For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country!
– Reginald Maudling, 1 July 1970
You may not totally eliminate the IRA, but the army has the power and certainly the intention of reducing the level of violence to something which is acceptable.
– Reginald Maudling, 15 December 1971
It was late on Friday afternoon, when the working day is winding down and thoughts are turning to the blessed relief of the weekend, that a police car, two army Land Rovers and four armoured personnel carriers of the Royal Scots Guards turned off the heavily Catholic Falls Road, Belfast and into the narrow, brick-terraced warren of streets below it. Their destination was 24 Balkan Street, where the Official IRA had hidden a small cache of weapons just days before, and, as the Scots Guards sealed off the street, their major and a group of Royal Ulster Constabulary men searched the house. But by the time they emerged, carrying fifteen pistols, a machine gun, a rifle and some ammunition, it was to a scene rapidly descending into chaos. At either end of the street, crowds of angry residents had surrounded the Scots Guards, pushing and shouting. And as the soldiers regained the safety of their personnel carriers, the crowd was on them, banging on the doors and trying to rock them from side to side. In the confusion, one of the drivers tried to reverse past the crowd, but he had barely got his one-tonne Humber into gear when he heard a sickening crunch. Without meaning to, he had reversed his vehicle into one of the local men, crushing him against the spikes of the iron railings at the edge of the street. From the crowd there came a great howl of rage, then the clatter of stones, raining down on the armoured personnel carriers. The soldiers radioed for help, and minutes later more Royal Scots roared into the Falls. It was not even 5.30; most people were still at work. But already the evening’s bloodshed had started.
By six o’clock, the narrow brick streets of the Lower Falls – streets that would have seemed immediately familiar to the residents of countless British industrial towns – were the backdrop for what might have been a medieval pitched battle or a vision of the Inferno. As more and more troops were sucked into the warren, each detachment supposedly going in to rescue the last, thick clouds of CS gas drifted down the alleyways and along the back streets, under doorways and windows, into bedrooms and kitchens, choking and suffocating men, women and children alike. As terrified residents cowered behind their doors, they heard the ominous percussion of nail and petrol bombs, and then the louder bangs of grenades and gelignite. High in the skies above Belfast, where the army’s commander was watching events from his helicopter, it must have seemed like a scene from Bosch or Breughel, hundreds of angry figures scurrying furiously through the little streets, the landscape dotted with bursts of flame and clouds of smoke. At seven, Brigadier Hudson gave orders for the troops to regroup outside the Falls. Already residents had started erecting makeshift barricades, setting light to tyres, mattresses and old bits of furniture, while the word on the street was that the Official IRA were on their way with guns.
But Hudson had no intention of giving up. By eight o’clock he had 3,000 men stationed just outside the Falls, among them units of the Black Watch and Life Guards whose ship had docked in Belfast only that afternoon. Twenty minutes later, he sent them in and sent them in hard, with instructions to clear the barricades, disperse the rioters and secure the area. Now there were no half-measures, and when the first shots rang out from the IRA men in the shadows, the soldiers fired back; one officer’s log recorded that some 1,500 rounds of ammunition were fired that night. Yet again there was no escape from the CS gas; indeed, this time canisters smashed through roof tiles into attics, filling the houses with smoke. On the doorsteps stood little bowls of vinegar, left by housewives for their men to protect them from the gas; in the dark back alleys, IRA snipers ran for cover. Such was the chaos, the clouds of gas, the confused hell of bullets and shouting and screaming, that it was a miracle only four more people were killed and forty-five injured. Even so, these were terrible scenes to be unfolding on a Friday night in one of the United Kingdom’s great old ports. By ten o’clock, in fact, the situation seemed so far out of control that the army’s commanding officer in Northern Ireland, General Sir Ian Freeland, decided it was time for drastic measures. Above the noise of battle, a new sound broke through: a clipped, upper-class English voice, booming from loudspeakers in a helicopter high in the sky, declaring that the Falls were under curfew, and ordering all civilians to get off the streets immediately or risk being shot.
The two-day curfew imposed on the Falls Road from the evening of Friday, 3 July 1970 was one of the pivotal moments in Northern Ireland’s descent into sectarian bloodshed. As the army moved in to search the Falls, there were reports of more gun battles across Belfast, while three bombs went off in the city centre, the biggest at the offices of the city’s Unionist Belfast News Letter. Clouds of CS gas still hung in the air as the armoured personnel carriers moved through the shattered streets, littered with debris, ash and broken glass. Toddlers watched with handkerchiefs pressed over their mouths as the Black Watch moved from house to house, kicking in locked doors, ripping up floorboards, tossing family photographs and religious trinkets contemptuously to the floor. For many, this was their chance to get their revenge on the IRA bastards who had been shooting at them; some, however, felt qualms of unease as they smashed their way through one house after another, like an invading army on foreign soil. Inside, parents hugged their children close as they heard the tramp of the soldiers’ boots; in some houses, trapped IRA men sat clutching mugs of tea, their guns hidden, their taut faces trying to contain their fear. No house escaped, and by the time the curfew was lifted, the army had arrested more than 300 people and collected some 100 firearms, 100 homemade bombs, 250 pounds of explosives and 21,000 rounds of ammunition. But their haul came at a heavy price; too heavy, many thought.
‘Some of the houses I had seen were totally wrecked,’ said the Provisional Sinn Fein activist Marie Moore, who led a group of women to bring bread, milk, tea and sugar to the imprisoned residents on Sunday morning. ‘Holy statues were smashed on the floor. Family portraits and pictures were smashed. Furniture was ripped and overturned. Windows were broken and doors off the hinges. Some of the people who’d been beaten were still lying there, bloody and bruised.’ Perhaps she exaggerated a little. But when a senior British officer looked into allegations of looting and pillaging, he estimated that about sixty of them were true. And when residents saw two hard-line Unionist politicians touring the area in an army Land Rover, like colonial officials surveying the repression of the natives, even the most moderate struggled to contain a surge of fury. For the men and women of the newly formed Provisional IRA, who had spent the last few months seething at their fellow Catholics’ apparent passivity in the face of British occupation, it was a moment to savour. Women who had once given soldiers cups of tea now slammed their doors or spat in their faces; children who had once watched the armoured personnel carriers passing with fascinated awe now threw stones and chanted abuse. ‘Thousands of people who had never been republicans now gave their active support to the IRA,’ one of the Provisionals’ rising stars, a young man called Gerry Adams, wrote later. As men and women poured furiously out of their homes in the moments after the curfew had been lifted, a helicopter cruised overhead, a British officer repeating through a loudspeaker: ‘We are your friends. We are here to help you.’ But nobody was listening.1
When Edward Heath became Prime Minister, the agony of Northern Ireland was already several years old. The so-called Six County state, which had been detached from the rest of Ireland in the Partition of 1922 and ruled since then by the Ulster Unionist Party, had a strange and uneasy relationship with the rest of Britain. It was part of the United Kingdom, but although its Protestant majority often described themselves as British, it was not technically part of Great Britain. Meanwhile, although the Republic of Ireland still maintained that the Six Counties were part of Ireland, most southern politicians had lost all interest in the province and consistently ignored its minority Catholic representatives. Since the late 1960s, however, Northern Ireland had found itself making international headlines thanks to a deadly cocktail of industrial decline, sectarian tensions and the violent repression of civil rights marches. Since 1963 its patrician Prime Minister, Captain Terence O’Neill, had falteringly tried to guide the province towards modernization and reform, partly by trying to attract international investment and partly by trying to reach out to the Catholic minority, who suffered from voting, housing and job discrimination. But as so often happens, his tentative reforms proved the worst of all worlds. At a time when the Belfast shipyards were struggling to stay alive, O’Neill’s programme alienated working-class Protestants who were already frightened for their jobs, pushing them into the arms of anti-Catholic demagogues like the evangelical minister Ian Paisley. And by 1966, a group of working-class loyalists from Belfast’s staunchly Protestant Shankill Road had already founded the vigilante Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and committed the first murder of the Troubles, drunkenly killing a Catholic barman in cold blood.
But on the other side, too, O’Neill’s reforms failed to satisfy the demands for change. From August 1968 onwards, Catholic nationalists mounted a series of high-profile civil rights marches, demanding an end to gerrymandered voting, the elimination of job and housing discrimination, and the abolition of the unionist state’s security force, the B Specials. In the background, however, hovered the spectre of Irish unity, which was utterly unacceptable to their Protestant neighbours. Meanwhile, television pictures of the marchers being beaten by Protestant policemen were flashed around the world, horrifying most British observers. In Northern Ireland, however, the chief effect of the marches was to crank up the tension. Protracted rioting saw the first barricades go up in nationalist parts of Belfast and Londonderry (or Derry; the confusion over its name reflects the sectarian passions at the heart of Northern Irish life), and in August 1969 the violence reached a terrifying climax when pitched street battles in Derry’s Bogside ignited three days of bloodshed across Northern Ireland, with 8 people killed, 750 injured, and 1,500 Catholic and 315 Protestant families expelled from their homes. With the overwhelmingly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary so clearly hated by the Catholic minority, the government in Westminster was left with no choice but to send in British troops to maintain order. Initially the troops were seen as the protectors of the Catholics, who greeted them with smiles, cheers and fish and chips. But the man who ordered them in, Labour’s Home Secretary James Callaghan, was never so naive as to think that the honeymoon would last. Sending in the army ‘was the last thing we wanted to do’, he said later. ‘We held off until the last possible moment, until we were being begged by the Catholics of Northern Ireland to send them in. What an irony of history.’2
Like most of his ministers, Heath knew next to nothing about Northern Ireland and had little interest in its affairs. But he had only been in office for three days when his Cabinet Secretary, Sir Burke Trend, handed him a memo that made deeply disturbing reading. Events since the spring of 1970 had made a mockery of predictions that the troops could be withdrawn in a matter of months; indeed, far from dying down, the fires of sectarian hatred seemed to be reaching a new intensity. At the end of March, rioting on Belfast’s Ballymurphy estate had seen British troops in action for the first time against Catholic youngsters, prompting General Freeland to warn that in future petrol bombers risked being shot dead. As Trend saw it, these events were merely a taste of what was to come. For the situation to improve, he wrote bluntly, it would take a ‘miracle’. More likely was that it would ‘remain much as it is – stabilized by the presence of British troops and trembling on the edge of disaster but never quite tipping over’, which would mean an ‘intolerable’ burden, ‘in terms both of men and money’. But there was a still worse possibility. ‘It could get worse and finally tip over the edge,’ Trend wrote; ‘the Northern Ireland Government proving incapable of holding the position, civil war breaking out within the Province and Dublin being compelled to intervene. This would present us with a political and constitutional crisis of the first order.’3
The sheer intractability of the problem facing Heath in Northern Ireland was nicely summed up by his very first dilemma: should he impose a ban on the Protestant marching season, which had provoked so much violence the year before? As one historian remarks, ‘it was a case of being damned if he did and damned if he didn’t’, for a decision either way would inevitably inflame one of Northern Ireland’s communities. In the end, he left the decision to his Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, who elected to let the marches go ahead under strict supervision from reinforced security forces. It was the first of many disastrous decisions, for what looked to Maudling like a sensible compromise was seen in Belfast and Derry as a nakedly partisan surrender to unionist interests. At the end of June the marching season got under way amid scenes of almost apocalyptic violence, and when Protestant mobs threatened to overrun the Catholic Short Strand enclave in East Belfast, the Provisional IRA made their first appearance on the streets, blasting away in a fierce gun battle around St Matthew’s Church. Six people were killed that weekend and 200 injured; ten soldiers ended up in hospital, homes and businesses suffered half a million pounds’ worth of damage, and hundreds of Catholic workers were expelled from the shipyards. For the Provisional IRA, which had been founded only months earlier, it was a terrific public relations coup and the moment that they staked their claim to be the heroic defenders of the embattled Catholic minority. For the government, though, it was a catastrophe. Surveying the wreckage afterwards, the British government’s official representative in Belfast remarked to a friend: ‘That was the greatest single miscalculation I have ever seen made in the course of my whole life.’ It was made under extreme pressure, when there was no right answer; even so, it was the first mistake of many.4
It is a myth that the tragedy of Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s was simply inevitable. Although people were deeply shaped by their political and religious traditions, often looking to the conflicts of the past for inspiration and guidance, they were not prisoners of history. Picking up the gun was a matter of choice, not destiny; for every disaffected, unemployed young man who found solidarity and excitement in a paramilitary brotherhood, there were hundreds who did not. But the conflict also owed much to the decisions of individual political leaders: not just people who consciously sought to inflame the conflict, like the anti-Catholic preacher Ian Paisley and the Provisional Sinn Fein president Ruairí Ó Brádaigh (born Peter Brady), but moderate politicians who made things worse by indifference, inaction or incompetence.
Of the second group, Reginald Maudling was perhaps the supreme example. For all his superficial cleverness and charm, Heath’s Home Secretary cut a sadly diminished figure in the early 1970s, his mind coarsened by drink, his attention distracted by his corrupt business interests. Even his name seemed suggestive: a blend of ‘muddle’, ‘maudlin’ and ‘dawdling’. As one contemporary profile put it, he was a ‘great rambling, untidy hulk of a man with epicurean girth, a ready grin, and sardonic humour’, staggering into action ‘like an overweight prizefighter who would rather sink back into the comer and take the bell’. Maudling knew little about Northern Ireland and cared even less; on his first visit to the province, just four days after the Short Strand gun battle, he made a terrible impression. To the nationalist MP Paddy Devlin, he was ‘plainly out of his depth and bored rigid’, while even General Freeland thought that he seemed ‘completely ignorant’. And as his plane back to London climbed into the sky the next day, Maudling let out a great sigh of relief. ‘For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch,’ he exclaimed. ‘What a bloody awful country.’5
If Maudling offered only a caricature of leadership, then the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Major James Chichester-Clark, was little better. A former Irish Guards officer and County Londonderry farmer, Chichester-Clark was a typical product of the unionist landed gentry: slow, decent and sensible, and totally out of his depth. To be fair, he was in a hideously difficult position, trapped between the British government, the Catholic minority and his own unionist electorate. Such was the tension and paranoia that with every concession, from voting reforms to the abolition of housing discrimination, he pushed more Protestant voters into the arms of Ian Paisley. And with every new report of violence, every bomb attack, every shooting, he faced more demands for a tough military crackdown. But while Chichester-Clark patently lacked the skill to juggle all these competing pressures, the truth was that even the most gifted politician would have struggled. Not only was Stormont a deeply compromised regime in the eyes of the nationalist minority, but once British troops arrived in Belfast the Northern Irish government was little more than a caricature, a client state at the mercy of its master. As early as May 1969 – even before the army was sent in – Callaghan had warned his Labour colleagues that scrapping Stormont completely ‘might be forced on us’, although the Cabinet minutes noted that ‘the difficulties of direct rule, which would probably have to be imposed against the wishes of the majority of the population, would be very great’. By the summer of 1970 the Home Office had drawn up detailed contingency plans for direct British rule, and on 9 July, after the debacle of the Falls Road curfew, Burke Trend raised the issue with Heath and Maudling. If the situation deteriorated much further, Trend said, ‘we must be prepared … to suspend the Parliament at Stormont … and to place the executive government of Ulster in the hands of a nominee of our own’.6
While Heath hesitated, the initiative on the shabby, careworn streets of Belfast was quietly passing to a group of men who had very different priorities for Northern Ireland. After its last military campaign was crushed in the 1950s, the tiny Irish Republican Army – which was banned on both sides of the border – had turned instead to Marxism, hoping to build a working-class coalition and bring Irish unity by peaceful means. Despite the bloody events of 1969, the IRA’s leaders refused to indulge in what they saw as sectarian violence; instead, they hoped to coax the movement towards political participation both north and south of the border. For many older IRA men, however – often highly conservative Catholics who nursed a visceral hatred of the British and the unionist state – this was anathema, while a group of young militants, seasoned in the street battles of Belfast and Derry, insisted that the IRA take up arms to defend its people. Graffiti across Belfast that summer – ‘IRA = I Ran Away’ – hammered home the message: if the IRA wanted to maintain their image as the standard-bearers of the republican cause, they needed to return to the gun. At the end of August 1969, a small group of Belfast hardliners got together to plan a new direction, and a month later they launched a coup within the city’s IRA. On 18 December, twenty-six delegates secretly elected a new Provisional IRA Executive and Army Council, and ten days later they issued a public statement reaffirming their commitment to defend ‘our people’ against ‘the forces of British Imperialism’ and to build a united thirty-two-county Irish state, by force if necessary. Finally, on 11 January 1970, the IRA’s political wing Sinn Fein underwent its own split into rival Official and Provisional wings. The Provos – the group who brought the IRA back to the forefront of international attention and struck terror into the hearts of thousands of families not merely in Northern Ireland but in mainland Britain too – were born.7
Although apologists for the IRA later claimed that the Provisionals were above all a defensive organization, formed to protect Catholic communities from Protestant attack, this is not really true. There were clear continuities between the Provos and the old IRA of the 1950s, and almost all of the Provos’ original leaders, such as ‘Seán MacStíofáin’, ‘Ruairí Ó Brádaigh’, David O’Connell, Billy McKee, Joe Cahill and Seamus Twomey, had been active in the IRA for decades; indeed, most had served time in British or Irish prisons. Even younger recruits often came from republican families of long standing: so Gerry Adams, then a West Belfast boy in his early twenties, came from a family in which both his father and uncle had been IRA men, while his mother’s family also had impeccable IRA connections. As the historian Richard English points out, it is a myth that Adams became involved because of his anger at the repression of the civil rights marches. In fact, he seems to have joined the Belfast IRA in 1965, when he was 16, well before the civil rights movement had got under way.
From the very outset, in other words, the Provisionals saw themselves as the heirs to a long tradition of republican violence (or ‘physical force’, as they euphemistically called it). They saw the Six County state as utterly unredeemable; in the words of Adams’s collaborator Martin McGuinness, it was ‘a unionist state for a unionist people’. Whatever they might claim later, they were not interested in reforming it, only in tearing it down in the name of Irish unity. Peaceful reform was for the effete Marxists of the Official IRA; indeed, one of the major reasons the Provos had walked out was that they believed in violence. Only the gun, they thought, would bring down Stormont and bring home to the British the costs of keeping Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. On top of that, it would give their Catholic people a chance to strike back, to regain some pride after the attacks and humiliations of 1969 and 1970. The Irish people, said the Republican News in September 1970, ‘must realise that British imperialists do not respect, fear or pay much attention to people who beg, grovel or crawl for favours or concessions … If we do not respect ourselves, we need not expect our British overlords to respect us. If we act like slaves and lickspittles, we deserve to be treated as such.’8
During the mid-1970s, some on the extreme left of British politics hailed the Provisionals as non-sectarian Marxists standing up for the rights of the working classes. This was nonsense. There was always a strong element of sectarianism in Provo thinking, and their reputation for hitting back at the Orangemen was part of their appeal. Although they took their own Irish Catholic identity extremely seriously, most refused to believe that Protestant unionists were anything other than self-deluding Irishmen. When the journalist Kevin Myers asked Seamus Twomey if there was a risk of provoking a Protestant backlash, Twomey exploded: ‘THERE IS NO BACKLASH BECAUSE DEEP DOWN THE PROTESTANT PEOPLE WANT A UNITED IRELAND, only they don’t know it yet,’ which suggested an interesting relationship with reality. Their left-wing identity, too, was only skin-deep: many senior figures were extremely pious and conservative Catholics, opposed to abortion and contraception. ‘Seán MacStíofáin’, the Provos’ first chief of staff, even refused to bring contraceptives over the border to be used as acid fuses for bombs.
But then MacStíofáin was a very peculiar character by any standards. His real name was John Stephenson; far from being some oppressed child of West Belfast, he had been born and bred in Bethnal Green. His father was English; his mother, although of Protestant Irish descent, was Bethnal Green through and through. His Irish Catholic identity, like his ‘Hollywood Darby O’Gill brogue’, as Myers put it, was entirely self-created; even many of his own comrades found it hard to take him seriously. He certainly made a very unlikely hero for British left-wingers who fancied themselves as progressive freethinkers. ‘Seán’s problem is that he spends all his time going around trying to prove to everybody that he’s as Irish as they are,’ the Official IRA’s Marxist chief Cathal Goulding once remarked, ‘and in the IRA he had to show that he was more violent than the rest.’9
At first, the British army saw no great threat from the Provisional IRA. Behind the barricades, officers even held informal talks with Provo representatives to get a sense of the mood on the streets. As late as January 1971, indeed, there were still secret links between military intelligence and the Provisional command. All the time, however, the Provos were preparing for the great offensive. Their growth was slow and they remained relatively obscure, but by the middle of 1970 they could count on about 1,000 active supporters across Ireland, from armed street fighters to the people who ran their safe houses. Their biggest problem seemed likely to be getting their hands on some guns, but their luck was in. In 1969, the Irish government in Dublin had agreed to make money available for the Catholic victims of Protestant attacks, and much of this money found its way into the hands of the Provos, who used it to buy arms. What was more, elements within the Irish government – notably Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, but possibly even the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, himself – arranged for Irish Army intelligence to buy and ship guns to the Provisionals in the spring of 1970, an extraordinarily reckless and dangerous decision, given what was to follow.
Finally, any group claiming the mantle of the IRA could expect considerable moral and financial support from across the Atlantic, where Irish families still toasted the Easter Rising and damned the British Empire. In particular, it was American money that paid for the massive shipments of Armalite rifles to the Provos in the early 1970s, with most of the cash coming from the Provo front organization NORAID. Smugglers even used the cruise liner QE2 as cover, bringing over half a dozen Armalites with every voyage, sometimes tucked down the legs of their trousers. By the late summer of 1970, therefore, the Provos had enough weapons to start a small war. ‘There were Belgian FN semi-automatic rifles, assault rifles, self-loading rifles and M1 carbines,’ one IRA man later recalled. ‘People didn’t question where they came from. Just the fact that the weaponry was there made people feel a lot more at ease.’10
By this stage, the Provos had already made their first impression on the people of Belfast. Having killed five Protestants in the gun battles of late June, they had established what one historian calls their ‘ghetto credibility’ over the more restrained Official IRA, and their aid to Falls Road families during the disastrous army curfew only added to their lustre as defenders of the Catholics. It is worth repeating the fundamental point that even before these landmark events, the Provos were bent on a campaign of armed unrest. For all their claims that they acted only in self-defence, they were violent revolutionaries before they were protectors of their communities. Still, there is no doubt that the Falls Road curfew gave them an enormous boost, both in morale and in recruitment. Crucially, it shattered the relationship between Northern Irish Catholics and their British protectors, so that whereas the IRA’s standing orders in September 1969 dictated that British soldiers were ‘not to be shot’, after the Falls curfew ‘all Brits’ were ‘acceptable targets’. More broadly, it destroyed any remaining illusions that politics in Northern Ireland could be resuscitated on the basis of mutual trust. For nationalists, the attack on the Short Strand and the so-called ‘rape of the Falls’ confirmed that the British army was merely the tool of the repressive unionist state; for unionists, however, these events were a terrifying reminder of the threat of the IRA and its Catholic supporters. On both sides, moderate voices were almost drowned out by the hubbub of fear and anger. As a moderate nationalist councillor later remarked, ‘overnight the population turned from neutral or even sympathetic support for the military to outright hatred of everything related to the security forces. I witnessed voters and workers turn against us to join the Provisionals. Even some of our most dedicated workers and supporters turned against us.’11
Behind the grey drabness of the urban landscape, the dilapidated Victorian brick façades, the ‘mean houses, tiny streets, endless rain’, old enmities were rising to the boil. And in the narrow terraced streets and bleak, grey estates – the ‘tiny, lightless kennels’ reeking of ‘coal smoke, sour milk and the rancid liquids of reproduction’, as Kevin Myers put it – the air tingled with anticipation as before a storm. Every week brought a fresh wave of IRA bombs aimed at Protestant shops and businesses across the capital, with the year’s hundredth explosion, an unhappy and ominous landmark, coming on 15 September. A report for the Ministry of Defence warned of ‘inflamed sectarian passions … deliberately exploited by the IRA and other extremists’, but Heath and Maudling still believed that Stormont must be given every chance to restore order before they resorted to the drastic option of direct rule.12
Yet although the marching season passed off without more major incidents, the mood was bitter, nervous, tense. And if anyone doubted the fierce passions that lay beneath the surface, they needed only listen to the increasingly common stories of punishments meted out to girls who had fraternized with British soldiers – many of them teenagers who had merely gone along to the discos set up as part of the army’s hearts and minds campaign. One soldier never forgot coming across a young girl’s body tied to a lamp post late one night. She had been held down so that her head could be shaved; then hot tar had been poured over her, and she had been covered with feathers. ‘The tar actually ran down her neck and the front of her breast,’ the soldier remembered, ‘and her hands were badly affected where she’d clawed at her face to get it off. And the feathers were just stuck to the tar. We had to cut her away from the lamppost and take her to hospital. She was very badly burned … I felt utter revulsion for the type of person that had the mentality to do it – just because a human being had decided to go and dance for a couple of hours at an army barracks.’13
It was not until the early hours of Saturday, 6 February 1971, during street fighting near Belfast’s Ardoyne area, that the potential costs of the conflict were brought home to the British public. Trouble had been brewing in the area for days, and when fighting broke out late on Friday night, the army sent in a unit of the Royal Artillery. The men had just finished a six-week tour along the Irish border and had returned to Belfast for a break; they were still lugging their kit off the troopship when the orders came through to restore order in the Ardoyne. Trained to deal with rioting crowds, they had no concept of what awaited them. ‘The crowd was in front of us, throwing bricks, bottles, petrol bombs, everything that was going,’ one soldier remembered. ‘Then all of a sudden the crowd parted and this chap just popped out with a machine gun and just opened up.’ The chap in question was Billy Reid, a Provisional IRA volunteer, and one of his bullets hit Gunner Robert Curtis in the chest, killing him instantly. The first British soldier to be killed in Northern Ireland, Curtis was just 20 years old, a Newcastle boy who had been married for thirteen months. His wife, also 20, was three months pregnant. In the army and among the general public alike, there was widespread horror and incomprehension. Curtis’s father told the press that he had no idea ‘what my son died for’. His wife’s mother, meanwhile, said that her daughter thought the troops should be brought home immediately, and ‘the mobs left to fight it out among themselves’.14
The troops did not come home, of course. The government was committed to restoring law and order to the troubled province, even if that meant stepping deeper into the quagmire. When Heath’s Cabinet met three days later, Maudling told his colleagues that the ‘renewed disorder in Northern Ireland was being deliberately fomented by the militant wing of the Irish Republican Army’, while the Defence Secretary, Lord Carrington, added that ‘the disorder was no longer an intercommunal matter’, since ‘a situation approaching armed conflict was developing’. Even at this early stage, the Cabinet were worried that ‘public opinion in Great Britain was beginning actively to resent the situation’; reports suggested that ‘many people would favour abandoning the Province to its fate, a course which the Government could not contemplate’ – not least because of the international outcry that would greet British withdrawal and the sectarian anarchy that would almost certainly ensue. ‘The general public’, the Cabinet agreed, ‘should be helped to realise that the disorder was no longer the result of communal strife or rebellion against political injustice but was the outcome of deliberate terrorism by the IRA.’15
This was not just political spin: although Heath gets a bad press for his policy in Northern Ireland, and made more than his fair share of dreadful mistakes, he set out with the best of intentions. In his detailed study of Heath’s policy in his first twelve months, the historian Jeremy Smith concludes that ‘on the issue of reform, on future north–south connections, on political change within Northern Ireland and even the constitutional link with the United Kingdom, the British government was positive, open-minded and mildly radical’. Of course, this does not sit well with simplistic views of the conflict in which the British are cast as clichéd stage villains. But the fact remains that in the crucial months of late 1970 and early 1971 it was the Provisionals who set off bombs, intimidated local residents, murdered soldiers and deliberately escalated the conflict. Of course, they were not stage villains either. But while Heath had everything to lose from violence, they thought they had everything to gain.16
If anybody thought that Gunner Curtis’s death would bring an end to the violence, the events of the next few days destroyed their illusions. The following Tuesday, five BBC engineers were killed by an IRA land-mine near a transmitter in County Tyrone; the mine had been meant for a passing army patrol. A week later, a second British soldier, 22-year-old John Laurie, was shot by the IRA, and on 26 February Provo snipers shot and killed two RUC men patrolling in the Ardoyne. For many observers, however, it was what happened on the evening of Wednesday, 10 March that marked Northern Ireland’s descent into anarchy. That night, three young Royal Highland Fusiliers – Dougald McCaughey, 23, and the brothers John and Joseph McCaig, just 17 and 18 respectively – were enjoying a quiet pint in Mooney’s Bar in the centre of Belfast. They were off duty and wearing civilian clothes; in those days, there were no restrictions on soldiers visiting pubs and clubs on their evenings off. When a friendly stranger, introducing himself as a former soldier, offered to buy them some drinks and asked if they would like to come to a party, they readily agreed. It was only hours later, when a group of schoolchildren on a remote country road came across three corpses with bullet holes in the backs of their heads, that it became clear that the stranger was a member of the Provisional IRA, an Ardoyne man who had been kicked out of the SAS for mental instability after killing a civilian in Cyprus.
The murder of the three young Highlanders left many observers numb with disgust; it was telling that, even though they had been killed by an IRA unit, the Provisionals’ leadership refused to accept responsibility. ‘After all the horrors of recent weeks and months, Ulster people have almost lost the capacity for feeling shock,’ observed a local newspaper editorial. ‘But the ruthless murder of three defenceless young soldiers has cut to the quick. These were cold-blooded executions for purely political purposes.’ Protestant and Catholic leaders united to condemn the killers; from Dublin, Jack Lynch branded them the ‘enemies of all Irish people’, and said that the atrocity brought ‘Belfast closer to the abyss’. And yet on the streets, where it counted, the murder of the three men only stoked the passions higher. Kevin Myers noted that their deaths ‘caused much quiet satisfaction amongst republicans’, since as Scots they were ‘presumed to be Protestant and Glasgow Rangers supporters’. The consensus now was that ‘British soldiers simply had what was coming to them’. Some talked openly of civil war: even Myers’s Catholic taxi driver told him with shining eyes that ‘the war’s coming and it’s going to be serious’, that ‘the Provies have fresh gear coming from America’ and that ‘there’ll be people dying in this town who’ve never fucking died before’. And in the army, there was now a mood of white-hot fury, a grim determination to strike back against the thugs who had slaughtered three unarmed men. Harry McCallion, a working-class Scottish Catholic in the elite Parachute Regiment, remembered that he and his comrades heard the news in silence. ‘I looked at the faces of the older soldiers around me,’ he recalled. ‘I read on them the same thing: “Just wait until we get across” … For me and everybody at the table, that was the major turning point.’17
For unionists, the murder of the three Scottish soldiers provided definitive proof that the IRA were nothing more than barbarians, poised to destroy the very basis of the state they loved. Few had much faith in the British government or even in the army, which they blamed for not cracking down properly on the republican subversives in their midst. Many working-class Protestants, already frightened for their jobs and livelihoods, decided that they would have to take up arms to defend themselves, like their ancestors before them. By the spring of 1970, local communities across Belfast were already organizing vigilante ‘defence associations’ to protect themselves against their old enemies in the IRA. Like their counterparts in the nationalist community, these early loyalist groups put the blame on their adversaries, insisting that they wanted only to defend their families; as so often in sectarian conflicts the world over, violence and hatred were rooted in fear that the other side would strike first. Martin Snodden, a 16-year-old boy who joined the UVF in 1970, killed two people in a bomb attack and became an activist for reconciliation after being released from prison, recalled that on his estate – a unionist enclave in a predominantly nationalist area – there were ‘daily attacks on Protestant families’, including stonings, shootings and ‘riot situations’. Snodden’s grandfather had been a B Special and his father a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment: for an impressionable teenager, picking up a gun was a way of defending his family, asserting himself as a man, and associating himself with the history of his people. He felt ‘a combination of fear and love’, he said; ‘fear for what could happen and what was happening in the area at the time but also a wider sense of love for my whole tradition and the country that I had grown up in’.18
In homage to the three Scottish soldiers, young loyalists across Belfast set up what they called ‘Tartan’ groups, teenage gangs who roamed the streets of their estates harassing Catholic families whom they blamed for supporting the IRA. In their flared jeans, bovver boots and tartan scarves, the Tartans looked like nothing so much as Glaswegian football hooligans; indeed, when the Shankill Young Tartans marched back from watching their team, Linfield, they would often pause to throw missiles at the Catholics in Unity Flats. Unlike ordinary hooligans, however, they had the chance to graduate from throwing stones to throwing bombs. Whereas most English youths were content merely to parade the colours of their team, the future loyalist Eddie Kinnear used to travel to school every day with a rucksack bearing the initials SYT (Shankill Young Tartan), YCV (Young Citizens Volunteer) and UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force). That said, however, it is worth remembering that most people never joined a paramilitary organization. When the loyalist vigilante groups banded together to create the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), complete with a military hierarchy just like the IRA’s, it attracted tens of thousands of volunteers. Yet when the UDA’s recruiting sergeant visited one Belfast estate already guarded by baseball-bat-wielding vigilantes, the response was something less than overwhelming enthusiasm.
‘He walked in in full combat uniform,’ recalled the watching Sammy Duddy, ‘put a Union Jack on the table, a Bible on top of it and a Sterling sub-machine gun in the middle of the lot. He says, “Right, we’re all here to join.” I was nearly killed in the queue to get out. There was a mad rush for the door.’ Of the fifty vigilante teenagers, he estimated, only fourteen joined the UDA. Duddy was one of them, becoming the group’s press officer. Unusually for a paramilitary, he maintained a double life as a drag artist by the name of Samantha, performing in loyalist clubs in fishnet tights, a black wig, heavy mascara and scarlet lipstick. In his heyday, he was known as ‘the Dolly Parton of Belfast’.19
For the Stormont government, the murder of the three Scotsmen was a catastrophe, a symbol of its total failure to impose the rule of law on a sectarian conflict rapidly lurching out of control. ‘The telephone exchange of one Belfast newspaper was swamped with callers,’ reported The Times, ‘many of whom were demanding not only the immediate intensification of security measures but the resignation of the Chichester-Clark Government.’ At the very least, Chichester-Clark needed to make a dramatic gesture, and Unionist hardliners hoped that he would urge the army to introduce internment under the Special Powers Act. Internment – the detention of IRA suspects without trial – had been used on both sides of the Irish border with great success as recently as the 1950s, and there were persistent rumours that the government was going to reintroduce it. Indeed, in December 1970 Maudling and the Defence Secretary, Lord Carrington, had considered plans to hold IRA suspects on the troopship HMS Maidstone, and the following February a secret army report identified a possible site at the disused Long Kesh airbase, near Lisburn. Clearly this would be a controversial and risky step, yet in the immediate aftermath of the three Scots’ deaths, there seemed a decent chance that even some Catholics would accept it as a way to stop such atrocities happening again. Gerry Fitt, the founder of the SDLP and spokesman for moderate nationalism, privately urged the British to introduce ‘the immediate internment of all Provisional IRA men known to the police in order to rid Belfast of intimidation’.
Even south of the border, where the Dublin authorities were increasingly disturbed by IRA recruitment and gun-running, harsh measures might not be entirely unwelcome. In December 1970, Ireland’s Minister of Justice, Desmond O’Malley, had publicly threatened to introduce internment to crush the republicans’ ‘secret armed conspiracy’, and six months later the Irish government set up ‘special criminal courts’ without juries to handle IRA terrorist trials. And even though Chichester-Clark had publicly ruled out bringing back internment, arguing that it would create more problems than it solved, the pressure seemed irresistible. Two days after the murders of the three soldiers, thousands of angry unionists descended on Stormont, waving Union Jacks and carrying placards demanding immediate internment, the rearming of the RUC and a major army offensive into ‘no-go’ areas. It was time, said the Unionist hardliner Harry West, for the murderers to be ‘rooted out’.20
On 16 March, Chichester-Clark flew to London. To the surprise of his hosts, though, he did not ask for internment, because both the army and the RUC had warned him that it would provoke serious street protests and that given the poor state of intelligence on the IRA, it would be impossible to pick up all the right people. (This was a view echoed in London: when Heath’s Cabinet first discussed internment in February, they agreed that it must remain a last resort because it was bound ‘to exacerbate communal tensions afresh’.) Instead, Chichester-Clark wanted a broad security crackdown, with at least 3,000 more British troops sent in to occupy the nationalist ‘no-go’ areas, to impose curfews and cordons, and to forestall what he melodramatically warned might be a ‘general uprising’ against the IRA. This idea was a non-starter: army chiefs were adamantly opposed to the thought of their men becoming sitting ducks on nationalist estates, while Heath had no desire to throw thousands more men into a British Vietnam. So when Chichester-Clark flew back to Belfast, it was with a British offer of just 1,300 extra men, nowhere near enough to satisfy his increasingly vituperative critics on the right of the Unionist Party. For this decent man, painfully out of his depth, it was the final straw. Two days later, he decided to ring Maudling and announce his resignation.21
Chichester-Clark’s departure unfolded in blackly comic circumstances. Maudling, it turned out, was giving a lecture at Merchant Taylors’ school, and when his Special Branch bodyguards approached him with news of the Stormont Prime Minister’s call, they found him having lunch with the headmaster – a lunch ‘made up entirely of whisky’, one said. Although Maudling then headed back to London, his car mysteriously ‘broke down’ in Watford, preventing him from taking the call – a breakdown probably arranged by his officials, given that by now he was steaming with booze. Instead, Chichester-Clark was put through to Heath himself, a very different prospect from the lazy, amiable Maudling. ‘What is the reason?’ Heath snapped when Chichester-Clark mumbled about resigning. ‘In what way are you disappointed? … Well, I don’t know what your justification for thinking that is … You’re responsible for your own intelligence, and you’ve agreed that it’s extremely weak … Well, I don’t understand what you mean by saying that.’
Every time Chichester-Clark tried to justify himself, largely by blaming the British, Heath stamped all over him. The transcript reads like an account of a bulldozer crushing a rabbit:
HEATH: Can you give me any examples where the IRA could have been apprehended and we failed to take action?
CHICHESTER-CLARK: No, I can’t, no.
HEATH: Well, then, Prime Minister, you can’t give me a single example. How can you say that we are just sitting there and doing nothing? On the one occasion that you raised with me at Chequers, we immediately took action.
CHICHESTER-CLARK: Well, indeed, I appreciate that. I am not really trying to dispute that. I am not really trying to dispute that …
Poor Chichester-Clark was not so much out-argued as overwhelmed. To a man of Heath’s obstinate rigidity, the notion that Chichester-Clark would walk away was simply unfathomable. ‘What exactly is your personal position?’ he demanded angrily. ‘Have you told the Cabinet that you intend to resign? … So in fact the decision is taken? … I see.’ And when Chichester-Clark muttered that he intended to blame the British army, Heath exploded. ‘Well, all I can say is that I consider that absolutely unjustifiable,’ he snapped. ‘I shall make it quite plain from here that it is absolutely unjustifiable. In fact it bears very little relation to the truth. I think it is doing immense harm to Northern Ireland and I think it makes the position of any successor of yours absolutely impossible. Absolutely impossible.’ That was the end of that; it would have taken a man with a much stiffer backbone than Chichester-Clark’s to stand up to Heath in this form. ‘Well, I will certainly look at what I propose to say again,’ he said weakly. ‘The last thing I want to do is to do anything that is in any way unhelpful.’ But Heath was in no mood to be magnanimous. ‘I don’t think there is anything further to discuss,’ he said bluntly. ‘Goodbye.’22
Chichester-Clark’s successor was a very different proposition. As the heir to the world’s biggest shirt-making company, Brian Faulkner saw himself as the spokesman for Northern Ireland’s business interests, rather than the old landed gentry. Unlike most of his Unionist colleagues, he had not served in the Second World War and, perhaps to compensate, cultivated a brusque, no-nonsense style. As Stormont’s Minister for Home Affairs in the late 1950s he had taken the credit for crushing the IRA’s last major campaign, and he was reputed to be the best administrator that Unionist politics had ever produced. Cunning, energetic and fiercely ambitious, he saw himself as the only possible saviour of Northern Ireland, not least because his tough line had a strong appeal to the Protestant working classes. Indeed, even before Chichester-Clark’s resignation, Heath had told his Cabinet that Faulkner might be the only man who could stop the rise of ‘the extreme right wing’ in Unionist politics. If Faulkner failed, then Britain would have to take over. But Faulkner had no intention of failing, and in his first words after his election by the Ulster Unionists he struck a predictable theme. His priority, he said, was ‘law and order … What we need on this front are not new principles but practical results on the ground in the elimination not only of terrorism and sabotage but of riots and disorder.’23
Far from the situation improving in Faulkner’s first few months, however, it got steadily worse. With an average of two bombs going off a day, the people of Belfast were becoming used to the distant thump of another explosion, the plumes of smoke, the smell of cordite, the sight of bleeding, crying casualties. On Sunday, 11 July, the Provos twisted the knife with a fresh bombing offensive along the route of the Orange marches planned for the Twelfth, as well as an attack on the Daily Mirror’s new Belfast printing plant. By now Faulkner’s words were looking like yet more empty promises. So far, 1971 had seen 300 explosions, 320 shooting incidents and more than 600 people rushed to hospital, while 10 soldiers and 5 policemen had lost their lives. And as Faulkner mulled over the latest terrible headlines, there seemed only one way forward. As he saw it, he had already offered concessions to the nationalists by promising the SDLP that their representatives could chair two new committees reviewing government policy and legislation; now it was time to balance the equation. Internment was risky, but it had worked for him in the late 1950s, and it would shore up his shaky Protestant base. On 2 August, The Times reported that Faulkner’s most vociferous critic, the former Home Affairs minister William Craig, was already calling for new leadership and the foundation of an armed Protestant reservist force on the lines of the old B Specials. Three days later, Faulkner flew to London and formally asked Britain to introduce internment.24
Heath and his ministers were well aware of the arguments against internment. In March, the British representative in Belfast had reported that Army Intelligence estimated that they would catch only 20 per cent of the Provisionals’ membership (‘and then mostly small fry’), while the RUC had advised that ‘there would be a lot of younger people whom the police did not know and who would not be picked up’. The new commanding officer in Belfast, General Sir Harry Tuzo, observed in July that the arguments against it were ‘very strong’ and that it would be ‘primarily a political decision’, not a military one. And at the end of the month, the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, had warned that there was no way he could introduce internment south of the border without splitting his own party. Heath ‘should reflect very seriously’ before taking such a ‘grave step’, he told the British ambassador in Dublin, warning that ‘it would produce an explosion that it would be impossible to contain … With the extreme unionists apparently on the rampage, all the [Catholic] moderates would identify themselves with the internees.’ Even when the ambassador raised the prospect of direct British rule, Lynch ‘reverted again and again to the immediate problem of the unwisdom of internment, saying that surely we had enough troops, police and intelligence resources to manage without it’.25
It could hardly be said, then, that Heath was unaware of the dangers. The problem, though, was that he was now totally committed to Faulkner. If he turned him down and Faulkner resigned, then the only alternative might be direct rule, which nobody in Westminster wanted. And there were possible compensations: not only might internment break the back of the Provisional IRA, but as Maudling pointed out, it might be the only way to forestall a ‘Protestant backlash’ against the Catholic minority. At six on the evening of 5 August, therefore, Heath told Faulkner he could have what he wanted. He noted, however, that internment ‘could not be said … to be justified by any military necessity’, but was ‘a political act, which would be thought to be directed against one faction and must accordingly be matched by some political action, in the form of a ban on marches, which would represent its counterpart in relation to the other faction’. Faulkner tried to wriggle out of a ban on Orange marches, but Heath stood firm. Internment ‘should be seen to be impartial in its application’, he added, ‘and it would presumably be desirable for this purpose that those interned should include a certain number of Protestants’.This was good advice. Unfortunately, Faulkner did not heed it.26
When Richard McAuley went to bed on the night of Sunday, 8 August 1971, he found it difficult to get to sleep. Like thousands of other Belfast teenagers, he was waiting nervously for his A-level results to come in the post the next morning, and he did not drift off until almost three. But when he finally awoke at half-past seven and came downstairs, there was no sign of the post – or the postman. ‘There was a barricade at the top of the street,’ he remembered.
It was incredible. In our street! Barricades! I didn’t understand it. Stories were going around that people were being lifted out of their homes and the word was that internment was in. And there I was asking people, ‘What’s happened to the postman?’ They were all saying, ‘His van’s probably at the top of the street.’ And my A-level results were with him. Then I thought to myself, ‘Internment? … They can’t do it. They wouldn’t be so daft.’
But they had; the postman never came that day. So Richard and a couple of friends hurdled the barricades and walked the short distance to school, where they found their results. Richard’s were good; he went to St Joseph’s College to train as a teacher, fulfilling a lifetime’s ambition. But he never graduated; instead, he dropped out a few years later, and joined the Provisional IRA.27
‘Operation Demetrius’, as it was called, was a shambles, a debacle, a disaster for the cause of peace in Northern Ireland. Acting on intelligence provided by the RUC, British troops sealed off streets across the province and snatched a total of 342 men in a series of dawn raids, whisking them off to various makeshift camps, most famously at the Long Kesh airbase. Some of their captives were indeed IRA activists, and they did manage to extract some decent intelligence. But whatever slight benefits they gained were overwhelmingly outweighed by the mistakes, the terrible public relations and the ferocity of the reaction. The RUC’s files on the IRA were horrendously out of date; the split between the Officials and the Provisionals, as well as the emergence of the militant new generation, meant that they were not even close to identifying the key players. Their intelligence, one British officer said, ‘was very, very poor’. He himself had the unenviable task of storming into a house at four in the morning to pick up an ‘elderly gentleman who was well into his eighties who was rather proud to be arrested’. ‘I’m delighted to think that I’m still a trouble to the British Government,’ his captive said wryly, ‘but I have to tell you I’ve not been active since the Easter Rising.’ Needless to say, he was soon released; indeed, no fewer than a hundred people were released after just two days, which says it all about the quality of the RUC’s information.28
But internment was no laughing matter. Kevin Duffy, a 21-year-old joiner from the little country village of Moy, was watching television with his mother when soldiers surrounded the house and threatened to kick the door in unless he gave himself up. He had never joined the Provisionals, the Officials or any republican group; he had never been connected with the civil rights groups; his only qualifications for arrest were that he had learned Gaelic and was a member of the Gaelic Athletic Association. And he was, of course, a Catholic. Despite what Heath had said in London, and despite Maudling’s encouragement to ‘lift a few Protestants’, every single one of the 342 people arrested that morning was a Catholic.29
Faulkner always insisted that the policy had been a success. The army was excising ‘a deep-seated tumour’, he said, which was ‘not a pleasant business. Sometimes innocent people will suffer.’ But as news of the raids spread across Belfast, anger turned into outright fury, and fury into violence. In Catholic areas, women banged hundreds of dustbin lids to warn of approaching army vehicles while teenagers dragged together cars, mattresses, old furniture, even builders’ skips and rubble to construct makeshift barricades. Milk vans were seized and their bottles converted into petrol bombs; paving stones were torn up and smashed into missile-sized fragments. As smoke rose over the bleeding city, the first reports of deaths reached the local press: in two days, seventeen people were shot dead, ten of them Catholic rioters shot by the British army, while enraged mobs forced 7,000 people out of their homes. Buses came to a standstill, and thousands of people stayed away from work: a wise decision, given that almost every hour brought news of fighting breaking out somewhere else in the city. In the Ardoyne, at least 200 houses were ablaze by Monday evening, as Protestant families fled their homes after attacks by nationalist mobs. Many set fire to their own houses to ensure that Catholic families would not take them over, and as the crowds of fleeing refugees straggled down the roads, some defiantly flying the Union Jack, IRA snipers and British soldiers exchanged gunfire in the streets. ‘All shops were closed, and the destruction of so many lorries and tankers meant that the city was running out of food and fuel,’ wrote Kevin Myers, who watched the devastating scenes in the Ardoyne with fascinated horror. ‘A perpetual pall of smoke hung in the city’s skies, its acrid vapours accosting everyone who stepped out of doors … Belfast was paralysed.’30
Reginald Maudling spent the day relaxing by his swimming pool in suburban Hertfordshire, rousing himself from time to time to ring Whitehall and ask how things were going. In interviews over the next few days, he blandly repeated Stormont’s propaganda that internment was a terrific success, telling the Guardian what his biographer calls the ‘outright lie’ that he had merely been following army advice. And when the BBC’s Robin Day asked why the army had not arrested any loyalists, Maudling came out with the absurd line that ‘if any Protestant organisations were behaving like the IRA we should treat them in precisely the same way’ – which completely missed the point that not only had the loyalist UVF committed the first murders of the Troubles, but the UDA was even then building up its strength on Protestant estates. Within the army, however, there was much less complacency. As one officer put it, internment had been a ‘complete disaster’. Among other things, it destroyed the last vestiges of a moderate political consensus in Northern Ireland, with the SDLP walking out of public bodies and organizing a rent and rates strike until the internees were freed. And by turning so many Catholics against the British, internment completed what the Falls curfew had begun, utterly undermining the hearts and minds campaign the army had been conducting for two years. One account of the Troubles calls it ‘a misjudgement of historic proportions’; Maudling’s biographer even calls it ‘one of the great blunders of recent British political history’. The tragic irony was that neither Heath nor the army had wanted to introduce it in the first place. But by listening to Faulkner, Heath had committed one of the worst errors of his career. The big winners, of course, were the Provisionals, who not only survived with their weapons virtually untouched, but could now count on huge support on the nationalist estates. ‘That’s when it became clear to me’, said one Belfast woman who joined the Provos, ‘that the Brits were here to suppress the Catholic minority, and for no other reason.’31
Initially, most papers scoffed at claims that the army and the RUC had tortured internees in Northern Ireland. Here, Cummings addresses the issue with his usual sensitivity in the Daily Express, 27 October 1971.
What made internment even more of a disaster, however, was the treatment of the prisoners. Incarceration in the bleak solitude of Long Kesh, which with its low Nissen huts and barbed wire fences looked like a Nazi concentration camp, was bad enough, but as early as mid-August Irish newspapers began running reports that suspects were being tortured by the army and the RUC. One Belfast man, for example, told the Tyrone Democrat that he had been made to run over broken glass; others reported suffering violent beatings, being forced to stand spreadeagled with hoods over their heads, or being subjected to white noise and bright lights. But while the government insisted that this was merely IRA propaganda – and indeed republicans gleefully repeated allegations of brutality as loudly as possible – the terrible reality was that the stories were true. In April 1971, the army and the RUC had held a secret meeting in Belfast to plan the interrogation of suspects if internment were introduced. During colonial operations in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden, intelligence officers had already perfected what they called the ‘Five Techniques’, which involved making suspects stand spreadeagled against the wall for hours on end, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to white noise, giving them only water to drink and a little bread to eat, and keeping them awake for days on end. There was nothing new about these techniques, and they owed nothing to anti-Irish racism, as some republicans claimed. They were merely part of the army’s colonial repertoire, and it never occurred to its officers that, quite apart from any moral considerations, they might not be suitable within the United Kingdom itself. For one thing, they had explicit government approval. As Lord Carrington later told his colleagues on GEN 47, the special Cabinet committee set up to handle Northern Ireland, both he and Maudling had approved the ‘proposed methods of interrogation’ the day after internment was announced. As the minutes blandly concluded, ‘the lives of British soldiers and of innocent civilians depended on intelligence. We were dealing with an enemy who had no scruples, and we should not be unduly squeamish over methods of interrogation in these circumstances.’32
The memories of men interrogated according to the Five Techniques make chilling reading. The Belfast republican Liam Shannon, for example, claimed that he had been beaten constantly before being hooded, spreadeagled and exposed to white noise for a solid seven days, and then interrogated with a bright light shining in his face, ‘like something you see in KGB films’. Other men were treated to more rudimentary methods: Tommy Gorman recalled being ‘battered, just battered, for three days. There was no subtlety to it. It was just, you were hauled out of bed at two o’clock in the morning and brought in and questioned, battered against the wall.’ That two men as intelligent as Maudling and Carrington thought that such techniques were acceptable in Northern Ireland is a reminder that British officials often saw the conflict through a colonial prism. If the techniques had been appropriate for Aden, they thought, there was no reason why they would not work in Belfast. Even so, it beggars belief that they genuinely thought the techniques could be kept quiet. As early as August 1971, the pressure was such that Heath set up an inquiry under Sir Edmund Compton to investigate the allegations. But before it could report back, a major investigation by the Sunday Times’s Insight team on 17 October uncovered eleven potential cases of torture. And while Compton’s report concluded that there had been no ‘physical brutality as we understand the term’, a second inquiry by the Privy Council a few months later produced rather different results. Two of the three-man panel backed the government, but the third, Lord Gardiner, was blistering in his condemnation of techniques ‘which were secret, illegal, not morally justifiable and alien to the traditions of what I believe still to be the greatest democracy in the world’.
After that there could be no going back. On the same day the report came out, Heath announced that the Five Techniques would never be used again. The damage, however, was done. ‘If I, as a Catholic, were living in Ulster today,’ Graham Greene wrote to The Times, ‘I confess I would have one savage and irrational ambition – to see Mr Maudling pressed against a wall for hours on end, with a hood over his head, hearing nothing but the noise of a wind machine, deprived of sleep when the noise temporarily ceases by the bland voice of a politician telling him that his brain will suffer no irreparable damage.’33
Internment was a public relations catastrophe. Viewed from Dublin or New York, it gave the impression that the arrogant imperialists were once again stamping with brutal callousness on a defenceless people. And even in mainland Britain it provoked fierce criticism. Ever since troops had been sent to protect the Catholics in 1969, a minority on the far left had insisted on seeing them as the equivalent of the American troops fighting in Vietnam, reducing the conflict to a simplistic morality tale of imperialists and insurgents. And although the Provisional IRA were one of the least countercultural organizations imaginable, they became the unlikeliest of folk heroes in the squats and festivals, the polytechnic classrooms and hippy communes that made up the far-left landscape in the Heath years. As early as the summer of 1971, marchers in London waved placards reading ‘GAY LIBERATION FRONT SUPPORTS BATTLE FOR FREEDOM IN IRELAND’. It probably says it all that John Lennon, always keen to advertise his bleeding heart, went along to one march waving a countercultural newspaper with the headline: ‘For the IRA – Against British Imperialism’.
Two years later, a coalition of ‘trade unionists, housewives, students and ex-soldiers’, as they rather disingenuously called themselves, gathered at Fulham Town Hall to set up the Troops Out Movement, modelled on the American movement against the Vietnam War. Although this organization professed to be entirely non-partisan, much of its money and muscle came from Tariq Ali’s International Marxist Group. Its literature frequently defended IRA atrocities while devoting vast swathes of newsprint to the alleged crimes of the British army. The province’s unionist majority, meanwhile, were either dismissed as imperialist puppets or ignored altogether. And while the Troops Out Movement never came close to securing mass support, its arguments did filter slowly into the mainstream. ‘Give Ireland back to the Irish,’ sang Paul McCartney and Wings in 1972, in a single that was banned for political reasons by the BBC, although they might have done better to suppress it for crimes against musical taste. Certainly nobody could accuse McCartney of excessive sophistication: ‘Great Britain you are tremendous / And nobody knows it like me / But really what are you doing / In the land across the sea?’34
Still, Lennon and McCartney were hardly unusual in knowing so little about the conflict in the land across the sea. Instead of explaining the roots of the troubles, the tabloids often preferred to feed their readers’ worst fears, such as when the Mirror told its readers that the IRA had ‘hired assassins from behind the Iron Curtain to gun down British troops’, or when the same newspaper claimed that the IRA had recruited ‘British Trotskyists and Marxists’ to organize ‘a blitz of shopping centres, rail-way stations and other government offices’. And behind the ignorance lay centuries of dislike, suspicion and outright prejudice. In Glasgow, Protestant Rangers fans cheered the news of army offensives in Northern Ireland, while Celtic fans sang bloodthirsty Fenian songs. Even on BBC programmes, overt anti-Irish sentiments were not uncommon. In Till Death Us Do Part, Alf Garnett is forever thundering against ‘the Micks’, while few Irish viewers could have been entirely delighted by Sybil Fawlty’s verdict on the builder O’Reilly in September 1975: ‘Not brilliant? He belongs in a zoo! … He’s shoddy, he doesn’t care, he’s a liar, he’s incompetent, he’s lazy, he’s nothing but a half-witted thick Irish joke!’ And once the Provisionals launched their mainland bombing campaign in 1973–4, there were brief spasms of fierce anti-Irish harassment, with reports of Irish pubs and clubs being attacked in major cities. ‘Even mates that I’ve worked with for years, Eddie from Wales, I’ve seen him blank me,’ said one Irishman living in London. ‘Mates in the pub, they come out with comments like “Bloody Irish murderers, they should all be shot.” ’35
Yet what is most striking about British attitudes to Northern Ireland is the sheer indifference. Although more than a million Irish men and women lived in Britain in 1971, making up more than 2 per cent of the population, the conflict in the Six Counties never became a major electoral issue; indeed, between the two major parties there was an undeclared but virtually unbroken consensus. Beyond Westminster, most people simply could not care less. In September 1969, just after British troops had been sent to Belfast and Derry, an NOP survey found that people ranked Northern Ireland rock bottom in a list of ten problems confronting the government. Even at the height of the violence, it lagged well behind public anxiety about the economy. In fact, as the conflict got worse during 1972, so Northern Ireland actually receded as an issue. By April 1973, less than 10 per cent of the population described the conflict as Britain’s biggest problem – a proportion that steadily fell in the next few years. As an American reporter astutely remarked, the ‘televised spectacle of suffering in Ulster has become monotonously familiar’, with the images of weeping mothers and bombed-out homes now ‘stale with repetition, an O’Casey drama with no last act’.36
It is ironic, therefore, that foreign observers, especially in Ireland or the United States, often imagined that the average Briton dreamed of Belfast’s pebble-dashed council estates with misty eyes and a thumping heart. In fact, as early as February 1971 the government was worried that the public was ‘beginning actively to resent the situation’, and that ‘many people would favour abandoning the Province to its fate’. Although polls had originally shown strong support for Britain’s military intervention, they soon swung around: by 1974, just 32 per cent favoured keeping the troops in Ulster, while 59 per cent thought the government should bring them home – although few people felt strongly enough to do anything about it. Far from taking sides, most people regarded unionists and nationalists alike with baffled horror. By 1973, 44 per cent agreed that the people of Northern Ireland were intolerant, while only 20 per cent thought them hard-working and just 14 per cent described them as friendly. ‘I hate Bernadette Devlin as much as I hate the Revd. Ian Paisley, if anything worse,’ recorded the diarist James Lees-Milne, a good barometer of conservative opinion, in January 1971. And even atrocities on the mainland provoked not a great wave of sympathy for unionism, but a surge of contempt for all Northern Ireland’s combatants, whether loyalist or republican. ‘I loathe and detest the miserable bastards … savage murderous thugs,’ wrote Lord Arran in the Evening Standard in October 1974. ‘May the Irish, all of them, rot in hell.’37
But the truth was that many of them were there already. In the aftermath of internment, Northern Ireland sank into the bloodiest period in its history, an orgy of bombings and shootings in which even the most terrible atrocities were almost overlooked amid the carnage. By now, any remaining trust between the rival communities had completely broken down. As in so many sectarian conflicts, each side looked on the other with horror and fear, arming itself in case its enemy struck first. By September, soldiers, paramilitaries and civilians were dying almost every day in shooting incidents and bomb attacks, and at the end of the month the conflict reached a new low when the Provisional IRA detonated a 100-pound bomb in the Four Step Inn on the Shankill Road. It was half-past-ten at night; the lounge was full of local residents watching television, and when the bar’s roof collapsed, twenty-seven were badly injured and two were killed. One of the dead men, Alexander Andrews, was so badly disfigured by shattering glass that his son could only identify him by his shoes. It was a naked sectarian attack, brutal and cold-blooded, and it unleashed a cycle of violence that seemed likely to consume the city itself.
On 4 December, the UVF took their revenge by planting a 50-pound bomb in McGurk’s Bar in the city centre, a sleepy, Catholic-owned pub with no republican connections, in which old men liked to chat about the horses over a pint. Patrick McGurk himself, who was serving behind the bar when the bomb went off, miraculously survived the explosion; when he came to, he was told that his wife and daughter were among the fifteen people killed. It was a ghastly, terrible scene, the stuff of some sick nightmare, but the blood feud was not over yet. Exactly one week later, the IRA bombed the Balmoral Furnishing Company on the Shankill Road. It was a busy, bustling pre-Christmas Saturday, and the street was packed with shoppers. Two men were killed; so were two infants, aged just 1 and 2. ‘Women were crying. Men were trying to dig out the rubble,’ one man said later. ‘One person was crying beside you and the next person was shouting “Bastards” and things like that. I didn’t actually see the babies’ bodies as they had them wrapped in sheets, but the blood was just coming right through them. They were just like lumps of meat, you know, small lumps of meat.’ The next day, he walked along to a local UDA meeting and announced that he wanted to volunteer. He was prepared to do ‘whatever it took to defend the people of my area’, he said. And so it went on. This was the United Kingdom in December 1971.38