalists in the North. Nor, despite the paranoiac ramblings of churchmen and contributors to the Daily Telegraph, is it part of an international terrorist conspiracy to destroy civilization as we know it.

The machinery of government could not operate democratically. It was not designed for the job. So the fight for a democratic Northern Ireland was always likely to become a fight against the state itself. The ‘national issue’ was going to be posed. The only question left open was: by whom and in what form?

When, in January 1969, Johnnie McMenamin saw a crowd of men in his street in the middle of the night smashing up houses and beating up his neighbours and rushed to the telephone to dial 999 he was reacting as any working-class person in an ‘ordinary’ society would to such a spectacle. But what does one do when it is the police themselves who are doing the marauding? Who then does one call in?

A few months later that question would have been answered in the Bogside with: ‘the British army’. And when the army begins to behave exactly as the police had done, what then?

One turns to oneself, there being no one else, and tries to put together an organization as capable as possible of repelling the assaults. In the short term the politics of the defence group is irrelevant. It is irrelevant whether it has any politics at all. The long term is different. On a day-to-day basis defence groups can prevent random arrests, assaults and worse in an area simply by refusing admission to forces so intentioned. But tiny enclaves cannot exist in isolation for ever.

In 1970 the poster most frequently to be seen in windows and on gable walls in the Bogside and the Falls depicted a clenched fist and the words: ‘Never Again!’ Never again were mobs, whether in uniform or not, going to be allowed to rampage through the streets shooting and petrol bombing. The logic of that demanded that an offensive military campaign be launched against the state. When it is the state itself which threatens to destroy you it is necessary to attack the state, not just to defend oneself against its attacks, to try to ensure that there will be no repetition.

The trajectory of events led inevitably to a military campaign against the existence of Northern Ireland. The responsibility for the launching of the campaign rests entirely with those who created the situation which made that inevitable; that is, with the British ruling class and its agents in Ireland. That said, one can analyse why the campaign took the form that it did, how the politics of the activists involved developed and what, in the light of that, ought now to be done.

In 1968 and 1969 the left and the right, the ‘militants’ and the ‘moderates’ in the civil rights movement, were united on one point: that partition was irrelevant. No meeting was complete without at least one speaker declaring that we wished to make it clear that we were not setting out to unite Ireland, rather to achieve change within Northern Ireland—the extent of the change desired varying according to the tendency to which the speaker adhered. This was in line with the general drift of Catholic politics for the previous decade.

The left was, if anything, even more determined than other anti-Unionist groups to ‘keep partition out of it’; and for reasons which were not ignoble. The partition issue had for so long been the ‘property’ of what we regarded as contending Tory factions that the mere mention of it smacked of jingoism. The result was that when, in 1969‒70, Catholics in Belfast and Derry were, in the literal sense of the word, forced to raise partition there was no existing organization for them to turn to naturally. So they created one. The Provisional IRA—notwithstanding allegations to the contrary from various ‘leftists’ in Ireland and Britain did not ‘bring partition into it’. The Provisional IRA exists because partition was going to come into it whether or not the right, the left, or anyone else thought this advisable.

The one organization which might have been expected to have preserved its anti-partitionist credentials in the period before 1969 was the Republican movement, which traditionally had offered little other than a ‘32-County Republic’ as a remedy for all Irish ills. After the débâcle of the 1956‒62 border campaign, however, the Republican leadership had turned away from their traditional politics—or lack of them. Realizing that their emphasis on purely military activity had played no small part in rendering them politically irrelevant, they sought to make an analysis which would enable them to build a firm political base for the future. Assisted by products of the British Communist Party such as Dr Roy Johnston—the Number One Republican ideologue of the middle and late sixties—they finally adopted a crudely updated version of Joseph Stalin’s ‘Stages Theory of Revolution’. This laid down that there were predetermined stages through which ‘the Revolution’ must pass, that it was not possible to skip stages, and that therfore it would be a tactical mistake to make demands designed to achieve, say, stage three before stage two had been reached. As Dr Johnston explained it to us in Derry in 1969, stage one in the Irish Revolution would be the winning of ‘bourgeois democracy’ in the North; stage two would be the achievement of an ‘independent capitalist Ireland’; stage three would be ‘socialism in Ireland’. In an effort to achieve stage one the Republicans had helped to found the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and had directed the energies of its members in the North towards the building of the NICRA as a ‘broad-based movement for reform’.

Stated briefly the theory sounds crazy; and indeed it is. Still, in the mid-sixties it represented a genuine attempt by the leadership and the remaining rank and file of the Republican movement to escape from the narrow nationalism and gun-
fetishism of the past and to lay the basis for a socialist republican organization. One of the effects of the adoption of the theory was that in 1968 and 1969 some Republicans were among those most vehemently opposed to mention of partition (that had to wait for stage two) and equally strongly opposed to attempts to argue socialist politics from civil rights platforms (that was stage three).

When after 1969 Northern Catholics began to raise the question of partition without waiting for the culmination of stage one the Republican perspective became irrelevant.

The non-Republican left failed to understand the importance of the national question because it had no coherent analysis of the situation. The Republican left failed to understand it because its coherent analysis turned out to be wrong. Moreover, the left as a whole had not managed by August 1969 clearly to demonstrate the difference which did exist between itself and the ‘moderates’. And it was largely as a result of that failure that when the national question was posed anyway it was posed in stark and increasingly sectarian, for-or-against-partition terms.

Lacking any clear, common programme the original detonating group in Derry all but disappeared into the Citizens Action Committee. After that, left-wingers directed attention and hopes towards the People’s Democracy. But while maintaining a separate existence the PD too was for a long time effectively submerged in the mainstream of civil rights agitation, establishing itself not as an organization with a programme qualitatively different from that of the ‘moderates’, but as a lively and aggressive ginger-group within the same broad movement. To the mass of the people it was clear that the PD in Belfast and White, Finbar Doherty, myself, and others in Derry were more militant than the NICRA or the Derry Citizens Action Committee. But it was not clear what we were being militant about. This meant that Unionist spokesmen were able plausibly to suggest that the difference was this: that the moderates were anti-Protestant—and the militants even more anti-Protestant.

This was plausible because it contained a tiny kernel of truth. There was one sense in which the civil rights movement was ‘anti-Protestant’. The movement was demanding an end to discrimination. Its leading moderate spokesmen, such as John Hume and Gerry Fitt, insisted endlessly that this was all they were demanding. In a situation in which Protestant workers had more than their ‘fair’ share of jobs, houses and voting power the demand for an end to discrimination was a demand that Catholics should get more jobs, houses and voting power than they had at present—and Protestants less. This simple calculation seemed to occur to very few leading civil rights ‘moderates’, but five minutes talk with a Paisleyite counter-demonstrator in 1968 or 1969 would have left one in no doubt that it was not missed by the Protestant working class. There never was the slightest possibility of a movement demanding ‘fair play’ in Northern Ireland engaging the support, or even securing the neutrality, of Protestant workers. In terms of strict economics the only programme with any potential to undercut sectarianism would have been one which linked the demand for fair distribution of the relevant commodities to demands designed to increase absolutely the number of jobs and houses available for distribution. This would have involved campaigning for an end to the system of grants and inducements to private industry, a ban on the export of profits from Northern Ireland, direct state investment in areas of high unemployment. With regard to housing it would have meant demanding the cessation of repayments and interest payments by the Housing Trust and the local authorities to the London banks—payments which were and are crippling the housing programme in the North. In a phrase, it would have involved the elaboration of a comprehensive anti-capitalist, not just anti-Unionist, programme.

If any group had fought consistently—from within or without the civil rights movement—or both—for such a programme, the all-class Catholic alliance, which is what the civil rights movement became, could not have held together. And such a programme, hardly the normal stuff of Northern Irish politics, would not have attracted immediate mass support; but it might have enabled those of us in Derry at least to go on talking to Protestants in the Fountain in 1969. At any rate the matter was never put to the test. No such group existed or emerged.

By the middle of 1969 ‘the left’ was established as those who were most impatient and most willing to run risks, who wanted to go along the same road as the moderates, but further, faster. It was not at all established that the left wanted to go along a different road. Thus, when the explosion came in August we were still imprisoned within the sectarian strait-jacket, forced to operate almost exclusively within the Catholic community but quite unable in doing so to give any clear lead to the Catholic masses. When the raging bitterness of Catholics in Belfast and Derry swamped Fitt and Hume and carried the partition issue on to the centre of the political stage, support did not pass over into the socialist camp. There was no socialist camp there to receive it. The politics of the Provisionals was predetermined by that fact, and it is bottomless hypocrisy for ‘leftists’ in Ireland, including and especially those who held leadership positions in the Official Republican movement before 1969, now to attribute the reactionary social attitudes of a part of the Provisional movement to the malign influence of agents of Fianna Fail or some other suggested diabolus ex machina. The primary reason why the Provisionals exist is that ‘socialism’ as we presented it was shown to be irrelevant. The Provisionals are the inrush which filled the vacuum left by the absence of a socialist option.

That the national question was going to be posed in nonsocialist terms, that it was going to be posed as a straight, sectarian choice between the maintenance of the border and the incorporation of the Six into the 26 Counties, was further guaranteed by the fact that the ‘struggle’ had been confined to the North. Since 1922 the majority of Protestants had understood and had been encouraged by their leaders to understand that any attack on Unionism was an attempt to extend the rule of the Dublin government of the day over them. For very sound reasons the Protestants were against that. Every self-respecting left-winger was against it too. At all times we were opposed to the low wages, the bad housing, the pathetic level of welfare benefits and Rome-rule in the schools in the South, and we were never done saying so. (In the period before August 1969 this indeed was one of the reasons why we were against raising partition at all—that Dublin had nothing to offer.) Thereafter, when we found that we had to deal with partition, we continued to make it clear that in supporting a fight to end the Northern state we were not advocating its absorption into the South as it stood.

But these unimpeachable sentiments had no convincing practical expression. We were not part of a fight in the South against the set-up there, and one cannot expect acceptance as an opponent of bourgeois nationalism if one is not seen to be part of a struggle against that section of the national bourgeoisie which is actually in power.

The point was illustrated by one early elaborate attempt to ‘extend the fight to the South’. In April 1969 the People’s Democracy organized a march from Belfast to Dublin. The marchers swung into O’Connell Street after four days on the road chanting, pithily enough, ‘Lynch Lynch, lynch O’Neill’. What we meant was that Lynch and O’Neill represented two equally oppressive Tory regimes and that the working class in each area ought to rise up and eject them from power. There was a difference, however. We had been involved in a well-publicized campaign to bring O’Neill down. We had not been involved in any similar movement against Lynch. So what the people standing in O’Connell Street understood us to mean was that O’Neill, as a Unionist, would have to go, and that Lynch would have to go because he was insufficiently militant in pursuing this same objective. The difference between Fianna Fail and the revolutionary left was seen, not in terms of the social content of the societies they aimed at, but almost exclusively in terms of the intensity with which they were willing to attack the regime in the North.

That is how the Protestants in the North saw it: not that we were opposed to Catholic bourgeois-nationalist rule in any part of Ireland, but that we were in favour of its extension to every part of Ireland—even more strongly than the bourgeois-nationalists.
And that was some difference.

All this resulted in confusion so total as almost to defy description. At one of our meetings at the bottom of Westland Street in the summer of 1969 I recall making a ten-minute speech which included the following two points: (1) that Lynch was a traitor because he had not sent his troops over the border when we needed them, and (2) that if he had sent them we would have opened up a ‘second front’ to drive them out again. Looking back, I find it difficult to know what the listeners can have made of this.

The absence of a movement in the South allowed the establishment there much room for manoeuvre, and they certainly needed it. And it gave the Provos, with their lack of any analysis of the South and therefore of any basis on which they could oppose it, an almost clear field in the North. It was they and their politics which began to dictate the course of events. What most significantly they dictated was the final destruction of the Orange machine as a ruling institution.

By the time the Provo campaign got into gear all tenuous links between Catholic radicals and Protestant workers had been broken. The mass of the Protestant population reacted to the campaign by demanding ever more stringent measures to smash the culprits down and made no distinction between Provos and Officials once the Officials joined in. That, after all, was the way such affairs had always been managed in the past. For a long time the British government tried to accede to the demand. The British strategy from mid-1970 until March 1972 was militarily to defeat the IRA and to hope that the Protestant population would be so cheered by this victory that they might readily accept a reformed Stormont. The Catholics, suitably demoralized by the IRA’s defeat, would thankfully accept the reforms and wait quietly for them to have some effect. That is what the Falls curfew, the ‘arms searches’, the murder of Cusack and Beattie and internment were all about. It failed totally. The reason why it failed was that the Catholic guerrilla forces were not defeated. As long as they held out the strategy could not work. Bloody Sunday was the last desperate effort to make it work, and it was the most disastrous failure to date. Catholic intransigence increased tenfold. Once that became apparent, Stormont was doomed and the stage set for direct rule.

Direct rule presaged a new British strategy. But it did not connote any change in the overall British objective. Britain was still seeking to achieve a reformed ‘democratic’ Northern Ireland. That had been the central thrust of British policy in Ireland for a decade. Direct rule meant merely that Heath’s government had realized that buying off the Protestants by publicly brutalizing the Catholics was not going to achieve it.

When Stormont was prorogued a shudder went through the Orange machine of such violence that it began to fall apart. Unionism had always meant two things: Protestant power and the link with Britain. Direct rule made it dramatically clear that the Unionists now could choose one or the other—but not both. And they could only choose the former in opposition to Britain.

That had always been on the cards. That is what the Downing Street Declaration had meant, although Wilson was too cowardly a bourgeois leader to face up to it.

While the strategy of repressing the Catholics had been open and unashamed it had been possible for Unionist leaders to maintain or to pretend that the choice need never be made. Not any longer. What has happened to the Unionist Party since March 1972 is that the various elements within it have made their choice—always excepting Mr Faulkner, who has never been a one for making choices while there remains a sliver of a chance of having it both ways. Mr Faulkner has been impaled for so long on the fence that he could be torn neatly in half along the perforations.

Those, like Mr Craig, whose political careers had been entirely within the Orange-Unionist complex and who represented, objectively, small local business threatened by the expanding operations of outside monopolies, went so far as to contemplate cutting the link with Britain if that was the price to be paid for clamping the machine back on to the state. More sensitive to the overall needs of big business were men such as Roy Bradford who had achieved political eminence other than by threading their way up through the various Orange and Unionist institutions. They had no real commitment to Orangeism and in the year after direct rule they scuttled out of it, most of them issuing press statements drawing attention to that passionate commitment to common decency which had always characterized their public lives. Some of them joined the ‘moderate’ Alliance Party; others waited, refusing to place bets until the likely winner emerged more clearly.

Dr Paisley was the one significant Protestant leader who had been outside the apparatus from the start. He was a member neither of the Unionist Party nor of the Orange Order. It was for that reason that immediately after direct rule he plumped more quickly and decisively than any official Unionist for the maintenance of the British link. UDI, which Mr Craig was wont to canvass in his more flamboyant moments—that is, the machine back in place as the effective state apparatus and this time with no ‘outside’ supervision—would have denied Dr Paisley, as surely as his erstwhile enemies Bradford and Faulkner, any position in the power structure. For a time Dr Paisley therefore advocated the total integration of Northern Ireland into the United Kingdom and began to adopt the required ‘British’ attitudes to Southern Ireland, community relations, and so on. British commentators, rather charmingly, attributed Dr Paisley’s new moderation to the civilizing effects of membership of the Westminster Parliament.

Direct rule lifted racks of Catholic politicians off the hooks on which they had been dangling. Mr Lynch, for example, had not had an easy time. Each British outrage against the Northern Catholic community had sent a gust of Republicanism across the border, and he had spent the previous three years frantically trimming his sails to suit the prevailing wind, all the time hampered by the fact that some of his crew were intent on making the craft capsize. Every time the British army killed a Catholic he would essay a Republican phrase. A few days after the funeral he would make the point that of course he and his government were firmly committed to a moderate course. After Bloody Sunday he sent a car-load of cabinet ministers to the requiem mass. A fortnight later, the furore having slightly calmed, his Minister of Justice, Donagh O’Malley, announced the introduction, ‘if necessary’, of ‘military or special courts’ to deal with Republicans. With Stormont gone Mr Lynch was able to make much less erratic progress towards an Anglo-Irish consensus. With only an occasional judicious genuflexion towards a Republican past, he was able gradually to tighten the screw of repression.

Direct rule forced the Protestant workers to realize that Britain cared little for them and their ‘loyalty’. At the same time Catholic workers were being made to see that the South cared just as little for them and their ‘Republicanism’.

This realization drained from the Catholic ghettoes some of the fierce passion for a united Ireland which twelve months previously had provided an emotional dynamic seeming to carry the community forward towards the achievement of the old goal. Coupled with the welcome given anyway to the end of Stormont and the fragmenting effect of incidents like the Best killing, it created in the Bogside and like places emotional and political confusion which led in turn to a degree of passivity. By the end of 1972 the Bogside was more ready than it had been for two years to accept whatever package the British government wrapped up in its White Paper. The fact that Catholic acceptance was not certain, the fact that there remains considerable doubt whether the collection of plastic conventionalities issued on 20 March 1973 will work at all in the long run, is attributable in large part to the factor which had removed Stormont in the first place—the dogged refusal of the Provos to give up.

If the Provos had heeded the chorus of advice to call a halt when Stormont was prorogued, support in the Catholic ghettoes would have flowed rapidly to the SDLP. The Provos did not have a political base from which they could have counteracted this swing. The Nationalist Party was withering away. The Officials and other leftists had solidified their organizations in some places but did not wield decisive influence in the crucial areas, Belfast and Derry. Once established as the sole authentic voice of the Catholic masses the SDLP’s team of quick-change artists—perhaps with an occasional dissenting voice from within—would have worked energetically to deliver their constituents up to the settlement Whitelaw was attempting to dictate, and, being proficient in such things, they might well have succeeded.

At first sight the SDLP is a curious party. Of the six members of the Stormont Parliament who came together to form it in the summer of 1970 three had been elected as Independents, one as a member of the Republican Labour Party, one as a Nationalist and one as a member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party. Mr Gerry Fitt was selected as leader because he was, on aggregate, the least unacceptable to all the others. Mr Fitt is one of those people whose personalities seem to create a particular atmosphere, no matter where they be.

Since it was formed by the coming-together of six individuals elected on four different platforms, each of whom had his own local power-base, the SDLP was riven with contradictions. But underlying all the contradictions there has been a basic consistency, the significance of which far outweighs that of various internal squabbles. In the period after August 1969 it was, from the British point of view, necessary to have an organization which could speak plausibly for the Catholic community in the North, which would be willing to accept, and capable of leading the community as a whole to accept, a reformist solution in the British interest. No such organization existed. The SDLP emerged to take on the role, and it is not without significance that members of the Labour Party front bench at Westminster were active in promoting its formation.

Since then it has striven manfully to coax the Catholics towards acceptance of the British objective. It has not been easy. The SDLP has not always been helped by the means the British government has used to attain its objective. Military assaults tended to stiffen the resistance and boost the Republicanism of Catholic areas and on occasion this carried the SDLP, conscious of the necessity not to lose contact with its base, outside the pale of consensus politics—for example after the murder of Cusack and Beattie. In the six months after internment, particularly in the period immediately after Bloody Sunday when it appeared that Catholic rage might not be assuaged by any British reforms, a few of them took the precaution of hedging their bets—driving Provo leaders around for all to see or trying to break into the gelignite-trafficking business. But always the overriding aim was to find a way back into the bourgeois consensus. Mr Fitt never lost sight of this. During the period when the SDLP was pledging daily that it would not ever, under any possible circumstances, etc. talk to British ministers while a single man remained ‘behind the wire’, Mr Fitt’s chatter was such as to lead a junior minister in Whitelaw’s administration to lament to a political correspondent on a weekly paper: ‘If this is what he is like when he is refusing to talk to us, God help our eardrums when he changes his mind.’ As change his mind he did, of course.

At the beginning of 1973, as Whitelaw prepared to announce the Tory blueprint for the future, Provo persistence remained the single most formidable stumbling-block: because whether or not the Catholic community as a whole now adjudged attacks on the army to serve any worthwhile purpose, the mere fact that the attacks continued forced Catholics to take sides. And when it came to the sticking point there was still no doubt which side most of them would take.

Whitelaw’s White Paper and the Bills based on it set out the framework within which British capitalism wanted Irish politics to be conducted. What, in summary, they said was this: the contradictions between the two sections of Irish capitalism have all but disappeared. A new relationship between the political representatives of these interests must therefore be found. At present this requires political office to be shared between the Catholic and Protestant middle classes. Under an executive so constituted Catholic workers will not and must not be exploited more than Protestant workers. Once an assembly is elected we shall look at its composition. If it appears likely to be able to work towards such a situation it will be allowed powers to do so. If it appears unlikely to be able, or willing, to achieve this, we will intervene directly to impose the structure we wish to see.

The White Paper was issued to the accompaniment of a massive propaganda effort. On the Sunday before its publication Cardinal Conway delivered a ‘sermon’ in Armagh Cathedral which came close to suggesting that it would be a sin to reject it. (It is to be noted that in the nineteenth century Catholic prelates in Ireland retained a certain regard for public decency and a modicum of self-respect; they waited until British governments had actually announced their plans for Ireland before issuing endorsements.)

In the months before and after the publication of the White Paper other stratagems, less public and innocent than the employment of pliant clerics, were used to maximize its chances of popular acceptance. British Army murder squads were sent out in Belfast to shoot up Catholic areas, hoping so to terrorize the inhabitants that they would accept whatever was offered. It was very difficult to distinguish between the activities of these units, who operated in civilian clothes from unmarked cars, and the parallel activities of right-wing Protestant assassins. Probably it will never be known what percentage of the ‘unexplained’ murders in Belfast since mid-1972 each can claim.

In the 26 Counties at the same time British agents were at work petrol-bombing police stations, suborning members of the Irish security services and, almost certainly, planting bombs and killing people. There was later to be some dispute between two of these agents, Kenneth and Keith Littlejohn, and British ministers about whether the Littlejohns had been in breach of orders when they robbed a Dublin bank; what was not in dispute was that the British government was sending criminals into the 26 Counties to make mayhem, in the hope of engendering a law-and-order atmosphere conducive to an anti-IRA crackdown. The most dramatic piece of such mayhem occurred on 1 December 1972, when two bombs exploded in Dublin while the Dail was debating the Offences against the State (Amendment) Bill. This lays down that if a senior police officer says that you did it, you did it.

The Bill was opposed by the opposition parties, Fine Gael and Labour, not because they were hostile to law-and-order, but because they saw no reason to help Mr Lynch out of difficulties which, they reckoned, were of his own making. Some dissident members of Mr Lynch’s own party were also pledged to oppose the measure. It seemed certain, therefore, to be defeated. Then the bombs exploded outside, killing two and injuring more than a hundred. With the dead and the maimed strewn all around, concern for civil liberty quickly disappeared. A few Labour Party mavericks did hold on to the stubborn belief that to send a man to jail on the unsupported say-so of a policeman was going a bit far. But the main Party spokesman on such matters was Dr O’Brien.

The fact that some members of Mr Lynch’s party were not enthusiastic about the bill—or about law-and-order generally—had much to do with the defeat of Fianna Fail in the General Election of February 1973 and its replacement by the coalition of former fascists and reformed radicals led by Messrs Cosgrave, Corish, Fitzgerald and O’Brien.

With both the Protestant and the Catholic communities in the North divided and confused, with a more-than-friendly government in the South and a blank-cheque endorsement from the leader of the Catholic Church, hopes for the success of the White Paper plan were high indeed. Elections for the ‘Northern Ireland Assembly’ were held in June. On the Catholic side, only the SDLP offered candidates in all constituencies and they swept the board. (The Provisionals, as an illegal organization, could not of course put candidates forward.) Before the election Mr Craig, having despaired of taking the Orange machine with him in a piece, had left to form the ‘Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party’ from as many of the components as he could get. He made an electoral alliance with Dr Paisley and they, together with various other dissident loyalists, won rather more Protestant votes than Mr Faulkner’s Official Unionists. The Alliance Party did poorly, the Northern Ireland Labour Party disastrously.

After the election a protracted period of wheeling and dealing between these parties commenced in an attempt to form a ‘power-sharing’ executive. How far, if at all, the RUC should be reformed, and what powers, if any, a Council of Ireland should possess were notable stumbling-blocks. Formulas and counter-formulas were produced. Mr Whitelaw held meeting after meeting with representatives of the various parties. In August Mr Heath went to Belfast to express irritation that more rapid progress was not being made. In the same month the Provos started bombing Britain.

Since the publication of the White Paper, and presumably in order to assist in its implementation, claims that the Provisionals had finally been smashed multiplied. Such claims were compounded of—in about equal measures—fact, wishful thinking and misunderstanding.

The British tactic of directing both open and covert military operations, not at the Provisionals as such, but more generally at any community which might be tempted to give the Provos support, had met some success. lt had made things very difficult for Provo activists; it had not made them impossible. In Belfast, where the pressure was strongest, the campaign continued, albeit at a reduced level. In Derry there was a bombing or a shooting weekly. Activity in the countryside was stepped up. In South Armagh particularly, Provo units fought and seemed to win a series of set-piece battles.

The decision to launch a campaign in Britain was taken after much heartsearching. The fact that the British had taken the war to the people in the North removed any quasimoral inhibition Republicans felt about involving British civilians. The new campaign was directly in support of what had become the Provos’ central, short-term demand—that the British set a time-limit for the withdrawal of their troops.

Support for withdrawal among British people had been growing for some time. It had manifested itself in a ‘bring the boys home’ campaign among service families, in the speeches of various Labour politicians and in a general weariness with the whole question of Ireland. Mr Heath was quite explicit that the bombing campaign would not lead to the growth of this movement, nor would it direct the thinking of any British government along such lines. Rather would it stiffen the will of the British people to see the Northern Ireland operation through. Editorials in all major British newspapers made the same point. Time will tell. And, contrary to the assertion that the Provos are on the verge of defeat, time is something they believe they have in abundance.

The Provisionals are very young. Most of them were at school when the ‘Troubles’ began on 5 October 1968. Since then, trouble is the only life they have known. They are very, very determined. If the Irish conflict could be settled by determination, by unconcern for personal aggrandizement, by an ability and a willingness to fight on against overwhelming disadvantageous odds, the Republicans would be assured of victory. On their own, however, such qualities are not decisive.

The Provos, in the North especially, are almost entirely working-class; but for the reasons outlined earlier many of them have little understanding of the need for working-class politics. At leadership level they are shot through with Catholic Nationalism. Their ideologists tend frequently towards a mystical conception of Nationhood and are, therefore, sometimes more concerned to re-enact scenarios from the past than to deal with present reality. Between 1971 and 1973, as the Provos developed into the most effective urban guerrilla army of the twentieth century, they managed marvellously to frustrate the designs of British governments. But finally to frustrate such designs it is necessary to have a coherent, class-based programme. Thus far, the only detailed programme the Provisionals have produced is the document Eire Nua, the centrepiece of which is a hare-brained scheme for four regional parliaments in Ireland. (This idea was first mooted by Brian ua Dubhghaill in the columns of An Phoblacht in 1934.) As an alternative to British plans it is quite unreal and despite energetic promotion it has excited little interest, much less gathered support.

Only the revolutionary left could offer the programme which is needed. If it is to do that it must quickly learn the lessons of the last five years. The left failed in Ireland. There is nothing to despair about in that. Even Trotsky made mistakes. Mistakes are disastrous only when one fails or refuses to recognize that they were mistakes and fails thereby to learn from them.

We have learned that mass ‘influence’ or prominent involvement in mass agitation is, despite sometime appearances to the contrary, meaningless and fruitless unless one is in the process of forging the political instrument necessary to lead such agitation to victory over the opposing force. We have learned that it is impossible to do that if one is not forearmed with a coherent class analysis of the situation and a clear programme based on it.

We need a movement without illusions in any section of the bourgeois class, which understands that the interests of all sections of the ruling class in Ireland, Orange, Green and pastel-pink, are now identical and that to attempt to ally with one section against another is to become the plaything of the enemy.

We need a movement which will deal with sectarianism by fighting all its manifestations. That means, among other things, confronting the power of the Catholic church in the South.

We need a movement which understands the continuing importance of the national question—that it cannot be avoided; and which will seek to show to those, like the Provos, who are tempted therefore to concentrate on it exclusively that to demand a ‘united Ireland’ in the 1970s without reference to its social content is to demand something which imperialism, in the long term, has no essential interest in denying and which a large section of the working class, in the short term, has no essential interest in achieving.

In a phrase, we need to build a mass, revolutionary Marxist party. The opportunity to do it will present itself. In the Catholic community in the North, particularly among the rank and file of both Republican movements, there are many who seek for an analysis which will enable them to carry the struggle on to a new phase.

The apparatus of discrimination, the mechanism whereby Protestant workers had been given an illusory sense of privilege, has been wrecked beyond repair. Placed in the same social situation as their Catholic counterparts many Protestant workers will react—as they have done—by moving to the right. Others will recognize that the ferocious loyalty they gave to Orange leaders was never really reciprocated. They will recognize more quickly their identity of interest with Catholic workers if there emerges an organization with roots in the Catholic working class which is seen to be opposing the conservatism and clericalism which has shrouded that community for so long.

Either British imperialism or the Irish working class will win. There is no other social force in Ireland with a potential for power. In the end, the only thing which can prevent William Whitelaw putting his priorities into operation is the revolutionary overthrow of his parasite class. The future in Ireland lies with the small but at last steadily growing, forces of Marxism. To make the revolution we need a revolutionary party. This book is intended as a contribution to discussion of how best to build it.