I AN UNSENTIMENTAL VIEW FROM ENGLAND
Readers in the US, especially the forty million people with remote Irish ancestry, albeit 56 per cent derived from the Scots-Irish, may subscribe to a republican fantasy view of Ireland, much as the English have an idea of Provence or Tuscany derived from cookbooks, novels and a villa holiday. Imaginary Ireland has led some Irish-Americans (not least those organised as the Irish Northern Aid Committee or NORAID) to pour money into Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army, or IRA, although the largest source of weapons in recent decades was the Libyan dictator Colonel Ghaddafi, memorably dubbed ‘loony tunes’ by the Irish-American president Ronald Reagan. Ghaddafi is only one of the international friends of Sinn Fein–IRA (which also include Cuba and Syria, the PLO and ETA) who are regarded with intense suspicion by those who conduct US foreign policy.
Even some American Jews are not immune to the obscure romance of the IRA. In 2005 no less a personage than Elie Wiesel, the living conscience of the Holocaust, attended a New York junket organised by Bill and Hillary Clinton on religion, conflict and reconciliation. One of Wiesel’s fellow guests was Sinn Fein president, and IRA Army Council member, Gerry Adams, whose organisation is a long-standing supporter of Palestinian (and Basque) terrorists. Perhaps Wiesel was ignorant of the fact that Adams’s father lit bonfires on the Black Mountain to guide Luftwaffe bombers towards Belfast, where they killed over a thousand people in a devastating series of raids that wiped out 50 per cent of the housing stock. Adams’s party, Sinn Fein, also annually celebrates around a statue of Sean Russell, an IRA terrorist whose organisation declared war on the British in January 1939, putting the Nationalist community under the protection of Nazi Germany, to where he went to train as a spy.1
Modern England exhibits many signs of cultural decline, which amuses or saddens the quick and witty. However, the decline of English culture is at least matched by what has happened across the Irish Sea, which despite the lingering flutey-voiced sentimentality has become a vulgarised version of Essex, a rather beautiful English county unfairly traduced as the epicentre of a crass materialism symbolised by ‘Essex man’, whom like greed Margaret Thatcher allegedly invented.
A post-imperialist cringe means that less attention has been paid to the inhabitants of an island once associated with Joyce and Yeats, or C. S. Lewis and Louis MacNeice if one is so minded, for Ulster had a culture too. Due to its affluent American diaspora and the European Union, the Irish Republic has become much richer, while Northern Ireland is kept afloat by an inflated public sector providing outdoor relief to its middle class. Since 1997 the Irish have overtaken the British in per-capita GDP, and in a few years are projected to be richer than the citizens of affluent Luxembourg.2 There is a price. Some of Ireland’s most prominent businessmen have a, doubtless ill-deserved, reputation for ruthlessness.3 Fans regard such figures as genially piratical; others think they are greedy and mean-spirited, a description that might also apply to large swathes of the Irish in the English building trades, although competently reliable young Poles are displacing this horde of bodgers and shysters. Bizarrely, English local government enables Irish travellers to defy—for they are not ignorant of them—planning laws that apply to everyone else living in these islands. Taste inhibits one from dwelling on the predominant ethnic identity of Catholic clergy involved in the paedophile scandals, who along with the bishops responsible for the cover-ups have disgraced and embarrassed the Church. They are not Chinese, Germans or Filippinos. Although many Irish people fought for Britain in the two world wars, one might not know it, for the number of memorials to the dead of those conflicts is dwarfed by those to the heroes of the Easter Rising and the Civil War. The last world war has other embarrassments. In addition to president de Valera’s unfortunate condolences to the German people on the suicide of their Führer, there is the less-known matter of how the Catholic Church provided sanctuary for Croatian Catholic war criminals.4
Then there is ‘the culture’, which should not be confused with the occasional minor Irish poet winning the Nobel Prize for literature. Various provincial cliques and coteries, whether eccentrically Anglo-Irish, or just plain Irish, are inflated out of all proportion to their actual significance by their admiring fellows in the metropolitan British media. It is also depressing that the only celebrated visual art is the political graffiti—known as Muriels in Belfast—that adorns the ends of terraced housing. Hollywood contributes its quotient of surreal movies about nobly moody Irish terrorists allegedly facing agonising moral dilemmas, rather than the reality of intimidating drunks cutting (Republican Catholic) people’s throats in Belfast bars for such grave offences as spilling their drink, a practice that assumed global notoriety after the slaying of Robert McCartney (1971–2005). It can depict Irish-American cops as crooked or psychopathic in such movies as LA Confidential or Internal Affairs, but realism departs once the movies are about the emerald isle. Drink plays a large role in what is a deeply unattractive fusion of sentimentality and violence, where people are quick to take offence as Robert McCartney and Brendan Devine discovered (senior Belfast IRA figures stabbed and battered McCartney to death in Magennis’s bar after Devine had made an observation about one of the females in their company). Speaking of bars, dingy Irish theme pubs are ubiquitous in Europe, with their fake swirling Celtic tat and Guinness, and giant monitors for football and rugby, Gaelic or otherwise, which only partially drowns out the relentless, mindless gabbling known as ‘craik’. Some evenings these places are given over to interminable fiddle and jiggy music, or to tear-jerking rebel songs, although a truly weird cultural format, consisting of boys and girls hopping up and down with their arms rigid at their sides, has even made it on to the West End stage in London.
England has undergone the reverse cultural colonisation of the erstwhile oppressed. As fluent talkers, the Irish have colonised entire areas of British television, with the benignly unctuous Terry Wogan succeeded by the vulgarly queer Graham Norton, whose sexually obsessive innuendo even managed to fall below the (very) low standards of British television comedy. The skill of the late Dave Allen or Dermot Morgan (whose capacity to speak home truths about dipsomaniacs and crazy clergy made them both very unpopular in Ireland) has become but a memory.
Membership of the European Economic Community in 1973 broadened the Irish people’s horizons away from their perplexing love affair with Franco’s Spain or their curious penchant for living in England while muttering about the ‘fookin’ British’ in the queue for handouts in English post offices. The Irish have skilfully dipped into the bottomless trough of EU funds, securing £14 billion (or roughly US$25 billion) between 1973 and 1991, mainly in the form of agricultural subsidies. Some border areas have never progressed from a long history of banditry and smuggling. Criminal jiggery-pokery with differential duties and Value Added Tax rates between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland mean that smuggled diesel fuel, pigs and tobacco are a major source of income for the entrepreneurial gangsters of the Provisional IRA, who then recycle their illicit profits into Bulgarian, English and Italian property holdings as well as arms or drugs. A good movie, The General, about the murder of Veronica Guerin, an investigative reporter who probed that sordid milieu once too often, conveys the brute realities of the Dublin criminal–terrorist scene rather better than the Irish-American cinematic kitsch that merely flirts with the subject of terrorist violence. A significant exception to this sentimentalising trash is the amusing, and explicitly trashy, Halloween V, with its gleeful demolition of Irish-American Celtic fantasies, as a mad entrepreneur uses insect-riddled pumpkins to destroy America’s children following a trigger signal hidden in a subliminal TV advert.
A leading role among the European Union’s smaller nations has been followed by participation in other manifestations of soft power, such as international organisations and NGOs, where the Irish have found forums for their impassioned moralising self-assertion. Any cook or pop star can become a celebrity seer nowadays in a culture where other forms of authority have withered.5 Superannuated rock musicians have boarded this bandwagon, with Bono and saint cum sir Bob Geldof in the van of vulgarly formulated attempts to strong-arm governments seeking the youth vote into giving away more money that by and large finds its way into the Swiss bank accounts of African kleptocrats. It is startling to watch British politicians lapping up abuse from this mouthy sloven, until one notes that knowledge of pop music is nowadays a crucial part of obtaining high office. Ireland’s professional moralists are represented, at most disasters and ‘tragedies’, by Irish television news reporters, again omnipresent on British TV, with a nice line in emoting about the world’s starving, a sight that makes many of a cooler disposition long for the old days of stiff upper lips.
As such fine commentators as Kevin Myers have said for decades, wallowing in victimhood is an essential element in the Irish problem—as of so many other problems—providing as it does the emotional and moral ‘justification’ for bullying, intimidating and killing others, whether they belong to one’s own ‘tradition’ (the euphemism for tribe) or that of the opposing group. The republican version of History, with its roll-call of martyrs of British (and Irish) perfidy, and its assurances that the Celtic warriors will triumph in the end, is integral to this conflict, as it is to so many other conflicts around the world. The Celtic warriors are as risible as Islamist militants who depict themselves on horseback with swirling sabres when in fact they go about in Toyota SUVs. Although it should know better, the Catholic Church, in the shape of cardinal Tomás O’Fiaich, colluded in giving such convicted terrorists as Bobby Sands, the lead IRA H-Block hunger striker in the Maze prison, a spurious christological air, although that is not the sum of its relationship with terrorists.6
Words, we are told by the inside group that writes about nothing else, matter in Northern Ireland. A writer can choose to call the province Ulster or the Six Counties, or use either Derry or Londonderry, to describe that grim little town. While it is well known that some Protestants call nationalists ‘Croppies’, ‘Fenians’ or ‘Taigs’, it may be less appreciated that some nationalists describe Protestants as ‘West Britons’ or ‘Orange bastards’. For reasons that will be explored below, nationalists and republicans successfully erased awareness of the fact that their ranks include many Catholic bigots. Detached outsiders will also have noticed something else about the use of language, which may be less apparent to insiders for whom the jargon is second nature. Like armed robbers, who while studying law or sociology in prison adopt a professional vocabulary that sits unnaturally with their tattoos and stony faces, so many of those closer than a detonator or trigger’s length to colossal violence, have become plausible (at least to themselves) in an argot that they stream forth: ‘identity’, ‘tradition’, ‘the situation’ being favourites among terrorist–politicians who regularly bring their little frisson of violence (and smirking evasiveness) to British television studios.7
II ’THE INTEGRITY OF THEIR QUARREL’: RELIGION AND NORTHERN IRELAND
Among senior journalists, other than those who have gone native, the mere mention of Northern Ireland, which many have covered for decades, produces an effect on their faces akin to watching a sunlit field darkened by a passing cloud. British statesmen have often reacted thus, Shortly after the Great War Winston Churchill observed:
Every institution, almost, in the world was strained. Great empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous change in the deluge of the world. But as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that have been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.8
Others expressed their view of Ireland more acerbically. They had heartfelt reason to, because any political involvement with the problem meant a lifetime of armoured limousines and bodyguards, not to speak of colleagues and friends murdered by terrorists, the fate of such leading Conservatives as Airey Neave and Ian Gow. The place drove many to the bottle. In 1970, Reginald Maudling, home secretary in the newly elected Edward Heath government, is said to have despaired to a stewardess on a flight back from Belfast: ‘What a bloody awful country. For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch.’ Margaret Thatcher was eloquent on what it was like to deal with Ireland: ‘In the history of Ireland—both North and South…reality and myth from the seventeenth century to the 1920s take on an almost Balkan immediacy. Distrust mounting to hatred and revenge is never far beneath the political surface. And those who step onto it must do so gingerly.’9 Her highly astute chancellor of the exchequer, Nigel Lawson, wrote succinctly of ‘the curse of Ulster’.10 One did not need to be a British minister to feel bleak about Northern Ireland. A young southern Irish Catholic priest who arrived in a parish on Belfast’s Lower Falls area was told by a fellow cleric: ‘Look! This place is hopeless. The people are hopeless. They’re as thick here as bottled pig-shit. You’ll be wasting your time getting involved with them.’11
However much one may sympathise with these views, discussion of the last thirty years of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ is unavoidable, although many argue that this was not an exclusively religious quarrel, but one about questions of sovereignty or economic and political power that played out in communities whose respective nationalisms were heavily tinged by their remarkably high degree of religious observance.12 Actually, the long-term origins of the problem are obviously religious. In a fit of absent mind, the Tudors had left Ireland predominantly Catholic and ruled by chieftains they were allied with. Fearing that Ireland was England’s Achilles heel, the Stuarts settled large number of Scots Calvinists in the north-east. The beleaguered intransigence of these frontiersmen was matched by a heavy Counter-Reformation Catholicism. These antipathies were etched into the physical landscape. Many villages and towns in Europe still reveal their historic topography, most obviously London where the names of some tube stations like Aldgate or Moorgate dimly recall old perimeters, or for that matter Madrid where the medieval Moorish city is still just about evident. In Northern Ireland the stones and streets are frozen reminders of ethno-religious battlelines, with the Catholics of the Bogside and Creggan below and beyond Protestant Londonderry’s bastions and walls, and villages where Protestants and Catholics live at opposite ends of the main street. Even Belfast’s roads and pavements testify to riots past; cobblestones were replaced with granite setts, and then by massive flagstones too cumbersome to be thrown fluently.13
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with a population consisting of three and a quarter million Catholics and a million Protestants. Although there was a distinctive Anglo-Irish civilisation in the South, which went back to the Middle Ages, the majority of Protestants had been ‘planted’ in the north-east in early modern times to counteract Catholic rebellions which were sometimes linked, in a fifth-column sort of way, with the imperial ambitions of France and Spain, or indeed Germany in the twentieth century. While a three or four hundred years’ presence might indicate a right to be counted as indigenous, rather in the way that an illegally built shed would be considered legal after about five years, their enemies regard these Protestants as an alien infestation—or as the lickspittles of English imperialism.
In modern times, Irish nationalists sought Home Rule, that is an autonomous parliament in Dublin but under Westminster’s overall aegis vis-à-vis the highest affairs of state, a goal that horrified Unionists, that is people who believed they were British and regarded themselves as a bulwark of Protestant liberty against an authoritarian ‘popish’ tide. Real differences between the religions should not be glossed over; the point about Northern Ireland is that these are visceral today in ways that are not true of the British mainland or anywhere in Europe beyond the Balkans.
Protestants had radically differing views about authority, ecclesiology and the transferability of spiritual merit through the mediation of an elite priesthood that were irreconcilable with the beliefs of the Catholic Church. They were intensely suspicious of what they regarded as the theocratic nature of Catholicism, and of the ways in which priestcraft seemed to control the minds and bodies of their adherents. While it would be wrong to claim that religion is the only source of conflict, it renders everything into apocalyptic and absolute terms, to the incomprehension of English people whose dominant religion is based on so many hard-fought, judicious compromises.14 Religious endogamy also fixes people within their respective communities. Between 1943 and 1982 only 6 per cent of marriages in Northern Ireland were of mixed confession, in contrast to England and Wales where over the same four decades, 67 per cent of Roman Catholic marriages were of a bi-confessional nature. Religious polarisation was also evident in education, since even today only 2 per cent of children in the province attend mixed-confessional schools. Attempts to mix a primary school resulted in the spectacle of politically fanatical adults intimidating small children. Regardless of whether one regards religion as a cause of Northern Ireland’s problems, it is certainly high among the enduring effects.
It is not necessary to retrace the problem back to the battle of the Boyne, as that is refought on an annual basis. By 1914, the Unionists had armed themselves with weapons from imperial Germany to defend their rights against what they saw as an imminent sell-out by the Liberal government at Westminster, betrayal by the perfidious English (or Welsh in this case) being an underlying pathology among these descendants of predominantly Scots settlers of Dissenting stock, who themselves had been victims of Church of England discrimination and persecution. The fact that both antagonistic communities in Northern Ireland have a very developed sense of their own victimhood partly explains why they have such difficulty in understanding the victim status claimed by their opponents, a pathology that bedevils the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Both communities also have an extraordinary capacity to find excuses and mitigating circumstances for what to anyone else seems like psychopathic violence, whether committed drunk or sober, a mania that has a long history on the island.15
Although many Irish Catholics fought in the Great War, they were quickly expunged from the public memory of what would become an independent South. Five thousand Ulstermen in the 36th Ulster Infantry Division perished on the first day’s action on the River Somme, a loss that Unionists have never allowed to be forgotten. Communal myth ensured that these men shouted ‘No surrender’ (the Protestant war cry from the 1970s) as they went over the top of their trenches.16 Unionists have also never forgotten the abortive Easter Rising in 1916, which they regarded as an act of betrayal in wartime. The Rising had the effect of swelling support for an independent Irish Republic, which in 1921 was only partially assuaged by the creation of the Irish Free State, consisting of twenty-six southern counties, although that soon degenerated into a vicious civil war. In the new Free State, Protestants were driven out or forced into quiescence, in one of the twentieth century’s stealthier instances of ‘ethnic cleansing’. As the southern Presbyterian Church reported in 1921: ‘In more than one congregation members have received threatening notices and have been compelled to abandon their homes…church property has been stolen, burned, or otherwise destroyed. A very large number of Protestants was compelled to leave the country, in some cases, nothing being left to them but their lives and the smoking ruins of their homes.’ A separate British polity, called Northern Ireland, based on six counties in the north-east, was rapidly and successfully ramified, with its own devolved parliament, eventually situated at Stormont, and dual representation at Westminster. Following the 1949 Ireland Act, Northern Ireland’s constitutional status could be changed only with the explicit consent of the (Unionist) majority, a democratically sensitive arrangement that endures (just about) to this day.
Unlike in the Free State, where the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church was grimly hegemonic, Northern Ireland Protestantism consisted of a bewildering array of denominations, as well as the Anglican Church of Ireland, which lingered on in dilapidated splendour south of the border. Irish Protestantism was as fissiparous as Protestantism elsewhere, with divisions between liberal modernists and believers in scriptural inerrancy within the Presbyterian camp, which is not to be confused with the maverick reverend Ian Paisley. Since many southern Protestants relocated to the north after being made to feel unwelcome in the Free State, they developed an even more visceral siege mentality than that community already possessed as part of its memory of being on the frontier. Betrayal from within or without was a constant possibility, and typically it was given historical expression. The Loyalist term for a traitor—a ‘Lundy’—harks back to the prudent lieutenant-colonel Robert Lundy who was less than resolute during the 1688 siege of Londonderry by Catholic Jacobites. By contrast, the Apprentice Boys stood firm.17
To an outsider, the modest stage on which these conflicts have unfolded is as incredible as the incapacity to forget historic grievances and slights in a society when ‘they’ did in 1690 is parried by what ‘we’ did in 1691. This is hell around a parish pump. The entire population of Northern Ireland is about a seventh of that of Greater London, and roughly equal to those of Birmingham or Glasgow. Initially, Northern Ireland, or Ulster, had one and a half million people, a third of whom were Catholics. Only two counties, Antrim and Down, were overwhelmingly Protestant in composition; 320,000 Protestants in Belfast outnumbered the city’s 95,000 Catholics in the west of the city. Much of that urban Protestant majority felt imaginatively closer to people living in similar circumstances and doing similar jobs in mainland Leeds or Glasgow than they did to the backward rural sea beyond. At its shortest point, the distance between Ulster and Scotland across the North Channel is a mere twelve miles. By contrast, in Armagh, fifty thousand Catholics faced sixty thousand Protestants, in a rural borderland county that Northern Ireland might have been better off without when the boundaries were established, a sentiment many English people share about the entire province, which over the last thirty years has brought them nothing but international embarrassment, financial loss and grief. Although they do not often remark on it, the Troubles have cost the English, Welsh and Scots a great deal of treasure. Even now, a huge percentage of the province’s population are employed in a grossly inflated public sector, giving every second cousin of a terrorist a job, although that could be deflated with the arrival of peace.18
Religiously inspired discrimination was endemic on both sides of the border, although the northern Protestant strain appears better known among those credulous enough to elide the likes of Gerry Adams or Martin ‘Pacelli’ McGuiness with Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela. It was very difficult for any Protestant to get state employment (as distinct from entrance into a liberal or scientific profession) in the Free State, which also connived at the suppression of the Protestant Orange Order through tacitly supported popular violence. Compulsory Irish-language tests thinned out the ranks of Protestant civil servants and members of the professions, who invariably emigrated. The Catholic Church contributed its own form of exclusionism by insisting in the 1908 document Ne Temere that the children of mixed marriages be raised as Catholics, an injunction that became part of Irish law, although the Church eventually relaxed this in 1970 with Matrimonia Mixta. Just as the Orange Order was held to exert a malign influence north of the border, so Catholics had the Ancient Order of Hibernians—nowadays best known as the organisers of New York’s St Patrick’s Day parade.
In the North, Protestants enjoyed the lion’s share of jobs in the engineering, linen and shipbuilding industries, which were located in ‘their’ territories in Belfast. It is vital to emphasise that they regarded this as their entitlement for being loyal to the British Crown. Why should potential traitors and fifth columnists prosper? When some nationalist-dominated local councils ostentatiously professed allegiance to the Irish Free State, and refused it to the government of Northern Ireland, the Unionists responded by abolishing proportional representation, gerrymandering electoral boundaries and disfranchising those who paid no rates, the British term for local property-based taxes. Protestant businesses and householders enjoyed an inbuilt advantage over poorer Catholics who lived cheek by jowl in tenements with lodgers and tenants. Local councils controlled by nationalists fell from twenty-three to eleven, notably Londonderry where 7,500 Protestants were more amply represented in the city’s government than 10,000 Catholics. Such invidious arrangements, which were not universal across Northern Ireland, had knock-on effects in terms of the construction and allocation of rented public housing and employment in the local government sector, as each tribe sought to benefit its clientele in an era when there were no anti-discrimination laws and jobs were filled on the basis of family connections and word of mouth. The wrong address, identifying as it did religious confession to those alert to such things, would simply guarantee a life of low pay, marginalisation and unemployment. Again, it is important to qualify these broad assertions since there are respectable studies that indicate that discrimination, for example in housing, was less pervasive than is often suggested. Catholic entrance into higher education was also growing—the percentage of Catholic students at Queen’s university Belfast grew from 22 to 32 per cent between 1961 and 1971, but that only exacerbated matters as they did not progress into a society with equal opportunities.19
Access to political power was uneven. In 1943 there were no Catholics in the top fifty-five jobs in the provincial civil service and only thirty-seven represented among the six hundred in the next rung down. By contrast, seven years later, 40 per cent of council labourers were Catholics, as their restricted educational opportunities had equipped them for little else. In 1934 when the home affairs minister learned that a Catholic was working as a telephonist at Stormont, which two years earlier had become the home of the Ulster parliament, he ceased using the telephone until she was transferred. Although many Westminster politicians disapproved of these developments, which were accompanied by fierce bouts of sectarian cleansing in which people were persuaded to move elsewhere by having their homes firebombed, the ultimate effect was the creation of monocultural working-class ghettos, which were often ominously proximate to one another.
Religion played a vital part in bridging social divisions within the Protestant camp. Strident Protestant rhetoric secured working-class Protestant support for an elite class of rural landowners, many ostentatious in their wartime military ranks as ‘captain’ this or that, a form of capdoffing deference that took decades to disappear, as it eventually did with the emergence of Democratic Unionism. An Orange Order civil religion consisting of celebrations of royal occasions, the 12 July and 12 August commemorations of the 1689 siege of Londonderry and the 1690 battle of the Boyne, and the more universal cult of the dead in the Great War cemented Unionist or Loyalist solidarities across divides of social class or town and countryside. The Orange Order, a Protestant quasi-masonic self-defence organisation that came into being in the late eighteenth century to combat the depredations of the Catholic ‘Defenders’, exercised as much influence on Unionist politicians as the trades unions used to hold over the British Labour Party. Rather than anything necessarily sinister, that may simply reflect their background in committee work and public speaking, although in Catholic eyes sinister it certainly was. Some find its rituals quaint in our otherwise homogenised and globalised metropolitan cultures—a sentiment too far that this metropolitan author does not share.20
Unashamedly, the Unionists monopolised the judiciary, police and civil service, in addition to what was briefly a flourishing local economy, although, again, it is worth pointing out that the province’s first chief justice was a Roman Catholic. They were not shy in expressing this ‘ascendancy’, to give it an emotionally freighted name, as when prime minister Sir Basil Brooke told a Unionist gathering in 1933: ‘There were a great number of Protestants and Orangemen who employed Roman Catholics. He felt he could speak freely on this subject as he had not a Roman Catholic about his own place…Roman Catholics were endeavouring to get in everywhere. He would appeal to Loyalists, therefore, wherever possible to employ good Protestant lads and lassies.’21
Throughout his tenure of office, Sir Basil Brooke—or viscount Brookeborough as he inevitably became under Britain’s Ruritanian system of organised deference—refused to visit a single Catholic school. Although it began with a limited Catholic presence, well below the third of places reserved for them, over time the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) became ever more Protestant in composition. The continued activities of the IRA ensured that fearful (and aggressively militant) Protestants flocked to the ranks of the Ulster Special Constabulary, a part-time paramilitary police force, notorious as the ‘B-Specials’, equipped with extensive powers and weaponry unknown in the rest of the UK, powers they used not only to harass Catholics in spiteful ways but to ensure that the Civil War anarchy in the South did not spread northwards. The fact that the IRA tended to shoot Catholics rash enough to join the police reinforced the RUC’s sectarian character, the republican contribution to indirectly fostering the institutionalised discrimination Catholics complained of being a relatively under-explored aspect of this saga.
Ironically, the early 1960s seemed to presage an end to Ireland’s unholy wars of religion, if that is what they were. Even in these benighted parts, where the Enlightenment never happened, the winds of change were felt, as faiths were modernised and hands outstretched. The reforms instituted by the Second Vatican Council promised a new respect on the part of the Catholic Church for those it had hitherto regarded as heretics, in that it upgraded them as ‘separated brethren’, although it could not quite bring itself to refer to the brethren’s Church as such. The mainstream Protestant response was encouraging. The Church of Ireland, Methodists and Presbyterians issued statements welcoming the Council’s spirit, and admitting that there had been ‘uncharitable’ discrimination against Catholics. By contrast, the Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy resembled that of Franco’s Spain in dragging its feet in adopting the new guidelines from the Vatican. Predictably, the sight of Protestant clergy happily flitting back and forth to exchange platitudes with the pope, let alone such worrying signs of the time as pronouncements that ‘God was dead’, increased the feeling among the hotter sort of Ulster Presbyterian that the forces of Antichrist were rallying for the kill. Maybe all the 1960s did was to ensure that the terrorist gunmen tended to have long hair.22
In 1965, Sean Lemass, the taoiseach of what in 1949 had become the Irish Republic, paid the first official visit of a southern Irish leader to the new Northern Ireland premier Terence O’Neill. The latter was an Eton-educated army officer with an aloofly English manner that grated as much on the more fiery Protestants as his patronising remarks about slothful child-rich welfare dependency outraged Catholics. The two Irish leaders were propelled into each other’s arms by chronic economic problems in both parts of Ireland, which in the North consisted of a worrying decline in its outmoded heavy industries, and the related need to attract foreign investment in more advanced sectors such as car manufacture. Artificial fibres and Third World production ravaged the linen industry, while ships became ten a penny because of Far Eastern and Polish competition. Between 1961 and 1964 the workforce at Belfast’s Harland and Wolff yards fell by 40 per cent (or 11,500 men) and the Troubles themselves would ensure that it, and other jobs dependent on inward investment, would fall much further until youth unemployment alone would touch 50 per cent.23
Other elements of the geometry shifted as for the first time in Northern Ireland’s history English politicians opened their eyes to Unionist dominance of a province that was annually costing the British Exchequer £45 million by the early 1960s. The advent of a British Labour government under Harold Wilson added urgency to O’Neill’s desire for economic modernisation and political reform. Wilson represented a constituency in Liverpool with many Catholics, while some ninety Labour MPs would join the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster, a powerful pro-republican caucus within his party. An O’Neill era aptly described by the journalist T.E. Utley as ‘government by gesture’ ensued. His reforms were never enough for Catholics, especially university graduates whose chief career path was emigration, while reform as such terrified both rural Evangelical Protestants and those working-class Unionists who imagined that O’Neill was selling them out to pushy papists.
The Lemass visit was the final straw for the keener sort of Protestant already bothered by other O’Neill gestures. As a mark of respect, O’Neill had ordered flags on government buildings to be flown at half-mast when the internationally regarded pope John XXIII died in 1963. Worse, he had sent a telegram of condolence to archbishop William Conway, commiserating on the death of a pope who in more extreme Protestant minds was already perspiring in hell. Ian Paisley, the firebrand head of the Free Presbyterian Church, led a march on City Hall against ‘the lying eulogies now being paid to the Roman antichrist by non-Romanist Church leaders in defiance of their own historic creeds’. In his worldview, one does not send commiserations to a Church that persecuted most of one’s own religion’s founding fathers. The past was so real that one could almost smell Latimer and Ridley still burning in the air. In 1964 Paisley provoked days of riots when his agitations forced the more pragmatically inclined police to enter an IRA-dominated building to remove the Irish tricolour flag, which it was illegal to fly in Northern Ireland. When Lemass arrived at Stormont in 1965, Paisley and his supporters demonstrated with placards reading ‘NO MASS NO LEMASS’. Who was this troublesome cleric, currently the leader of the largest political party in Northern Ireland and the member of the European parliament with the entire continent’s highest total of votes?
As many have remarked, Paisley was the religious equivalent of a Trotskyite, positively revelling in his capacity to divide a Church until he was in charge of a purer version of his own (the Free Presbyterian Church), although it has affiliates nowadays in many parts of the world. Up in the chill solitudes, the pure air is said to go to one’s head. An acute sense of political theatre, and a vivid and sometimes humorous turn of phrase, ensured Paisley’s instant notoriety, as did his willingness to court fines and time in jail for his beliefs. On his earliest political outings, he seemed like a deranged US Evangelical preacher as he threw his imposing black-garbed bulk—sometimes rounded off with a black fedora or a jaunty Russian fur—into unseemly mêlées. His moving mass was accompanied by baritone shouts of what in local argot sounds like ‘Tach yoor hunds off that mon’ or the more comprehensible ‘No surrender’, always barked out with a snarl. In person, Paisley is said to be congenial, in a monomaniacal sort of way. As in the case of republicans, the monocultural background is not conducive to flexibility of mind. That he comes from a highly religious family and has founded a political dynasty, as well as a successful Church, contributed to his singularity of purpose, since there was no nagging domestic voice to damp things down, either from Mrs Paisley or from their many children, some of whom (like Ian Paisley Junior) have become politicians in their own right.
It is important to note that the emergence of a more implacable strain in Unionism antedated the emergence of the ‘civil rights’ movement, and that its chief cause included the perceived betrayal by the Unionist political caste, whose reforms signified that religion could be confined to a separate compartment, a view that was anathema in these circles where creed is all. Paisley’s supporters regarded O’Neill as a patrician, English-sounding traitor. Although dissident Unionist leaders could mobilise people through such quasi-Fascistic phenomena as William Craig’s Vanguard Movement, by the late 1960s ‘Official’ Unionist candidates for Stormont and Westminster were being challenged by what were initially called ‘Protestant’ Unionists, the forerunner of today’s Democratic Unionist Party, founded in 1971, the word ‘democratic’ signifying an end to the politics of deference towards what the populist Paisley memorably dismissed as ‘the fur-coat brigade’. In other words there was a crisis within Unionism as well as within nationalism. Meanwhile, the contemporary phase of terrorist violence gained momentum and would result in over three thousand people being killed over the following thirty years. The point of no return was approaching.24
In 1966, republican celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising witnessed the emergence of an Ulster Volunteer Force, or UVF, which in a brief drunken spree managed to kill three people, including an elderly Protestant widow, a Catholic man who shouted ‘Up the Republic’ within their earshot, and a young Catholic barman who strayed into the wrong pub in the ultra-Loyalist Shankill Road area.
While these killers were quickly apprehended, the increasingly well-educated Catholic middle class discovered the US civil rights style of politics, which focused on the simple slogan of ‘one man—one vote’ and sectarian discrimination in employment and housing. A Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was founded in 1967, an umbrella organisation that included the student-based People’s Democracy, whose Trotskyite leaders—above all Bernadette Devlin—would promote a campaign of civil disobedience against Unionist ‘supremacy’. That term, and others like it, often strays into writing about Northern Ireland. It reflects an agenda. White Irish Catholics managed the public relations trick of appearing to be African-American or South African blacks, with the Orange Order standing in for the Broederbond or Ku Klux Klan, and the RUC for Sheriff ‘Bull’ Connor or the Afrikaner police in the era of apartheid. Ironically, of course, a hundred years before, the Catholic Whiteboys had been the ones gallivanting around on dark nights in white sheets. It is also worth remarking that while there was discrimination in Northern Ireland, this did not inhibit interconfessional dating, which was certainly so with inter-racial dating in either South Africa or the southern USA.
This was an important sleight of hand, as all shades of US liberal opinion bought it, extending far beyond the narrow band of diehard Irish-American republicans with their mischievous folkloric view of the English, who as we all know invariably play the baddies in Hollywood movies. A broad coalition emerged, which together with neighbourhood defence groups, militant students and civil rights enthusiasts included elements of the IRA, who regarded the civil rights movement as a useful front for provoking street confrontations with the authorities in order to subvert the Unionist government at Stormont. Their Wolfe Tone Societies had actually envisaged this movement as the latest form of struggle. As the future Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams would assert, albeit with an element of self-aggrandisement, the civil rights movement was ‘the creation of the republican leadership’, although Adams was not a leader at the time.25
While Presbyterians and Roman Catholic clergy made cautious declarations of irenic intent, on the streets the politics of rage took over and the province’s government lost control of events. What were clearly examples of systematic discrimination were instrumentalised in ways which—rather than provoking a cross-confessional ‘class war’—resulted in sectarian violence as the two northern tribes slid into outright war. The O’Neill government’s enthusiasm for dirigiste planning prompted complaints that the sprawling new housing estates like those at Lurgan or Portadown, or for that matter a new university provocatively named Craigavon, were being deliberately sited within Protestant territory. Corruption in the allocation of a public council house to the secretary of a councillor’s lawyer, who was also a Unionist candidate, drove a Nationalist MP to squat symbolically in the house until he was ejected by policemen, who included the official tenant’s brother.26 This incident led to demonstrations by the civil rights movement, which in turn attracted counter demonstrations by loyalists. The civil rights movement organised a march from Belfast to Londonderry, as if these were Montgomery or Selma, which some participants hoped would lead to confrontation with the authorities. In Northern Ireland, marching is not a neutral stroll down the street, but a way of claiming territory by walking on what Unionists archaically call the ‘Queen’s Highway’. That is why so many of the marches look like military processions with each tribe sporting its uniform—bowlers and sashes here, balaclavas and parka jackets at republican funerals there, and guns everywhere. In January 1969 at Burntollet Bridge Paisleyites ambushed the marchers, who had already been set upon by the RUC and the B-Specials, amid scenes of primal violence.
These incidents appalled international opinion, while forcing the Westminster government to lean hard on the Unionist authorities in ways to which they were not accustomed in their role as Britain’s shock absorber. O’Neill was called to London to be dressed down by Wilson and home secretary James Callaghan, who threatened to cut the flow of subsidy from English taxpayers to Northern Ireland. Regional indignation over the fact that the Northern Irish, Welsh and Scots pay taxes too does not wash, since the British revenue system is wholly posited on transferring money from the rich south-east (and in particular London, where a quarter of the country’s money is made) to the less affluent regions. O’Neill’s desire for reforms was counterbalanced by those Unionists, like Brian Faulkner, who regarded the civil rights movement as a front for the IRA. His home affairs minister William Craig resigned over O’Neill’s weakness and the bullying tone of a British government the Unionists were professing aggressive loyalty to. Mysterious bombings of electricity sub-stations were attributed to the IRA but in fact carried out by the UVF so as to destabilise the O’Neill government. They were successful since O’Neill was forced to resign, an event which many loyalists marked with bonfires.
The new premier was a relative of O’Neill’s, James Chichester-Clarke, an Etonian former Irish Guards officer turned gentleman farmer. Under him Ulster went to hell in a handcart. Permission to allow a march by the Protestant Apprentice Boys of Londonderry, who included the usual quotient of hooligans, sparked an uprising among the rival hooligans in the Catholic ‘Bogside’, the Catholic settlement beyond the historic walls. When the RUC smashed down barricades, Protestants stormed into the area like a marauding army. Violence spread to the working-class districts of Belfast, and evolved from stone throwing to a shooting war in streets as lamps were shot out and the only light came from raging fires and the arcing spin of Molotov cocktails. Eight people were killed and 750 injured, including 150 with gunshot wounds. Families living on the wrong side of the sectarian divide quickly packed their possessions on to carts and trucks and moved elsewhere. The Irish Republic briefly considered military intervention, rapidly realising that this was inadvisable, but settling instead for field hospitals situated near the border to treat the injured, and, in the case of some members of the government, covert shipment of weapons to IRA terrorists whom they had hitherto suppressed in the Republic. Although the Republic under de Valera and Lemass had itself interned Official IRA men between 1957 and 1962 for waging war north of the border—thereby contesting the fundamental right of the Dublin government to declare war or peace—their successors seemed to have struck a tacit deal with the IRA, whereby the latter would confine their activities to the North, refraining from attacks in the Republic, a dirty deal reminiscent of how some French governments deflected French-based Basques back into Spain.27
Because the three-thousand-strong RUC had been stretched to exhaustion, Chichester-Clark asked London to despatch regular army soldiers, who began arriving in Northern Ireland from August 1969. There was a price for this assistance. Westminster insisted on the disarming of the controversial B-Specials as a prelude to their disbandment (they were replaced by the Ulster Defence Regiment) and reform of the RUC under an English chief constable. Had the British army not intervened, Londonderry’s Catholics would have been massacred. There was no one else to defend them, given that—as the graffiti in Catholic areas had it—‘IRA’ meant ‘I ran away’.28
This demoralising experience accelerated a split within the IRA, between its southern Marxist leadership under Cathal Goulding, who clung to the illusion of a unified Catholic and Protestant working-class struggle, and the newly founded Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Fein, which saw their mission as one of community defence, sectarian retaliation and the total rejection of parliamentary institutions, whether north or south of the border, which they regarded as the illegitimate offspring of Partition. They were often pre-political and bigoted fundamentalists. One of their leaders, the half-English John Stephenson—his Irish half winning out with Sean MacStiofain—had views on Communism that would have warmed the heart of Pius XII.29 The split occurred in 1969 and signalled a general downgrading of the political struggle for a united Ireland in favour of terrorist violence. By 1972 the Official IRA had formally renounced violence—on the ground that this increased sectarian mayhem—although they did not relinquish their weapons. Thenceforth most IRA violence was perpetrated by the Provisionals, or ‘Provos’. A further breakaway faction from the Officials, called the Irish National Liberation Army, INLA, managed to combine Marxism with psychopathic violence, which was erratically directed at the two larger factions of the IRA as well as at the security services and loyalists.
Although many of its leaders and activists were drawn from the South, the Provisional IRA tilted towards tough northern Catholics, from both city and countryside, animated by a desire to avenge themselves on Protestants and clan mythologies in which many of their relatives had lengthy involvements with the IRA. The former barman Gerry Adams, who despite never having fired a shot rose to the summit of the IRA, came from two families in which his great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and mother had histories of involvement with republican organisations. His comrade Martin McGuinness had once worked in a butcher’s shop before devoting himself to armed struggle. Mighty matriarchs, some members of the IRA women’s organisation Cumann na mBann, kept the home fires of sectarian hatred burning, while younger women helped move weapons or lure victims to their deaths through sexual entrapment. Children were recruited to the Fianna, the IRA’s youth wing.
Eventually, the Northern Command would effectively take over the organisation, putting the older southern godfathers out to grass on their farms in Kerry, one of the South’s hotbeds of republican extremism. Training camps situated in remote areas of the South taught northern city boys how to use rifles and to handle explosives, most of which were mixed on southern farms. IRA members had their own argot and culture, which included ‘nutting’ or ‘stiffing’ people—that is, shooting them—balaclava hoods, combat jackets, high-velocity rifles and US-manufactured machine guns. As the memoirs of convicted terrorists and informers amply illustrate, there was a hierarchical command structure, in which there were many chiefs and few Indians, fancy military titles, and much admired specialists such as bomb-makers, snipers, interrogators and torturers, roles that brought added kudos to those involved. Soubriquets like ‘Dr Death’, ‘Geronimo’, ‘Hack Saw’, ‘Slab’ and ‘Tonto’ were used not solely to discriminate among too many people called Murphy, but to convey a specific air of menace in the way that Americans will be familiar with gentlemen called ‘Fats’ or ‘Fingers’. The parallels can be developed further. Two of the Belfast IRA figures suspected of killing Robert McCartney are regarded locally as ‘made men’, who in the run-up to the 1994 ceasefire had murdered various Protestant paramilitaries.
Speaking of gangsters, among Boston’s criminal fraternity, shipping weapons to the IRA seems to have been a way of enhancing the local status of gangs like the Murrays, who were so untrustworthy that the IRA kept two of them hostage to ensure that an arms shipment was completed.30 The IRA’s constant search for revenue ineluctably meant armed robbery, the supply of rigged slot machines, forgery and money-laundering, drug trafficking, motor-insurance fraud, and various scams connected to the construction industry in England, which are indistinguishable from the methods used by the mafia. It was and is a criminal organisation, whatever its political rhetoric, the only ascertainable difference being that the profits go to the organisation rather than to individual gang members, most of whom live modestly—often on British welfare—and appear to pay no taxes.
One fact about these people needs to be emphasised. Violence was glamorous in inner-city working-class areas and small rural towns that were largely deprived of it; every hick or urchin could play the role of ‘romantic’ rebel. Some, like Gerry Adams, whose abilities had got him into a grammar school run by the Christian Brothers, effectively wrecked their own education and career prospects when the IRA alternative path to the top beckoned. Adams and many others made up for this during spells in prison, which acted as universities for republicans and loyalists alike, although men like Adams prided themselves on their autodidactic achievements, to distinguish them from those of the educated Catholic middle class, like John Hume, a French teacher who rose to lead the moderate nationalist SDLP. Others, like ‘Slab’ Murphy, a Gaelic-football-loving bachelor farmer, could play the local Mr Big, building a fearsome crime empire under the guise of humble pig farmer.31 Below that august level are the usual quotient of loquacious dullards or stony-eyed psychopaths whose reputation is dependent on their skill in the kill.
The demi-educated leadership talked a good class struggle, but visceral sectarian hatreds were involved that are invariably presented in a one-sided fashion. A Belfast Provisional observed as he surveyed the Protestant areas of the city: ‘that’s my dream for Ireland. I would like to see those Orange [Protestant] bastards just wiped out.’32 A spiral of violence ensued, in which the militarisation of searches and arrests by the security services led to incidents of heavy-handedness by soldiers who discovered this was not Wiltshire with more rainfall, while IRA shooting of British soldiers—some from cities, such as Glasgow or Liverpool, with their own sectarian history—resulted in the latter’s inclination to deploy their considerable firepower regardless of any rules of engagement. The introduction of internment without trial in August 1971 ratcheted up the tension—without effectively rounding up terrorists—many of whom sneaked across the border of the complaisant Republic, where the mythology of ‘rebels’ had some sway. The impression of British injustice was compounded with the introduction of non-jury Diplock courts in 1972—an inevitable solution to the fact that potential jurors were too terrified to sit on cases involving terrorists since they had to make their way home at night.
On 30 January 1972 a civil rights march in Londonderry against the recently introduced policy of internment became a major tragedy. Soldiers of the Parachute Regiment, whom other regiments of the British army regarded as ‘thugs in uniform’, were despatched into the Catholic Bogside to contain the disturbances and arrest rioters. For this task they were dependent on biased and inaccurate intelligence from the RUC. Arresting people was not a task paratroopers were suited to, so arguably those in London responsible for their deployment were at fault. The republicans were not blameless. The local Provo leader in waiting, allegedly Martin McGuinness, flitted and skulked about in the shadows, with guns and pipe bombs.33 Since the Parachute Regiment soldiers had (or claim to have) been shot at, they opened fire on the crowd, shooting dead thirteen unarmed people, in scenes that became a propaganda coup for the republican movement. ‘Bloody Sunday’ (although the IRA were responsible for bloodshed on every day of the week) attracted so many potential recruits to the IRA that the organisation was incapable of absorbing them. Republican tempers were further provoked when in April 1972 lord chief justice Widgery, who was predisposed to the forces of law and order, exonerated the actions of the Parachute Regiment. A re-run of the Widgery investigation (the Saville Inquiry) is still ongoing, which for the lawyers involved has turned into the most lucrative case in British legal history, with their fees totalling £85 million out of net costs of £163 million. This does not seem to embarrass the lawyers, but to many people it is a disgrace, especially because the peace process enabled McGuinness to use his own appearance/non-appearance as theatre.34
It is also the most egregious instance of how British soldiers, who have been responsible for 8.2 per cent of all deaths in Northern Ireland, have been constantly subject to politicised inquiries, while republican terrorists, responsible for 58.3 per cent of fatalities, evidently do not excite the imaginations of lawyers or the human rights industry.35 It is worth noting, as a sort of glaring parenthesis, the callous treatment of relatives of people murdered by the IRA when they sought explanations from its senior figures. In 1991 a dissident republican, Eoin Ta’Morley, was shot twice in the back with a rifle when he defected from the IRA to the INLA. His father, the former head of republican prisoners in the Maze, asked Martin McGuinness, a logical port of call in such situations, to investigate whether inter alia his son’s murderers had been drunk. The ‘investigation’ took place in a bungalow with the murderers present. ‘Were youse drinking?’ asked McGuinness, who presumably got his legal training while packing bacon in James Doherty’s butchers shop. ‘No, we don’t drink,’ replied the murderers, one of whom made to leave. ‘Sit down, Patrick, I am finished, I’m quite satisfied,’ said the scrupulous investigator. He reported to the parents of the dead man that this (ten-minute) ‘court of inquiry’ had found no wrongdoing. At least such investigations are cheap and don’t involve lawyers.36
In the wake of ever more killings and following the failure of the internment policy advocated by prime minister Brian Faulkner, the Heath government prorogued Stormont and opted for direct rule by the secretary of state (William Whitelaw being the first to venture into the political graveyard) with a Northern Ireland Office as the local administrative apparatus. This imposition of political tutelage without any regard to the wishes of the majority outraged Protestant opinion. Craig and Paisley organised a two-day strike that paralysed the province, while a hundred thousand Protestants marched on Stormont. One significant effect of the suspension of Stormont was a wholesale exodus of aristocratic and middle-class Protestants from Unionist politics, which left the field wide open for lower-middle-class demagogues and sectarian toughs from the Protestant ghettos. The number of British troops stationed in Northern Ireland climbed from seventeen thousand to nearly thirty thousand that year.37
Although there were covert discussions between Whitelaw and the IRA in London, these brought temporary ceasefires rather than a cessation of IRA violence. Both sides were clearly also testing the wills of their interlocutors for the serious military conflict that was not long in coming. Twenty-one car bombs that detonated simultaneously in Belfast on ‘Bloody Friday’, 21 July 1972, killed nine people and injured dozens more. An eyewitness described the scene at the Oxford Street bus depot where four bus drivers were slain:
You could hear people screaming and crying and moaning. The first thing that caught my eye was a torso of a human being lying in the middle of the street. It was recognisable as a torso because the clothes had been blown off and you could actually see parts of the human anatomy. One victim had his arms and legs blown off and some of his body had been blown through the railings. One of the most horrendous memories for me was seeing a head stuck to a wall. A couple of days later we found vertebrae and a ribcage on the roof of a nearby building. The reason we found it was because the seagulls were diving on to it. I’ve tried to put it at the back of my mind for 25 years.38
The violence the IRA meted out to anyone failing to conform to their way of thinking within what they regarded as ‘their’ own violently ‘greened’ communities was terrifying. Jean McConville was a Belfast Protestant who converted to Catholicism when she married a Catholic builder, who died of cancer a year before his wife’s disappearance. Menaced out of her home in a Protestant area, she and her family, which included ten children, moved to Catholic West Belfast. In 1972 the widowed McConville rashly tried to comfort a British soldier who had been shot virtually on her doorstep. In December, four republican women burst into her house, dragged Jean McConville from her bath, and abducted her in front of her brood of children. She was never seen alive again, although the IRA did eventually admit that it had killed her as a suspected informer. Her remains were discovered on a beach in 2003; she had been shot in the head. Eight of her children were put into care after her murder, as each of these killings has ramifications for many more than the victims.39
As the RUC retreated from what became Catholic ghettos, the IRA assumed the role of surrogate police force, delivering rough justice to delinquents, who, if they refused to emigrate to England, were treated with baseball bats, concrete blocks, electric drills, all applied to their arms, knees or ankle joints, as well as the ultimate sanction of death by shooting. Such vigilantism caught up with twenty-eight-year-old Hugh O’Halloran in West Belfast on 10 September 1979. A Catholic with five children, O’Halloran had allegedly knocked a girl over in his car. A group of men connected to the IRA beat him to death with hurley sticks and a pickaxe handle as he returned home late at night. The attackers were all drunk.40
Endemic violence also brought massive job losses. According to one of the most realistic Labour Northern Ireland ministers—the former coalminer Roy Mason, who occupied that office in 1976–9—the number of jobs created by inward investment fell from three thousand to three hundred per annum during his term in office. Seventy-two government-sponsored firms folded and sixteen factories were destroyed. Business costs were inflated by political extortion. One in five homes in Belfast were rendered uninhabitable.41
IRA violence was also directed against England, which had become dulled by the chronicle of death across the water. Scotland and Wales were exempted, less because of pan-Celtic sentiment than because the ferry routes from Northern Ireland to Scotland were used as what the terrorists dubbed their ‘Ho Chi Minh trail’. In 1972–3 the IRA bombed London’s criminal court, the Old Bailey, and the Protestant UVF killed thirty-three people with bomb attacks in Dublin and Monaghan in the Irish Republic. In incidents that are etched into the mind of most English people of my generation, a small IRA cell conducted devastating attacks on pubs in Guildford, Woolwich and Birmingham. These places were targeted on the notional grounds that off-duty soldiers frequented these establishments, but the wider expectation was that killing English civilians would attract enhanced news coverage, undermining English support for British government policy in Northern Ireland. So did the campaigns to free the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, that is those Irishmen who were convicted of two of these attacks, campaigns that in the left imagination eclipsed memory of the carnage the IRA had been responsible for.
In rural South Armagh, violence was savagely sectarian. Gunmen from nationalist and loyalist terror organisations simply burst into bars and the like to spray the patrons with bullets. Only murders in double figures attracted the big publicity. In one of the foulest incidents, twelve masked IRA men flagged down a red minibus containing a party of workmen on a lonely road at Kingsmills. The men had been chatting about English football. The IRA separated the sole Catholic from the eleven Protestants, whom they lined up and murdered in a hail of automatic gunfire—although one victim would survive despite being hit eighteen times. When the emergency services arrived on the scene, it was awash with blood, as well as littered with boxes of sodden sandwiches. This was a blatant sectarian killing, as it was certainly not part of the class struggle. Armagh, with its IRA roadsigns warning of ‘Snipers at Work’, became so dangerous that it soon bristled with military watchtowers while troops moved around by helicopter.
In the mid-1970s the British government adopted a twofold strategy of deploying Special Air Service troops to apprehend or kill IRA men as they perpetrated acts of murder, and ‘Ulsterising’ the public face of security through the RUC and part-time Ulster Defence Regiment. While this meant that part-time policemen (and prison officers) bore the brunt of IRA attacks, whether shootings or bombs wired into their cars, it did not immunise the British army. In 1979 two trucks filled with Parachute Regiment troops were blown up by an 800lb bomb as they passed a hay trailer. The survivors, and soldiers who had come to their rescue, were decimated by a second 800lb bomb concealed in milk churns, which had been deliberately positioned in anticipation of their probable defensive position. Eighteen young soldiers died at Warren-point that day; a surviving soldier was killed by the IRA a year later. The day also saw the murder of the seventy-nine-year-old earl Mountbatten, prince Philip’s uncle, his grandson and a teenage helper, when a 50lb bomb exploded in the Shadow V as they pulled up lobster pots. The earl’s daughter Lady Brabourne died of her injuries the next day. To the IRA’s warped mindset, Mountbatten was nothing more than a symbol of the British Establishment. As the Republican News explained: ‘We will tear out their sentimental heart. The execution was a way of bringing home to the English ruling class and its working-class slaves that their government’s war on us is going to cost them as well.’
These crimes had a complex impact on the major Churches. Violence between republicans, loyalists and the British armed forces and their local auxiliaries polarised communities, which in turn expected their respective clergy to clarify their own stance. The leaders of the flock were often the led. Internment was supported by many Protestant clerics, whose instinct was to support the forces of law and order, even as the Catholic hierarchy vociferously opposed it. While the priest Edward Daly was caught on film desperately waving a blood-soaked handkerchief after tending a victim of ‘Bloody Sunday’, both the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterians regarded the rioters as the cat’s paw of attempts to coerce Protestants into an all-Ireland republic. The Roman Catholic position was complicated by centuries of anti-Catholicism on the part of a Britain for whom militant Protestantism is a residual part of its identity, albeit a sentiment tempered by increasing tolerance of the Catholic minority in England, a minority that includes a huge Irish diaspora. Sections of that clergy had also imbibed the usual Gaelic cum Celtic mythology, and the republican ideology of the martyred rebel.
Most Catholic clergy north and south of the border felt strongly about the need for social justice for the northern Catholic community, as did the majority of citizens of the Republic, so long as they did not have to take on the fiscal burden of the North’s far more extensive welfare arrangements. They condemned harsh army search tactics and the use of mental or physical coercion in police interrogation centres, although the Republic’s Gardai were not known for their gentle approach to offenders. Like any normal person, they took grave exception to such instances as an ambulance being deliberately kept waiting at an army roadblock so that the wounded terrorist inside could bleed to death. ‘That’s the point, mate,’ an English soldier explained when a priest objected. Emotionally clergy supported the goal of a united Ireland, and sympathised with the anti-British outlook of their parishioners. There was another reason for the clergy to become involved in the civil rights movement, namely the concern of their bishops that it might otherwise be dominated by secular Marxists in the IRA.42 Some priests went further in more or less overtly supporting the so-called ‘armed struggle’, by hiding weapons or ferrying terrorists about and taking them to safe houses that they themselves provided. Only one priest, father James Chesney, seems to have been actively involved in terrorism—the 1972 bombing of the village of Claudy, which killed nine people, including nine-year-old Rose McLaughlin. Although it is difficult to get at the truth of the matter, memoirs of former terrorists frequently allude to the bigotry of Catholic clergy and their uncritical espousal of an unreconstructed republicanism. While making his getaway after murdering Peter Flanagan, a Catholic RUC Special Branch officer, in a pub, IRA operative Sean O’Callaghan—the future head of its southern command—stayed in a priests’ house. The prospect of an over-cooked fried chop was enlivened by the TV and radio:
The IRA had regularly used this house for meetings, for the induction of recruits and as a general safe house and base in the area. The priest was an active IRA sympathiser with influence at the highest levels of the republican movement. He was as good as regarded as a senior IRA activist.
There was another priest in the house. Home on extended leave from a stint in the foreign missions, he was nowhere near as shrewd as the first priest and was regarded locally as a friendly, irresponsible simpleton. He was a ‘groupie’ who liked to spend time in local republican safe houses where he would try to get people like me to talk abut operations. ‘That was a good job,’ he would say with a sly, cunning look on his round, simple face. Once he was there he was happy. I never regarded him as more than an idiot, useful at times but mostly tiresome and irritating…Over dinner and more holy water, having listened to more radio and TV reports of the day’s events, the senior priest said to me, ‘Flanagan was an abominable man who sold his soul to the devil.’43
It is important to recall, however, that some priests had unique insights into the evils of republican violence and were clear-minded about this. On some occasions, the IRA allowed those it had tortured as alleged informers the consolation of a last confession, an act which sheds light on the presence of committed Catholics within the movement. After the arrival of armed and hooded figures at the parish house, priests were taken to secret locations where they were confronted with men who had been drowned in baths or burned with cigarettes to extract information. A priest recalled:
I froze when the bathroom door closed. I was suddenly dealing with evil and not just talking about it. The man in the chair was one of my parishioners. I remember looking at the bath filled with water wondering what they had done to him. He was stripped to a pair of wet underpants. His hair and body were wet, so they’d obviously been holding him under the water. Looking back I observed so many things in a matter of seconds or perhaps because I now just imagine that was so…He was badly bruised and his eyes were so swollen that he could hardly see me. My first thought was whether I could get him out of there when the bathroom door opened. ‘Remember, Father,’ one of the gunmen told me, ‘any funny business and you’re both for it. Anyway, there’s somebody out the back even if you could get him out the window.’
Unable to rise, the victim murmured ‘Please help me, Father.’ The man made his confession. ‘I’m going to die. Isn’t that right, Father?’ The priest put his arm around him. On the way out, the priest remonstrated for the man’s life: ‘This is against the law of God.’ The stony response was: ‘You look after the law of God, and we’ll look after our business.’44
That last remark had echoes of the term ‘cosa nostra’—or ‘our thing’. Some criticise the Catholic clergy for not refusing IRA murderers absolution or for failing to excommunicate them. In reality, although the subject is necessarily opaque, few IRA gunmen were likely to confide their crises de conscience to a mere cleric, while excommunication would have had as many pitfalls as internment. If practised in Ireland, it would have had to be universalised, including those cases of extreme repression where political violence might have been morally justified, as it probably is in hellholes like Guatemala or El Salvador. More importantly, the cultural Catholics and secular leftists in the IRA would have simply ignored it, as would Catholic Provos who regard murder as a venial sin, and the clergy would have forfeited all influence in such circles. Discreet influence may not be as glamorous as impassioned statements, but if it saved even one life, it was probably justified.
The Catholic hierarchy were never prepared to sanction indiscriminate terrorist violence. As the bishops said in September 1971:
In Northern Ireland at present there is a small group of people who are trying to secure a united Ireland by the use of force. One has only to state this fact in all its stark simplicity to see the absurdity of the idea. Who in his sane senses wants to bomb a million Protestants into a united Ireland? At times, the people behind this campaign will talk of defence. But…their bombs have killed innocent people, including women and girls. Their campaign is bringing shame and disgrace on noble and just causes…This is the way to postpone a really united Ireland until long after all Irish men and women living are dead.
That does not quite exculpate such senior clergy as cardinal Tomás O’Fiaich, who was appointed archbishop of Armagh in 1977 by an Italian papal nuncio whom both Fine Gael and the Irish Labour Party had wanted recalled because of his republican sympathies. A fanatical Irish folklorist and supporter of Gaelic football, O’Fiaich made a grotesque comparison between people living in sewer pipes in Calcutta and convicted Irish terrorists who chose to cover themselves and their prison cells in their own shit. The Calcutta poor do not choose to live in sewers. He was heavily criticised by such Irish politicians as Jack Lynch and Garret FitzGerald for his republican enthusiasms, which became evident in his responses to the Maze hunger strikes. Roy Mason tersely remarked that O’Fiaich’s ‘words could have been written by any propagandist from Sinn Fein’.45 One area where priests have played a vital political role has been in brokering contacts between elements of the republican leadership and other sections of the broader nationalist movement north and south of the border, an indispensable contribution to persuading the former back on to the tracks of constitutional politics. The Belfast Redemptorist priest Alec Reid was highly active in arranging such contacts for the likes of Adams, his vision being of a pan-nationalist front.
Under prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who instinctually sympathised with the Unionists until they managed to alienate her, IRA terrorists rediscovered the virtues of ‘martyrdom’ or what psychiatrists call passive aggression. In the spring of 1981, convicted IRA terrorists, including Bobby Sands, who was serving fourteen years for possession of a gun while on an IRA mission, went on a hunger strike within the Maze prison. ‘Geronimo’ Sands, to give him his sinister IRA soubriquet, was the officer commanding IRA prisoners, a powerful role belied by his long-haired bearded image, which among the credulous suggested an innocent drummer in a rock band.
On the most parochial level, these men were engaged in a familiar struggle with the prison authorities regarding whether they or the prisoners were running the prison. They were also determined to avenge an earlier hunger strike in December 1980 which had collapsed after one of the strikers went blind and the event was called off. Since this was Northern Ireland, they were also participants in a war of nerves with the government of Margaret Thatcher, over what the convicted IRA terrorists saw as attempts to ‘criminalise’ them through the wearing of prison-issue rather than personal clothing, a struggle that had already resulted in them covering themselves and their cells with their own excrement in what was called the ‘dirty protest’. Bearded naked troglodytes flitted about in cells smeared with primitive brown markings. The hunger strike was the next stage of the struggle. Although Margaret Thatcher undoubtedly won, unfairly contributing to her image as the ‘Iron Lady’, Britain’s image gained little from the interventions of the Red Cross and the Vatican, from the pictures of starving men beamed across the world, including Bobby Sands who had got himself elected as an MP at a Westminster parliament that the republican movement has never acknowledged. Sands died after sixty-six days.
Those engaged in the second strike, ten of whom died of their own volition, knew that their emaciated images would be mentally blended with that of the crucified Saviour, and that their funerals and wakes could be turned into IRA recruiting demonstrations. The clerical response to acts of suicide is crucial. Prison chaplains, notably Denis Faul, were in the unenviable position of being confronted with men fully prepared to die for their beliefs, an act they had learned about at several removes in the tales of missionaries they were taught to admire at theological seminaries. As Faul recalled: ‘Here were these men doing for a temporal cause, a doubtful, disputable temporal cause in many ways…they were making the very sacrifices that Jesus had done, and that Catholic priests and Catholic people were called upon to do. They were doing it…and there was a religious motif to it…they were doing it for the people.’ The Catholic hierarchy, with the conspicuous exception of Tomás O’Fiaich, condemned the hunger strikes on the ground that suicide was sinful, a line endorsed by England’s cardinal Basil Hume and the papal pronuncio to London Bruno Heim.46 Father Faul, who got to know the dying very well, was sceptical of their motives, seeing that the men were bent on death (and conspicuous funerals) as a political statement, acts of self-immolation with a long history within the republican movement. The strikers assumed the exterior mantle of Christian martyrdom without much sense of its spirit. The first four to die had achieved concessions on the subject of clothing, so it seemed unjustifiable to expect others to starve in order to achieve the rectification of further grievances. Towards the end, Faul succeeded in getting the remaining men’s relatives to take the opportunity of the strikers lapsing into comas to insist on their being fed intravenously, although other republican prisoners tried to combat this inexplicable ‘weakness’ on the part of relatives by producing fabricated letters of support from other members of their families.
III BANG, BOOM, BANG: THE LONG MARCH TO PEACE AT ANY PRICE
Both the international sympathy that the hunger strikers generated and the mass grief manifested at their funerals suggested to the more sinuous leaders of Sinn Fein–IRA that the ballot box had as much potential for achieving power as the bomb and bullet, especially since the British army (and covert police units) had inflicted serious damage on republican ranks. Much of this was due to improved intelligence, with virtually total surveillance possible in such a small society, not to speak of informers and supergrasses who, if nothing else, sent the paranoia of terrorist bosses into overdrive. Cases may have collapsed or convictions been overturned, but much of the energy of the IRA was turned upon itself. A reassessment of the political track was the key lesson of Sands himself, who was elected to Westminster by an impressive margin. Between 1982 and 1985 Sinn Fein contested four elections, averaging 12 per cent of the vote, but 40 per cent among nationalist supporters. They threatened to eclipse the moderate SDLP in the foreseeable future, while demographic trends promised a longer-term Catholic victory. In 1983 Adams was elected to Westminster. While he refused to take up his seat (without relinquishing the considerable parliamentary expenses to bolster his British benefit payments), which would have involved swearing the oath of allegiance, he nonetheless used his visits to London to establish amicable relations with such figures as the Greater London Council leader Ken Livingstone, an ultra-leftist who did not even have the usual pro-republican excuse of Irish ancestry which seems to have conditioned the sympathies of such Labour figures as Clare Short and Kevin McNamara. Sinn Fein–IRA joined a diffuse range of ‘causes’ which the ‘loony leftist’ Livingstone, a caricature radical, vicariously dabbled in before Mrs Thatcher sent the GLC packing. The prospect of Sinn Fein holding the finely balanced politics of the electoral ring in the Irish Republic helped concentrate moderate opinion north and south of the border. Both Mrs Thatcher, who in October 1984 narrowly escaped an IRA assassination bid in Brighton, which paralysed the wife of a close political ally Norman Tebbit, and the taoiseach Garret FitzGerald realised the urgent necessity of bolstering constitutional (that is unarmed) nationalism to stymie the rise of Sinn Fein in both parts of Ireland. British and Irish civil servants held a productive series of meetings out of which came the November 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. Maybe their experience of the European Union made it easier to contemplate the notion of pooled sovereignty in the case of Northern Ireland.
The Agreement solemnly repeated the view that no change in Northern Ireland was possible without the consent of the majority of its people. It institutionalised inter-governmental discussions and ‘structures’ that gave the Republic (and constitutional nationalism) a say in the affairs of the province. Unionists were horrified by an apparent British (and Irish) shift in stance to a benign neutrality towards this most dysfunctional of places that was costing both governments prodigious sums of money. The Protestant response to this agreement was predictable. In addition to incendiary speeches by the likes of Paisley, they organised massive demonstrations, while turning their own paramilitary forces against the police. The homes of five hundred RUC men were firebombed, and 150 of them were forced to move house. The ferocity of the Unionist response shocked British politicians, who from then onwards—in the eyes of nationalists—failed to follow through with the reforms that the Agreement seemed to herald. The republican side also consistently demonstrated bad faith. Even as it appeared to pursue electoral politics, the IRA availed itself of the generous arms shipments from Libya that we began with, to wreak havoc both in Northern Ireland and on the mainland. The security forces proved vulnerable, even within fortified police stations and watchtowers, as the IRA proved itself skilled in the improvisation of mortars. Nothing was sacred to them either. In November 1987 they exploded a bomb that killed eleven people, injuring a further sixty, at a Remembrance Day ceremony in Inniskillen. Violence spiralled out of control in a sequence of bizarrely interlinked events. In 1988, SAS soldiers shot dead three IRA terrorists, including a female, on the island of Gibraltar, as the latter reconnoitred the route of a British army band which they planned to blow up. Apologists for the IRA claim that the three terrorists were unarmed and that the SAS used excessive force, but the soldiers insisted that the three had made suspicious movements. Although these shootings were very popular with the man and woman in the English street, among nationalists and their various fellow travellers they were regarded as acts of murder, blithely ignoring what would have been the fate of the army bandsmen. Worse followed.
The funerals of the dead terrorists were attended by thousands of nationalists who flocked to west Belfast’s Milltown cemetery. A lone loyalist gunman, Michael Stone, ran amok in the crowd, firing indiscriminately with a handgun and throwing grenades, until he was cornered and almost beaten to death. One of Stone’s victims was an IRA man. During his funeral at Milltown, two British army undercover operatives took a wrong turn, and inadvertently drove into the cortège. Surrounded by hostile mourners, who mistook them for further loyalist terrorists, corporals David Howes and Derek Wood produced weapons and fired warning shots. Armed with such things as wheel braces, the crowd of republican sympathisers, dragged the two corporals from their car and beat them semi-conscious. They were then hauled, in their socks and underpants, into a taxi which took them to a wasteground, where IRA gunmen shot them in scenes that were recorded by army surveillance helicopters. The reason for their murder was an identity card with the word ‘Hereford’ on it—location of the SAS headquarters. In fact it said ‘Herford’, a small town in Germany, where one of the men had been based.
The IRA developed a variety of new tactics, including kidnapping people who were used as involuntary human bombs by being chained into trucks that were blown up after being despatched towards army bases. In February 1991 I obliged a visiting German professor, on his first trip to Britain, who wanted to see London from a taxi on what was a snowy afternoon. We left the LSE where the students were throwing snowballs, and, after heading along the Strand and around Trafalgar Square, turned into Whitehall, where pandemonium broke out. The IRA had fired several mortars through the roof of a van parked behind the Ministry of Defence which landed in the garden of the Downing Street complex where prime minister John Major was chairing a meeting on the Gulf War. In early 1992 the IRA struck at the financial heart of the British economy (that is, the part that produces 25 per cent of its GDP) when they detonated two gigantic fertiliser-based bombs at the Baltic Exchange in the City of London, causing £700 million of damage. A ‘ring of steel’ consisting of police boxes and CCTV cameras appeared around the entrances to the City, where the extreme proximity of towering modern buildings along quaintly named medieval lanes and alleys was almost ideal for maximising material damage. The physical shabbiness of many British cities was not unconnected to the removal of all wastebins lest the IRA put bombs in them. The effects of these bombs had no appreciable impact on the morale of the British people, nor did the British confuse Irish immigrants with those allegedly bombing on their behalf.
The 1990s saw the beginnings of what has become known as the ‘peace process’. Two affable conservative Northern Ireland secretaries, Brooke and Mayhew, under prime minister John Major, signalled that Britain had no ‘imperialist’ agenda in the province and that they would not rule out talks with anyone. Paradoxically, relations with the lower-middle-class Unionist political class were strained by Mayhew’s patrician manner and Anglo-Norman-Irish ancestry, stretching back to the thirteenth century, an improbable source of tension that would not count anywhere else on the planet.47 From 1990 they authorised MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, to reopen contacts with militant republicans. Although Major’s slender parliamentary majority might have increased his dependence upon the Ulster Unionists, in fact he was genuinely committed to resolving the Northern Ireland problem, and lucky in the warm relations he enjoyed with the Republic’s Albert Reynolds. In a further departure from recent tradition, in 1988 the constitutional nationalist John Hume, who was enormously influential in Washington, held secret talks with the Sinn Fein–IRA leader Gerry Adams. These talks were arranged by father Alec Reid, the Redemptorist priest, who also forged contacts between Hume and the Unionists. These were so sensitive that they were held in Germany.48 Hume’s outlook was remarkable, even if he had something of the droning pedagogue about him. He regarded the IRA as a species of Fascism, observing that if he were to re-establish the civil rights movement in the 1990s the IRA would be the principle object of criticism, since they had murdered and tortured thousands; dehoused people; killed people on campuses, in schools and hospitals; wrecked the economy and transport infrastructure; and caused massive unemployment, with robberies of post offices depriving the unemployed of state benefits. He memorably said: ‘They [the IRA] are more Irish than the rest of us, they believe. They are the pure master race of Ireland. They are the keepers of the holy grail of the nation. That deep-seated attitude, married to their method, has all the hallmarks of undiluted Fascism.’49 Yet Hume was also willing to talk to anyone in the cause of peace, regardless of whatever criticism, or worse, this brought upon him, for as in the case of all politicians in Northern Ireland violence is never far away.
Paradoxically, a sudden surge in the incidence of violence added fresh impetus to the quest for normality. The IRA struck at a fish shop in the Shankill Road, managing to kill nine ordinary people rather than the Ulster Defence Association leadership. The IRA commented laconically: ‘There is a thin line between disaster and success in any military operation.’ Retaliation came very fast from terrorists on the other side. At Halloween, loyalist paramilitaries—one of whom shouted ‘Trick or treat’—burst into a village bar at Greysteel where two hundred people were listening to country and western music. Eight Catholics were shot dead, with a further nineteen injured. It may be that such killings were so viciously senseless that the perpetrators forfeited any residual legitimacy even among their own supporters. A palpable atmosphere of fear spread over the province, with taxi drivers only visiting areas of the same religion as their own, and people scurrying home as quickly as possible after going to church lest a crowd be visited by IRA or UDA–UFF gunmen.
In December 1993 the British and Irish governments issued the Downing Street Declaration, which seemed to reconcile the conflicting agendas of consent and self-determination, while the British ventured further down the path of neutrality between the warring parties. The US played an ever larger role, especially when a president was elected who was prepared to spend up to 40 per cent of his time on the tiny troublesome province. The leaders of both tribes began to log up the airmiles. David Trimble had the intelligence to see that the Unionists, after several decades of being outmanoeuvred by the rich and influential Irish-American republican lobby, needed to remind many Americans of their ‘Scots-Irish’ ancestry so as to counteract republican propaganda. Much effort was put into elaborating a distinctive Protestant Ulster identity. The fact that Major had allegedly been partial to George H. Bush in the presidential election campaign, by raking through Clinton’s harmless Oxford past, probably inclined Trimble not to pal up with US conservative opponents of the victor, although the Ulsterman’s proverbial refusal to charm probably played a part in his thinking. Clinton helped the peace process along by controversially rescinding the prohibition on granting a visa to Adams, who was soon duly lionised by the US liberal media and the Irish-American Catholic Establishment. This reversal of policy was deemed a form of payback for Major’s earlier partiality for the Republican Party. The US ambassador to London, Raymond Seitz—one of America’s most highly regarded envoys—was outflanked by the US ambassador to Dublin, who thenceforth was known to Unionists as Nancy ‘Sodabread’ rather than Soderberg. Adams had to tread carefully. While he relished his newfound international celebrity, by carrying the coffin of Thomas ‘Bootsie’ Begley, the Shankill Road IRA bomber, who had managed to blow himself up, the Sinn Fein–IRA leader counteracted resentments among his IRA comrades that he was becoming over-fond of fancy limousines, fine dining and expensive suits, for in Ireland resentments tend to be lethal.
On 31 August 1993 the IRA declared a ‘ceasefire’. Two months later, the leading godfather of loyalist paramilitary violence, Augustus ‘Gusty’ Spence, also declared a ceasefire, one of the most significant developments of the preceding years being the emergence of a more politically astute leadership within the ranks of imprisoned Protestant paramilitaries. Any hopes that these ceasefires would result in political talks were frustrated by the IRA’s stubborn insistence that a ceasefire did not include their day-to-day criminal activities—least of all their idea of rough communal justice—and by their refusal to surrender their massive arsenal of weapons. Clinton appointed the Lebanese-Irish senator George Mitchell as head of an external team charged with assessing the size of the IRA’s arsenal and working out how to get rid of it, a task Mitchell performed with aplomb. The annual cycle of Protestant street marches brought further tensions, notably regarding the right of twelve hundred Orangemen to march to the church at Drumcree and back via the Garvaghy Road along which many Catholics live, which became a trial of strength between the loyalest of the loyal and Sinn Fein–IRA ‘community’ activists. The march, which had already been rerouted in the 1980s out of deference to Catholic sensitivities, was to be led by the Royal British Legion lodge. The Portadown Orange Lodge was the oldest in the province, Portadown being known as the ‘Citadel’ or ‘Vatican’ of Orangeism. They had marched out for a service on the Sunday before the commemoration of the battle of the Boyne since the early nineteenth century. One of the Catholic Garvaghy Road residents’ group members had convictions relating to blowing up of the Portadown Legion Hall by the IRA in 1981. Nothing straightforward here then, for once again Sinn Fein–IRA were using their passive-aggressive tactic, and the Unionists duly obliged them. The world focused on men in bowler hats and sashes wishing to bang big lambeg drums on a few flyblown streets in a British province, or rather on the bizarre cat-and-mouse game that the would-be marchers played with the RUC and British army, who improvised defensive wire to frustrate them. The UVF murderer in chief, Billy ‘King Rat’ Wright—a celebrity terrorist responsible for killing a dozen people—turned up with his aura of shaven-headed belligerency in the midst of the trouble with a view to using a mechanical digger as a primitive tank.50
In February 1996 the IRA detonated a powerful bomb near the Canary Wharf complex on London’s Isle of Dogs, killing two newspaper sellers, one a twenty-nine-year-old Muslim, and causing millions of pounds’ worth of damage to this prestige project. In June another massive blast ripped up the commercial heart of Manchester. The following summer brought renewed confrontations focused on a churchyard in Drumcree so embittered that the province teetered on the brink of a sectarian melt-down. In October 1996 the IRA blew up the headquarters of the British army at Lisburn, killing one soldier and effectively ruling themselves out of any further talks with the British government of John Major, who was personally affronted by the obvious discrepancies between the rhetoric and reality of Gerry Adams. Major’s mounting difficulties with his scandal-ridden party diminished the likelihood of a Northern Ireland settlement while he was in office, although that does not detract from the contribution he and the Conservatives made to one.
The landslide election victory of New Labour’s Tony Blair in May 1997 brought greater authority to the British government position vis-à-vis the Unionists, for Labour’s huge majority required no alliances of convenience, and a leader who was prepared to take the bold step of negotiating with Sinn Fein–IRA without insisting on prior decommissioning of IRA weapons. An Ulster Protestant mother and a Liverpool Roman Catholic wife seemed to leave no trace upon how Blair approached this problem, which was with his characteristic pragmatic steeliness. His relative youth and habit of knowing where the train of History (as well as Clio’s hand) was headed lent new momentum to the peace process. Obvious republican sympathisers within Labour ranks were sidelined, it being helpful to Blair that they belonged to a left-wing of his party that he regarded as akin to a lingering odour. Although the faux uncouthness of the new Northern Ireland secretary, a former academic called Marjorie ‘Mo’ Mowlam, managed to offend the more old-fashioned manners of the Unionists, the prime minister injected authority and realism into talks, just managing to keep Adams, McGuinness and the rising Unionist star David Trimble in the same building with one another. Communal meals were designed to engender glimmers of humanity amid the un-political talk about fly-fishing. On one occasion, a dish of porcini mushrooms prompted the thought that the diners had been slipped ‘magic’ mushrooms, so improbable did it seem that these men would be eating with one another.51
These talks produced the April 1998 Belfast or Good Friday Agreement, for even its name is contentious. The Republic formally renounced its constitutional claims on the North in return for a continued ‘all Ireland’ framework, together with a new 108-seat assembly, and the devolution of decision-making in such fields as agriculture and education to a local administration based on the strength of the respective parties. The Agreement was subjected to referenda in both parts of Ireland, although the Unionists were much less enthusiastic in their support. After much agonising, David Trimble became ‘first minister’ of the new devolved Northern Ireland executive. A bomb attack by the so-called Real IRA at Omagh in August 1998, which killed twenty-nine people, increased Unionist dismay that Trimble was willing to preside over an executive that included former republican terrorists. Many found it hard to stomach Martin McGuinness, whose hands they thought were steeped in blood, as minister of education with influence over the lives of their children. Another republican headed up the health service, so that republicans dominated the two areas with the lion’s share of the budget. While the British government tinkered with the Royal Ulster Constabulary—which had born the brunt of terrorist violence for three decades and many members of which were plagued by post-traumatic stress disorders—the IRA was allowed to drag its feet on the matter of surrendering its arsenal.
The asymmetrical nature of the peace process rightly outraged a large number of conservative British journalists, who, since Unionist politicians did not translate well to the mainland media, became the most articulate spokesmen of a cause that fashionable opinion deemed antediluvian or atavistic. That anyone holds the view that both sides are as bad as each other is something of a public relations achievement for the Unionists. Because of the IRA’s failure to disarm, which Unionists rightly insisted upon, the British government decided to suspend the Northern Ireland executive, returning power to Westminster after what had been a mere seventy-two days of limited devolved government. Elections in June 2001 indicated that only the extremes grew stronger, as Sinn Fein–IRA crept up on Hume’s SDLP, and the Democratic Unionists began to eclipse Trimble’s Unionists. Frustrated by the ongoing jiggery-pokery of the IRA, Trimble resigned as first minister. Protestant terrorists decided that, as IRA–Sinn Fein violence had won them rather a lot, they would adopt the same tactic.
The events of 9/11 initially confirmed the US Republican administration of George W. Bush in its implacable hostility to all forms of terrorism. An Arctic wind blew towards Adams, McGuinness and the rest from the new Republican White House, especially since three Irish republicans, including Jim ‘Mortar’ Monaghan, the IRA’s head of ‘engineering’, had been detained in Colombia a month earlier on an alleged training mission with FARC narco-terrorists, their defence being one of ‘bird-watching’ rather than franchising murder. While the Bush administration’s hard line on terrorism has weakened the position of Sinn Fein–IRA (and an Irish Republic neutral about Iraq) vis-à-vis the US’s most loyal ally, the loyal ally has paradoxically insisted that the IRA should not be conflated with Al Qaeda, which presumably explains such things as amnesties for convicted terrorists and such dubious innovations as ‘community restorative justice’, the first step to a dual or federal legal system and an ominous precedent. Incredibly the Blair government is now proposing to rake through every instance of killings by the British security forces in Northern Ireland.
An ambiguous peace, rather than goodwill, has come to Northern Ireland, although it is anyone’s guess whether this will hold. For the time being, the most recent burst of creative energy among those who deal with the province has been exhausted, especially since Blair will soon leave office, while the ball has passed into Adams’s and Paisley’s court on the assumption that they can ‘de-fang’ the men of violence. This is the modern analogue of handing considerable local power to tribal chieftains for the sake of a quiet life in the imperial metropolis, a deeply worrying development in Europe’s response to aggrieved minorities, where governments surrender power to leaders of so-called communities on the presumption that these figures are ‘moderate’ and that they control the ‘communities’ they claim to speak for. In this manner, entire cities or parts of them are being subtracted from the purview of the democratically elected government to create what amount to ‘no-go’ areas.
It seems unlikely that the presence of some thousands of amnestied terrorists will readily allow the province to slip into the regional decline that would otherwise be its fate were anyone to reduce the lavish monies that the Troubles attracted towards it. The killing of Robert McCartney suggests the high price being paid for the ‘peace process’. Women supporters of the IRA expertly cleaned the murder scene, Magennis’s bar, with bleach, while CCTV film disappeared. Many of the seventy-two eyewitnesses claimed to have been otherwise engaged in two tiny lavatories, cynically known nowadays as the ‘Tardis’ after the police telephone kiosk—with a capacious time machine within—used by the television time lord Dr Who. Once out of the spotlight of the world’s media, the five McCartney sisters have been forced out of their homes in the Short Strand Catholic enclave, where their families had lived for five generations. The IRA offer on 8 March 2005 to shoot the unknown perpetrators of the murder was a dismal insight into their conception of justice, while Martin McGuinness’s warning that they should not allow themselves to be politically manipulated was sinister in the extreme.
The manner and rhetoric of adult terrorists has seeped downwards into the minds of every hooligan and petty criminal, many of whom in Northern Ireland are viciously violent. Mainland Britain has plenty of juvenile delinquents who always ‘know their rights’. In Northern Ireland they have the paramilitary-dominated ghettos to flee to—where the newly minted Police Service of Northern Ireland is reluctant to enter, lest gunfire accompany the bottles and bricks, the fate of officers trying to investigate the McCartney murder. Even teenage suspects seem to have memorised the Provo handbook’s sections on counter-interrogation. Respect for lawful authority has virtually disappeared, as it has in much of the mainland. That tendency may become more widespread, in Britain and elsewhere, as police forces already fearful of charges of ‘Islamophobia’ or ‘racism’ surrender local power to communal vigilantes and strongmen, in a manner vaguely reminiscent of the late Romans watching as power leached away to the barbarians.
No one can foresee the future of a precarious peace, which involves turning a blind eye to extraordinary explosions of communal violence and to the mafia grip of paramilitary armies on entire communities. Other countries pay for the place, while no one really wants it. Not the thriving Irish Republic, because the amount of British government subsidy to the province—which has British levels of health and welfare—equals the Republic’s entire revenue from taxation. Why would it wish to assume responsibility for a population twisted by decades of war? Not the British, who either wish to be rid of the place or hope it will sink into provincial quiescence like any other disadvantaged region that the EU may eventually raise from the dead on a raft of taxpayers’ money. The ‘stakeholders’, to use the meaningless jargon of New Labour Britain, have renounced ‘ownership’. We are horribly wrong in imagining that Northern Ireland is some atavistic throwback to the religious wars of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. Its model of the state surrendering ‘communities’ to the tender mercies of their so-called leaders may presage the future, except it will involve minorities who worship another God. The gloomy spires of Fermanagh and Tyrone will continue to haunt us, despite such epochal events as the collapse of Communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but they may well be outnumbered by the gleaming domes of Europe’s proliferating mosques, in areas from which the state has quietly retreated.52