8

From the Ashes of Bombay Street …

In September 1994, soon after the Provisional IRA had announced a ‘complete cessation of military operations’, the Belfast-born journalist David McKittrick wrote an article in the Independent that looked back to the riots of August 1969 in his home town. ‘Bombay Street’, he claimed, ‘was in a real sense the birthplace of the Provisional IRA, which shortly afterwards broke away from the main IRA under the slogan “From the ashes of Bombay Street rose the Provisionals”. They vowed that vulnerable Catholic areas would never again be left undefended’.1 Contemporary unionist leaders, however, told a different story about what had happened. Prime Minister James Chichester-Clark insisted on 15 August 1969 that ‘we confront here a deliberate conspiracy to subvert a democratically-elected government’.2 This was a view shared by the likes of William Craig, Ian Paisley. John McKeague and other hardline unionists, too. In fact, a number of different factors combined to produce an explosive mixture. These included the growth in communal tension, which has been charted in the last Belfast chapter and was by no means the sole responsibility of the IRA; the clumsy interference of the Republic of Ireland; and the semi-detached policy of the British Government which, in the words of Home Secretary James Callaghan, was ‘to influence while getting embroiled as little as possible’, a contradictory and almost mutually exclusive approach.3

The IRA was certainly in no position to take on Stormont and its security forces. According to Billy McMillen, the Belfast Battalion in 1969 consisted of approximately 120 men who had only twenty-four weapons at their disposal, mostly short-range pistols. Raymond Quinn puts the figure at eighty full-time members and 200 auxiliaries and says that its ‘arsenal’ comprised two Thompson sub-machine guns, one Sten gun, a .303 Lee Enfield rifle and nine handguns.4 The RUC’s estimate ranged between 150 and 170 members and the City Commissioner would not commit himself with regard to its armament.5 As early as 18 August 1969 the RUC admitted in a letter to the Ministry of Home Affairs that, although ‘the I.R.A./Republican Movement have infiltrated and been manipulating the Civil Rights organisation with great energy, the speed of success of the latter in producing the present conditions in the streets has caught the I.R.A. largely unprepared in the military sense’.6 What the IRA could do, though, was to light the spark which produced the explosion.

I

After Derry erupted into renewed violence on 12 and 13 August 1969, appeals for diversionary activities to draw the RUC away from the city emanated from the DCAC and the chair of NICRA, Frank Gogarty, called for such action on that night.7 Gerry Adams tells us that the BHAC duly decided to hold a protest meeting at the Divis Flats on 13 August and on the same day McMillen ordered Republicans in Belfast to ‘get people on the streets’ to take the pressure off Derry. At 19:28 pm the Belfast police log recorded, ‘White car Cortina … in vicinity of Unity Flats with loud speakers asking people to attend meeting at Divis Towers tonight to support riots in Derry’.8

Later in the evening a crowd – led, as we now know, by two IRA men, Joe McCann and Anthony Dornan – was moving from Divis Street up the Falls Road towards the RUC’s Springfield Road barracks, where a deputation was received by the station sergeant to deliver a protest about events in Derry. The crowd then returned down the Falls to Divis Street and on towards the Hasting Street barracks which were bombarded by stones and petrol bombs. There then followed a police baton charge which drove the crowd back towards the Divis Flats.9

On hearing, just after 10:30 pm, that the crowd was heading over to Grosvenor Road, the Deputy Commissioner, Samuel Bradley, who feared that it might cross into a mixed area sent a platoon to stop it. This unit was met by gunfire and a hand grenade; the attackers were IRA volunteers.10 Another IRA action on the Falls Road that night was the arson attack on Isaac Agnew’s car showrooms. The police log reports at 23:32 pm that petrol bombs were thrown into them, looting was taking place and boys aged 14 or 15 years old were pulling vehicles out and setting fire to them. It was not young ‘hooligans’, however, who started the fire, but three IRA volunteers.11

It was a similar situation in Ardoyne, although guns were not fired there. Because of the trouble in the Lower Falls, the Crumlin Road had been relatively neglected by the RUC. District Inspector Montgomery told the Scarman Tribunal that only a sergeant and seven men were left at Hooker Street. Bottle throwing was reported at the Hooker Street-Disraeli Street interface as early as 7:16 pm on 13 August, but an urgent note only creeps into the police log four hours later when it was reported that rioting had begun. Protestants and Catholics had started throwing stones at one another and assistance was required. Father Marcellus Gillespie was out and about on the Catholic side of the Crumlin Road that night and he told the tribunal that he came upon a crowd ‘who told me that they were told to try and draw the police off Bogside to reduce the pressure on Bogside, to create some sort of disturbance to keep the police occupied’. A degree of duress, as well as organization, is suggested by his subsequent remark that ‘some of them actually asked me to persuade them to go home’.12 The rioting continued in Ardoyne and on the Falls until well into the small hours of 14 August 1969. It was not until 4:20 am that the police log recorded ‘all quiet now’.13

The effect that this rioting had upon local Protestant communities was considerable, especially when combined with the broadcast, at 9 pm on 13 August, of the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, in which he declared that ‘Irishmen in every part of this island’ were concerned about what was taking place, that Stormont had ‘lost control of the situation’ and that his own government could ‘no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse’.14 The legitimacy or otherwise of not only the intervention from Dublin but also London’s insistence that the situation was a domestic matter does not concern us here. What matters is that the interstate competition between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom added to the sense of uncertainty in Belfast and the feeling that the relationship between the two communities there was in flux. This, in turn, encouraged some people to take up violence. Whereas the clashes on 13 August were confined to confrontations between the police and Catholic crowds, those on 14 and 15 August saw large-scale involvement of Protestant crowds and were much more violent. Indeed, all seven deaths occasioned by the rioting occurred during those two days.

The Republican interpretation of these events is summed up in a recent article by Roisin McManus in the Andersonstown News. ‘This weekend’, she wrote, ‘marks the 40th anniversary of the pogroms of August 1969 when loyalists, B-Specials and the RUC invaded Catholic areas, shooting and burning as they went. In the hours that followed, three Catholics were shot dead as well as a Protestant rioter. As shots were fired into Catholic streets, nationalists had nothing but stones to defend themselves’.15 Let us look at the use of the word ‘pogrom’ here. It is a Russian word meaning ‘destruction’ or ‘devastation’ and has been specifically applied to ‘attacks carried out by the Christian population against the Jews in Russia between 1881 and 1921 while the civil and military authorities remained neutral and occasionally provided their secret or open support’. One of the worst pogroms occurred in Odessa in the first week in November 1905. It is estimated that over 300 were killed and thousands wounded. ‘From the outset, these pogroms were inspired by government circles. The local authorities received instructions to give the pogromists a free hand and to protect them from the Jewish self-defence … After a while, it became known that pamphlets calling for the pogroms had been printed on the press of the government secret police.’16

Although there was some superficial similarity between Belfast in 1969 and Odessa in 1905, it is hardly enough to justify the use of the word ‘pogrom’. Both Catholics and Protestants suffered, albeit unequally, from damage to property17 and there were deaths and injuries on both sides. The first death was, in fact, that of a Protestant. Herbert Roy was shot in the chest with a .38 calibre revolver bullet in Dover Street at about 12:30 am on 15 August. While he was undoubtedly part of a crowd which was trying to break out into Divis Street, the only eyewitness at his inquest stated that he was ‘not taking part in anything’ when he was shot.18 McManus’s lumping together of ‘loyalists, B-Specials and the RUC’ is clearly intended to lend support to the ‘pogrom’ thesis because the last two were agents of the state. However, despite serious lapses of discipline and impartiality on the part of both bodies, this does not mean that there was nothing to choose between them and the loyalist rioters, let alone that the Northern Ireland Government positively encouraged and even organized the rioting in the first place. Indeed, if one wishes to explore ‘victimhood’, while the RUC did not experience any fatalities, 76 of its members were injured, compared with 199 Protestant and 178 Catholic civilians. Given the relative size of each group, the police constituted the one which suffered the most. Finally, if ‘nationalists had nothing but stones to defend themselves’, it is odd that not only were both dead Protestants killed by gunfire, but another 61 were wounded by it.19 Apparently first applied to attacks by Protestants upon Catholics in Belfast in 1920–22 by Father John Hassan, the word ‘pogrom’ was not a full and accurate description of the facts even then, let alone fifty years later.20

Another Republican myth – or, at least, one propagated by the Provisional IRA and its supporters – concerns the alleged failure of the pre-split IRA to defend the Catholic population from loyalist attacks. In fact, Brian Hanley and Scott Millar have provided ample evidence to show that, far from ‘running away’, the IRA stood and fought. As we have seen, the organization took the initiative on 13 August and on the following day, correctly anticipating a loyalist reaction, McMillen and his adjutant, Jim Sullivan, sent small groups of volunteers to the different Catholic areas and ordered them to engage in defensive actions.21

The most famous example of the latter took place at St Comgall’s School in Divis Street on the night of 14/15 August 1969. Quinn tells the story in dramatic fashion. The area, he writes, was under attack from ‘a 200-strong Protestant mob’ which had come down Percy Street from the Shankill Road. ‘The warm dark night’, Quinn continues, ‘was illuminated with the red flames from the burning terrace houses, the smell of burning crackling ashes mixed with the smoke filled air’ and a small group of young IRA men in St Comgall’s School made themselves a target by throwing petrol bombs at the mob. ‘If the school burned … a direct line would be open into the Loney and St Peter’s …’22 When ‘gunfire … began to hit down toward St Comgall’s … the young defenders held on with fading hope’. However, ‘that hope became one of confidence when seven armed men moved from the back of the school. One carried a Thompson [sub-machine gun] and he positioned himself above the front door on the roof. Others took up position on the ground floor of the school with a .303 rifle and pistols. The defence party included Billy McKee, Albert Price, Seamus Twomey and Liam Burke.’ These men succeeded in driving the Protestants back.23

Is it mere coincidence that all those named in Quinn’s account happened to be men who had left the IRA because they disagreed with the direction of the leadership and who subsequently became key figures in the Provisionals? We simply do not know how many men were involved in the defence of St Comgall’s, let alone who they were. The Scarman Report refers to ‘3 or 4 men’. Joe Graham says he was one of them, but he does not mention the names of any of the others, referring only to ‘a handful (literally) of other republicans’. Peter Taylor also mentions ‘three or four’. Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie, whoseaccount pre-dates Quinn’s and is basically the same as his, give no names either, while the editor of the posthumously published oral memoir of Brendan Hughes, who was also present as a guide around the school of which he had been a pupil, has excised the name of the man with the Thompson gun!24 While Quinn’s account may be accurate, it is hard to avoid considering the possibility that its principal purpose is to confirm the Provisional IRA’s narrative: namely, that Cathal Goulding’s IRA was not up to a fight and had to be ‘rescued’ by men who had left it for that very reason.

Another iconic moment of the Belfast riots occurred in the Clonard district on 15 August and a vivid account of it is preserved in the chronicle of the monastery which overlooked the area. In the course of the previous evening, the monastery had received an anonymous telephone call threatening to burn the inhabitants out – but nothing happened. The following day, however, the chronicler records, ‘Just after noon a sniper on the old linen mill behind the monastery was shooting at people on the street’ and ‘[w]e learned from the people around that there was going to be real trouble’. At 3 pm the older men and the sick were evacuated from the monastery and sent to two of the brothers’ houses nearby. Half an hour later rioting began in Cupar Street, the dividing line between the Falls and the Shankill. ‘The protestants seem to have been well armed’, the chronicler went on, and ‘[t]here was a lot of shooting from the Cupar Street side …’25

The monks tried to telephone the RUC for help, but could not get through because the power was off. The rector then went to the police station, ‘but they more or less said they could do nothing’ so the bells were rung to call more people to defend the monastery. At 4:30 pm, we read, fires were raging in Bombay Street, Kashmir Road and Cupar Street. ‘No one can do anything about it. They are protecting by guns [those] who are throwing the petrol bombs. It seems certain now that the Monastery will be burnt. The Blessed Sacrament has been removed. We are all prepared to move when the worst happens’.26

The fact that British troops were already on the streets of Belfast gave the chronicler some hope, especially after about thirty soldiers arrived at the monastery at 7 pm and there was a lull in the fighting. An hour later, however, he reported that ‘[m]obs came on to Bombay Street again protected by guns and began one by one to set on fire all that remained of Bombay Street and Kashmir Road. They even got as far as setting o[n] fire five houses in Clonard Gardens. St Gall’s School was ablaze’. What was more, ‘[t]he soldiers were useless. They called down Bombay Street, “Come out with your hands up: we won’t shoot.” They were answered with a hail of petrol bombs. One soldier was hit by a bullet. They retreated and fired a tear gas bomb and there was silence for a while, except for the crac[k]le of sixty or so houses burning. Eventually the shooting stopped and the fire in St Gall’s was put out. Most of the houses were left to burn. They were beyond redemption’.27

The toll was indeed a heavy one. No less than twelve Catholics were wounded by gunfire between 4 pm and 5:45 pm in Bombay and Kashmir streets.28 In nearby Waterville Street a 15-year-old boy, Gerard McCauley, was shot dead. A member of the Fianna, the Republican youth movement, he was described as ‘the first Republican activist to lose his life during the present phase of Ireland’s freedom struggle’. While he was clearly helping in the defence of the Clonard area, there is nothing to suggest that he himself was armed. McCauley was shot from what the autopsy report described as more than close range by a medium or high velocity bullet.29

Thirty-eight houses in Bombay Street had to be demolished together with four in Kashmir Street and one each in Clonard Gardens and Cupar Street.30 Despite the alleged ineffectiveness of the IRA, however, there was evidently enough firepower in the Clonard to turn the tide of battle. Indeed, between 6 pm and the small hours of 16 August, not a single Catholic was shot while 13 Protestants suffered gunshot wounds.31 This was almost certainly due to the efforts of the IRA, for although the organization had received two severe blows on 15 August – its leadership (including McMillen) had been interned as a result of a government decision on the previous day and its ammunition had almost run out – there was a small number of volunteers present and, on this occasion, the evidence that they included McKee is a little stronger.32

II

If the IRA played an important part in the riots on the Catholic side, was there any equivalent organization on the Protestant side? If the UVF was involved, it has left no traces. The same cannot be said of McKeague’s SDA. He told the tribunal that, even before the riots broke out, ‘I took steps to find out what armament or if there was any in the particular area [the Crumlin Road], and anyone with any legal shotgun was asked to have this available to stop any infiltration into this area’. This proved unnecessary on 13 August 1969, but because there was only a small police presence there the following evening, six shotguns were brought out and barricades were erected in three streets on the Protestant side. The men with shotguns were posted behind each of them. When the Catholic crowd from Hooker Street attempted an incursion, he boasted, ‘it was repulsed and the Protestant people went after them and gave them a lesson which I do not think they will ever forget’.33

McKeague also admitted to taking part in the rioting in Percy Street on the same night, even claiming that he and two of his men were responsible for devising a successful counter-attack against the Catholic crowd which enabled him to plant a Union Jack on the Falls Road.34 Another man who was involved in the rioting in nearby Dover Street and who exercised his leadership skills by organizing the Protestant crowd was John McQuade, the ex-boxer and hardline Unionist MP for Woodvale at Stormont.35

As for Paisley he led some of his colleagues from the UCDC in a deputation to see Chichester-Clark in the early hours of 14 August to ask for the immediate mobilization of the B-Specials. Chichester-Clark warned that if this happened, Westminster would say that Stormont was unable to rule Northern Ireland and take over itself.36 Paisley suggested the immediate formation of a people’s militia instead. Chichester-Clark’s response to that proposal is not known, but Paisley did advertise a meeting at his church on 15 August to collect names for the militia. Some 100 people reportedly turned up and Paisley later claimed that about 5,000 ultimately volunteered. However, as Mr Justice Scarman pointed out, this was ‘the only occasion, of which we have evidence, of any action by the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee in the events under review’. He added, ‘There is no evidence that the Ulster Protestant Volunteers played any part in the disturbances …’37

There was obviously some jealousy of McKeague’s influence on the part of Paisley and other would-be loyalist leaders. On 26 August the Orange Order, the Unionist Party in west Belfast and the UCDC issued a joint statement in which they stressed that they had no connection with the SDA and that any public statement it had made in the past or would make in the future ‘doesn’t represent the views of opinions of the above associations or any loyalists or Protestants in this area’.38

What about the actions of the police? During an emergency debate at Stormont on 14 August, the pugnacious NILP MP for the Falls constituency and former IRA volunteer, Paddy Devlin, said that the RUC had done ‘a remarkably good job’ during the previous day’s rioting in Belfast.39 Devlin was contrasting the behaviour of the police in Belfast with that in Derry, but even so, one wonders whether he would have been so fulsome in his praise a day or so later. There is no doubt that the RUC resorted to excessive force, particularly on the nights of 14 and 15 August. The most obvious example was the use of Shorland armoured cars equipped with .30 calibre machine guns in Divis Street on the night of 14 August. As Scarman pointed out, these vehicles and their weapons were designed for patrolling border areas of Northern Ireland and not for use in an urban environment. Their firepower was awesome: 500–600 high velocity rounds a minute which could only be fired in bursts.40 According to police records, well over 100 rounds of this lethal ammunition were discharged in the Divis Street/Falls Road area that night and one was responsible for the death of 9-year-old Patrick Rooney. The boy was sheltering with the rest of his family in a back bedroom of a flat in the Divis complex and was struck in the head by a high velocity bullet. A detailed ballistics report showed that the Rooney family’s ground-floor flat had been hit by four such bullets which had passed through windows, doors and plasterboard walls before exiting the building altogether or lodging in a wall. Since there had been no intention to kill the child, his death was clearly an accident, but an accident caused by such recklessness on the part of the policemen responsible that it would surely have merited a charge of manslaughter had it been properly investigated.41

The other death at the Divis Flats that night was of Trooper Hugh McCabe, a 19-year-old British soldier who was on leave and back home with his wife in the complex. His body was not discovered until some time after his death, so it is not clear when he died as a result of being hit by a single, high velocity bullet which entered his body via his right cheek and exited from the back of his chest. The Scarman Report suggests that he was shot by a police marksman from the roof of the Hastings Street RUC barracks while ‘assisting … others in assaulting with missiles the police in the street below’. His father testified at the inquest that his son ‘had no connection whatsoever with any Republic[an] or illegal organization’, but while there is no reason to dispute this statement, it does not mean that he was not participating in the violence. Another witness at the inquest, a first aid worker who inspected McCabe’s body where it was lying, said that he had had difficulty ‘in getting past a stack of crates containing petrol bombs’ to reach it.42

In Ardoyne, seventy-five rounds of 9 mm Sterling sub-machine gun ammunition were fired on 14 and 15 August. Samuel McLarnon was killed with one round and Michael Lynch probably with another. McLarnon, a 47-year-old bus conductor, was inside his house in Herbert Street. His wife described at his inquest how she and her husband heard shooting outside, turned out the lights and drew the blinds in their living room, which faced on to the street. She went out of the room for a few moments and returned after hearing more gunfire to find her husband lying dead on the floor. The ballistics report stated that the bullet which killed him and which was recovered from his skull was a 9 mm round of the kind used in a number of weapons, including the Sterling sub-machine gun carried by the RUC. Two similar bullets were found embedded in the living room wall and others from houses on either side of the McLarnons’.43 These details point towards a random burst of fire rather than a carefully aimed discharge.

The second fatality in Ardoyne that night was a 29-year-old labourer, Michael Lynch, who was one of a small group of local residents trying to dash across nearby Butler Street, where shooting was coming from the direction of the Crumlin Road. An eyewitness saw Lynch, who was just in front of him, fall to the ground. He saw blood on Lynch’s shirt near the centre of his chest, but ran on in the belief that his companion would be able to get up and get away. Lynch did get up and staggered into a house in a neighbouring street, where it was found that he was badly wounded. Since an ambulance could not get through because of the rioting, Lynch was taken to hospital in a private car and was admitted at 2 am on 15 August. He died fourteen hours later. The bullet which killed him was not recovered, although the pathologist thought it was of ‘medium or high velocity’ and ‘fired at short range’, which led Scarman to conclude that ‘in all probability’ it came from an RUC Sterling.44 Unlike McLarnon, Lynch was out in the street and he could have been taking part in the rioting, but there is no evidence that he was. The police came under fire on this occasion, which was their justification for using guns themselves, but it is significant that in addition to the two dead men, no fewer than twenty Catholics in Ardoyne were treated for bullet wounds that same night, while the only gunshot wound on the RUC side seems to have been a grazed ear. This suggests that the latter’s response was grossly disproportionate. The death of McLarnon was probably accidental and that of Lynch possibly so, but as in the Rooney case, there was a need for further investigation which might have led to criminal charges. None, however, was forthcoming.45

There was one more fatal shooting in Ardoyne on the following afternoon, 15 August. Describing the mood of his parishioners to the tribunal, Father Marcellus said ‘Everyone was in a state of panic. People were talking about how many were injured and who was dead. Some were boarding up their houses and others were moving out. Some were building barriers with paving stones’. The priest helped build one in Herbert Street and he witnessed a bus being hijacked on the Crumlin Road to make another. To make matters worse, the Scarman Report noted that, due to pressure elsewhere, there were no police officers or vehicles on duty in the Crumlin Road/Ardoyne area for a two-hour period in the late afternoon. This left the rival groups free to fight it out amongst themselves, which they duly did. Between 5:30 and 6:15 pm no fewer than seventeen people (ten Catholics and seven Protestants) were admitted to hospital with shotgun wounds. They included Martin Meehan of the IRA.46 At 5:45 pm David Linton, a 48-year-old machinist from the Protestant Palmer Street, was brought into the Mater Hospital suffering from shotgun wounds in the head, neck, chest and right arm. Three of the pellets caused massive internal bleeding and Linton died some ten hours later. According to two eyewitnesses at his inquest, Linton was defending his street against an incursion from the other side of the Crumlin Road when he was shot and was not carrying a gun himself.47

Although the police returned to the area after 6 pm, rioting and shooting continued into the night. About twenty houses in Catholic Brookfield Street, abandoned earlier by their frightened residents, were looted and set on fire by Protestant rioters and another casualty of the night’s violence was the Edenderry Inn, where the trouble in Ardoyne had begun three months earlier. Although British troops had arrived in Belfast on 15 August, they were not initially deployed in Ardoyne. Vivian Simpson, the Stormont MP for the area had appealed for them shortly after midnight on 15 August and, together with the Rector of the Holy Cross Church, went to the Cabinet Office on the afternoon of 16 August to repeat the request. The Cabinet’s Joint Security Committee had already approached the GOC Northern Ireland, Lieutenant-General Sir Ian Freeland, on the same subject and troops arrived on the Crumlin Road at 6:30 pm that same day.48 An uneasy calm gradually descended upon the city.

III

Amid the pages of statistics produced for the benefit of the Scarman Tribunal were lists of individuals arrested for participating and/or injured during the course of the rioting in Belfast. An examination of these enables the historian to construct a collective profile of those involved. In the case of those arrested, it is perhaps more useful to adopt a wider timeframe than the 13–16 August, when the police were more concerned with containing the violence than arresting the perpetrators. The figures cited, therefore, cover a three-month period starting from 16 May – i.e. the date of the first disturbance in Ardoyne. They show that rioters were overwhelmingly male: only six of those arrested out of a total of 150 were women. They were also young: 28 per cent were aged between 16 and 20, 37 per cent between 21 and 29 and 21 per cent between 30 and 39. Finally, they were overwhelmingly working class. Indeed, of the 143 for whom we have employment details, no less than fifty-seven (40 per cent) were classified as labourers. One man was described as a despatch clerk and another as a salesman, which was the sum total of the white-collar occupations. The second largest single category among those arrested was the unemployed, but no significance should be read into that. Not only were the riot areas ones of high social deprivation, but the proportion of unemployed in the sample – 7 per cent – was no different from that in Belfast as a whole.49

The profile of those injured in the rioting of 13–16 August is broadly similar, although it is obviously more difficult to tell whether those affected were merely victims as opposed to participants as well. Excluding members of the RUC, we have some data for 276 persons. There were more women, both numerically and proportionately, than in the case of those arrested, but since a third of them were in their 50s and 60s and were clearly suffering from the effects of acute anxiety rather than riot-inflicted injury, one should not exaggerate the significance of this. For the rest, there is again a preponderance of young males – with 24 per cent between the ages of 16 and 20, 31 per cent between 21 and 30 and 18 per cent between 30 and 39 – although it is not as great as in the case of those arrested. Since the available hospital records, unlike those for arrests, do not automatically include occupation, the historian has to try to ascertain this from other sources, in this case by matching patients’ addresses with the entries in the annual Northern Ireland directory. As the latter only lists the head of household and sometimes not even that, the results can be disappointingly small, especially where so many younger people living with their families are involved. Nevertheless, the occupations of sixty-one patients can be found. Once again, labourers were well ahead of the field (twenty-three in total), while another thirty-five were in working class employment of one kind or another. The white collar and middle classes were represented by one businessman, one fire officer and one clerk.50 This brief breakdown of social background is revealing in some ways, but it cannot provide the basis for an explanation of why certain people turned to violence. Beliefs mattered more than background.

This is further suggested by the geography of violence. Picking up on a comment in the Scarman Report concerning the ‘remarkable fact … that the Belfast riots of August 1969 did not spread from the Falls and the Ardoyne into the rest of the City’, Liam Kelly, in a brief article and longer essay, has sought to explain why areas which had previously enjoyed a reputation for violence, like Sandy Row and east Belfast, remained relatively quiet. He attributes this to a combination of factors, notably the efforts of local peace committees, some of which were drawn from both communities, and better relations between the police and the public than those which existed on the Falls and Crumlin roads.51 While Kelly’s research provides many valuable insights and casts further doubt on the ‘pogrom’ thesis, it omits one remarkable factor. Whether a particular area erupted into major violence or not in August 1969 seems to have depended, to a significant extent, upon how far communal tensions could be exploited and even engineered by those with a particular political agenda. As we have seen, the IRA was active in the Falls and Ardoyne and the SDA on the Shankill. Both played an important role in the turn to violence. Such organizations had not as yet succeeded in putting down strong roots in other parts of Belfast. When they did, trouble followed.

IV

The deployment of British troops in Belfast, and elsewhere in Northern Ireland, too, gave Westminster the central role in future developments in the province. It was all very well for the two British Cabinet ministers principally involved to say ‘Let’s keep Chichester-Clark carrying the can’ and ‘I too want to avoid responsibility’,52 but the buck now stopped in London. Thus, all the available accounts of the Cabinet meeting of 19 August 1969 show that the British Government’s sympathies lay overwhelmingly with the Catholic minority. Yet, as Defence Secretary Denis Healey also reminded them, the Protestants were the majority and ‘if we put the majority of the population against us, we should be once again in the 1911–14 situation …’53

In spite of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s insistence that ‘We must keep firmly in the middle of the road and be “firm, cool and fair”’,54 the presence of the army on the streets of Belfast soon antagonized the loyalists. It is often overlooked that the initial clashes between the army and the civilian population in Belfast were with Protestants. These took place on 7 September, 27 September, 4/5 October and 11/12 October – and the first shot fired at the army was by a loyalist on the third occasion. On the last date, during a massive riot on the Shankill Road, over a thousand shots were fired at the RUC and the army, killing a police constable, Victor Arbuckle, and wounding sixteen soldiers. The army returned fire, shooting and killing two Protestants, George Dickie and Herbert Hawe.55 Some of the Protestant crowd were waving Union Jacks and shouting ‘Englishmen go home’ at the troops.56

The riot of 11/12 October was undoubtedly sparked off by the appearance of the Hunt Report on policing in Northern Ireland. A three-man committee, consisting of Lord Hunt, the conqueror of Mount Everest, and two senior British police officers, Robert Mark and Sir James Robertson, produced its report on 10 October after only six weeks’ work. It reflected the widespread British suspicion of Northern Ireland’s mechanism for preserving law and order and proposed the disbandment of the B-Specials and their replacement by a completely new and non-sectarian reserve force soon to be called the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), together with the disarmament of the RUC and its transformation into an English-style, ‘normalized’ police force.57 It confirmed the belief among loyalists that the British Government and the army were ‘soft’ on the Catholics – which, in a way, they were.

General Freeland gave a revealing indication of his position in remarks he drew up for a staff conference in London. ‘Many people, mainly Northern Ireland Protestants,’ he stated, ‘have said “Why didn’t the Army restore Law and Order when they were brought in in August after the Police had lost control of the situation?”’ What they meant by this, he continued, was ‘“Why didn’t the Army counter the resistance of the Roman Catholics behind their barricades by force of arms and reduce this minority to their original state of second-class citizenship?”’ This, Freeland argued, would have been impossible without a declaration of martial law, which was ‘unthinkable in the UK, especially when imposed on part of the population who have a long-standing grievance against the Police and Government’. He saw his task, therefore, as keeping the peace and holding the ring while the new deal for the Catholic minority and police reorganization was carried out. ‘If we had used force to reduce the Roman Catholic strongholds’, he concluded, ‘there would have been immediate escalation of the situation throughout the whole of Ireland and possibly elsewhere [i.e in Britain]’.58

Freeland’s remarks here highlight how it is far too simplistic to assume that the British army saw Northern Ireland purely in colonial terms. Indeed, in June 1970 a high-ranking civil servant at the Ministry of Defence wrote to a colleague at the Home Office that the army may have previously thought ‘in a colonial context’ but that ‘the Northern Ireland troubles’ had shown that disturbances in ‘what purport to be civilised countries’ required the review of ‘the whole of tactical doctrine for internal security operations’.59 The General Staff bracketed together Northern Ireland with the ghetto uprisings in the United States, especially the Detroit riots of 1967, and campus unrest throughout the western world, specifically the protests at Kent State University in the spring of 1970 which had ended with the National Guard shooting dead four students.60 When a Whitehall working party was set up in July 1970 to look into ways of improving ‘the British Army’s Internal Security (IS) techniques to meet situations similar to those in Northern Ireland’, its members travelled to America, France, West Germany, Italy and Japan not to the Third World.61

V

Towards the end of 1969, the UVF began to emerge from the shadows. As early as 2 September, a statement purportedly emanating from ‘Captain Stevenson, Chief of Staff, UVF’ had appeared in the Belfast Telegraph. It claimed that ‘battalions of the UVF are ready for action, and new battalions are being formed’, but it was dismissed by both the RUC and Paisley’s UCDC. On 19 October, however, following an explosion at an electricity sub-station in Donegal, UVF armbands were found on the severely burned body of a man, Thomas McDowell, discovered nearby. On 24 October the UVF claimed responsibility for the explosion, declaring that it was, in part, a reprisal for the stationing of Irish troops on the border following Lynch’s speech and warning that, as long as the threat from Republic continued, its volunteers would strike at targets over the border.62

The following month, on 18 November, it was reported that the UVF had ‘embarked on a recruiting campaign to augment its underground forces’ and that ‘[c]anvassing has been going on among factory workers in certain parts of Belfast and some country areas to enlist men for the illegal organization. Compulsory contributions of 10 shillings a week are being levied for the purchase of firearms.’ The campaign was linked, it was said, to the British Government’s plan to replace the B-Specials with the UDR.63 A subsequent article spoke of the UVF’s twenty to thirty ‘divisions’, while at the same time suggesting that it was ‘organisationally poor and numerically weak’ – although well-armed!64

The official picture was not much clearer. An RUC Special Branch report at the end of the year stated that ‘it appears that the subversive elements in the ranks of extreme Protestants loosely referred to as theUlster Volunteer Force, will never be identified as a body. They do not appear to have a constitution or terms of membership and their means of communication are confined to a very few letters carried by hand and the verbal passing of instructions …’ The author of the report referred to ‘an indication’ that ten men awaiting trial on conspiracy charges arising from the sabotage of public utilities earlier in the year were the activists and that ‘the remnants in Belfast are now in two separate groups clandestinely dealing in small quantities of arms, but at loggerheads with each other’. There was no intelligence on the identity of a leader or leaders. ‘Indeed the contrary is true, that there does not appear to be a “leader” as such’.65

It would be easy dismiss this report as proof of the RUC’s poor intelligence concerning extremist Protestant organizations about which the army habitually complained. However, the evidence to the Scarman Tribunal of Brigadier Peter Hudson, the CO of the Army’s 39th Brigade which was responsible for Belfast, shows just how fissiparous loyalism was in the months that followed the deployment of British troops in the city. Asked whether there appeared to be any organization on the Protestant Shankill side, he replied, ‘No effective organization. We found it very difficult indeed to get together a body of people who could talk with the same view. We tried for a long time to get, say, a dozen or 20 people representing, say, Shankill, Woodvale and [east Belfast], but failed. It was not easy. They were fragmented and all of different opinions’. Even the SDA ‘never really seemed to us to be a body that had very much influence and it certainly didn’t represent the whole of the Shankill, for instance; … other people with what one might almost call extremists views … disowned McKeague; … he was not acceptable to them, to the mass of the Shankill’.66 None of this shows that the UVF did not exist or did not play a role in events; merely that it was not nearly as significant as it has been made out to be. Its heyday was to come later, after the Provisional IRA campaign had begun.67

VI

Things were very different on the Catholic side, where the various local defence committees which sprang up at the time of the rioting came together to form a Central Citizens Defence Committee (CCDC). The CCDC negotiated with the army on such crucial matters as the removal of the barricades and the re-entry of the RUC into Catholic areas. The CCDC was not a Republican body, although a prominent Republican, Sullivan, became its chair. As Adams later explained, Republicans ‘came naturally into area leadership positions because they had standing in the community or because of their previous experience of agitational activity in unemployment and housing action and civil rights campaigning’.68

Recruitment to the IRA appears to have increased rapidly. ‘[Y]ou could have filled Falls Park with the amount of people who wanted to volunteer’, one man reminisced to Hanley and Millar, while three senior RUC officers told the Hunt Committee in September 1969 that the number of IRA members in Belfast had probably doubled to between three and four hundred in the month since the riots.69 Nevertheless, within a matter of months both the IRA and Sinn Féin had split. Belfast played a key role in this development. According to Adams, there were ‘three broad tendencies within republican activism’ in the city. The first was the leadership headed by McMillen and Sullivan and which continued, by and large, to follow the line laid down by Dublin. The second consisted of an older generation of Republicans, often referred to as ‘the forties men’, because they had joined the IRA in the 1940s. They had dropped out of the movement or resigned in protest against the ‘politicizing’ tendencies of the leadership, but turned out to offer their services during the August crisis. The dominant figures in this group were McKee, Twomey and Joe Cahill and their priority was armed struggle. Younger activists, like Adams himself, who had been involved in the new-style political and social agitation encouraged by Dublin, but who realized that developments in Northern Ireland required different priorities and different solutions, made up the third group.70

It was ‘the forties men’ who seized the initiative. According to one source, they met as early as 24 August and ‘decided to remove Sullivan and McMillen as quickly as possible and work on replacing the Dublin leadership with “traditional” republicans’.71 On 22 September they actually confronted McMillen and Sullivan – some say with guns in hand – to demand that the Belfast staff be enlarged by co-opting people who shared their views and that four members of the existing IRA leadership be removed, including Goulding.72 Cahill claims that McMillen promised to discuss the dissidents’ demands with Dublin, but when it was subsequently discovered that he ‘had been instructed by Goulding and company to play along with the dissidents and keep General Headquarters Staff informed of what was happening’ and particularly ‘to find out if we had made any contacts for arms supplies’, that was ‘the final straw’ and the dissidents set up their own separate and independent Northern Command.73

The split did not officially come, however, until Southern figures like Seán Mac Stíofáin, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Dáithí Ó Conaill unsuccessfully challenged the leadership at a special IRA convention in mid-December 1969 on the twin issues of forming a broad National Liberation Front with other left-wing groups and, more importantly, formally abandoning the hitherto sacrosanct principle of refusing to take up seats in the Dáil. The traditionalists reckoned that the meeting had been rigged because a number of delegates who could have been expected to vote with them failed to turn up. In addition, of course, Belfast was not represented, having decided to set up its own Northern Command. Immediately after the convention, Mac Stíofáin went to Belfast, where he spoke to a gathering of twenty sympathetic Republicans, who agreed with him that a new organization should be created. Another special Army convention was therefore summoned which was attended by representatives from Belfast, the minority who had voted against the Dublin leadership at the previous convention and those who had been excluded. It was this at meeting that the Provisional IRA was formally established, with Mac Stíofáin as its Chief of Staff and two Belfast men, Cahill and Leo Martin, on the Army Council. The split was completed in January 1970 when Provisional Sinn Féin was set up after a walk out from the Ard Fheis.74

The Provisional IRA was particularly strong in Belfast, probably because so many of its founders came from there. Cahill believed that there was another reason. When trying to recruit new members from the rest of Northern Ireland, he found that the rural units would not abandon their allegiance to the Dublin-based organization – soon to become known as the Official IRA – ‘until they were certain they would get weapons … They were very reluctant to change horses in midstream, and would say, “When you can supply arms, get back to us”. Despite everything, they were still hopeful that the Official IRA would supply arms’.75 Hanley and Millar have detailed how the two factions engaged in an arms race, seeking funds and/or weapons from, among others, the Irish government, the Irish Diaspora, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Hollywood film stars and even loyalists.76 Principles, personalities and pistols were not the only things shaping the way that the split was developing. Like any civil war, the Republican one was about more than just the issues that were dividing the elite.

Within Belfast, the Official IRA continued to occupy a dominant position in the Lower Falls, thanks no doubt to the influence of McMillen and Sullivan, both of whom were from the area. Outside of that neighbourhood the only parts of the city where the Officials could be said to have rivalled the Provisionals in strength were the Markets and the western suburb of Turf Lodge, possibly because a large number of former Falls Road residents had been re-settled in the latter. Those who formed the Provisionals started organizing in Ardoyne as early as November. Meehan played a key role here. He had resigned from the IRA in disgust after the August riots because he felt that the area had not received sufficient assistance from the Belfast command, and his brand of muscular Republicanism found a natural home in the Provisionals. The Short Strand in east Belfast seems to have been a kind of no man’s land between the two factions, while Ballymurphy remained in a state of limbo because Adams, whose position in this western suburb was crucial, had not yet made up his mind which side to back. He finally plumped for the Provisionals, who already held sway in the Unity Flats, the New Lodge area and the rest of Catholic west Belfast, apart from Turf Lodge.77

While the Republican movement was going through its reorganization, things seemed to be going well for the Catholic community in general. The British Government was overseeing and guaranteeing reforms which the community’s representatives had long sought and British troops were protecting its areas from further depredations by Protestant crowds. The Hunt Report, the Clonard Chronicle recorded, ‘marks a new era for Catholics in the North’ and they were ‘very impressed’ by it.78 An intelligence assessment approved by the Army’s intelligence committee on 5 January 1970 stated that ‘the majority of Catholics in the North have now little or no sympathy with the IRA type of attack. Now that the Civil Rights Association has paved the way for the reforms which are now working their way through Parliament, there is no point whatsoever in jeopardizing the gains already made by senseless acts of violence’. While Catholics in troubled areas would naturally accept IRA offers of protection and even offer to conceal weapons, the assessment concluded, ‘there is no real affection for the IRA and the IRA themselves are aware of it’.79

Of course, this did not suit the Provisionals at all. Hughes, a new recruit to their ranks, remembered McKee, the Provisionals’ commander in Belfast, ‘saying that this is our opportunity now with the Brits on the streets, this is what we wanted, open confrontation with the Army. Get the Brits out through armed resistance, engage them in armed conflict and send them back across the water with their tanks and guns. That was the Republican objective.’80 For people such as McKee, reform was a side issue if not a positive threat.

So, if the Provisionals’ objectives were to be achieved, the Catholic community had to be turned against the British army. To some extent the army itself was helping the Provisionals achieve this very thing. As an 18-year-old in west Belfast, the journalist Malachi O’Doherty recalls an incident which occurred in September or October 1969. Walking home from a Sunday night dance, he and a group of his friends ‘were drawn to the sound of shouting up ahead. It was a group of soldiers taunting some of the others who had come from the dance. I heard the soldiers calling them “stupid Micks”.’ While he could understand the rough behaviour of the troops when they were under attack later on, O’Doherty wrote, ‘[f]or them to have turned nasty before all that, just for the fun of it, seemed to say something fundamental about the untenability of using these men to bring peace … English soldiers calling Irishmen “stupid Micks” seemed to confirm the republican notion that there was old bad blood at work here …’81

Some of the dances and discos were put on by the British army as part of its programme for ‘winning hearts and minds’, but produced the opposite effect when the soldiers competed with the local boys for female attention. Adams subsequently criticized the troops ‘attitude to womenfolk’, and at the time he went so far as to organize a picket from the local Sinn Féin women’s branch against a disco in Ballymurphy. This ‘quickly deteriorated into shouting matches between British army squaddies, who were incensed by the protest, and the local women, who were incensed by the attitude of the British soldiers’. He claims that the protest put a stop to the discos, and adds significantly that ‘it had given us our first opportunity to agitate publicly against British troops and we continued this low-intensity agitation through the spring of 1970’.82

VII

What the Provisionals really wanted, however, was some high-intensity action as opposed to ‘low-intensity agitation’. This occurred at Easter 1970 and, since it was set off by an annual Junior Orange outing, was reminiscent of the disorders at the Unity Flats the previous year. On this occasion, though, the rioting occurred in Ballymurphy and Catholics took the lead. At approximately 9:15 pm on 31 March 1970, well after the local Junior Orange Band had passed, a gang of up to 200 youths began throwing bottles and stones at troops in the area of the Whiterock Road/Springfield Road crossroads. The disorder lasted until 1:30 am, four arrests were made and twenty-five soldiers were injured, one of whom had to be detained in hospital. The following night trouble began at about the same time and the RUC reported that ‘a raiding party’ of Catholics had crossed the Springfield Road into the Protestant New Barnsley estate. As the situation deteriorated, CS gas was used, for only the third time in Belfast83, and barricades were thrown up at two road junctions leading from Ballymurphy out on to the Springfield Road. According to the British army’s weekly intelligence summary, ‘Military action was taken to clear demonstrators and petrol bomb throwers from the area … The troops used baton charges and 18 cartridges of CS gas between 0200-0300 hours. By 01.40 hours the area had been cleared and the barricades taken down …’84

A third night of rioting took place on 2/3 April 1970. Earlier in the day about seventy Catholic youths broke into homes on the Protestant side of the Springfield Road which had been vacated by residents on account of the previous disturbances. Families with children later moved in and the RUC made plans to evict them, but a local councillor managed to persuade them to leave peacefully. Two hostile crowds faced each other that night, with the RUC taking care of the Protestant one and the British army the Catholic. The former managed to persuade the Protestant crowd to disperse, but the Catholic one chose to attack the soldiers again. CS was used once more and by 2:30 am on 3 April the crowd had been cleared. Around fifty petrol bombs had been thrown at the troops and a cache of 150 more was discovered during a search of the area. Twenty-one arrests were made by the army, one of them a man carrying a .22 automatic rifle and fifty-three rounds of live ammunition.85 These events there followed by a series of threats and counter-threats: General Freeland announced that petrol bombers could be shot dead if they persisted in their actions after due warning. The Provisional IRA then stated that if one Irish life was lost in this fashion, it would shoot members of the army where and when the opportunity arose, while the UVF threatened to shoot one Catholic for every soldier.86

In a memorandum, dated 3 April, the UK Representative, Ronald Burroughs, told his superiors that not only had an outbreak of violence in the area not been predicted, but it also could not have been because ‘the root causes are still obscure’. Even the leaders of the Catholic community, he added, were at a loss to explain them. Their consequences, however, were clear: ‘A Bogside type of situation developed in which hooligans turned their attention more towards the forces of law and order than towards their religious opponents’. And, in this case, the forces of law and order were the soldiers who ‘had to face a series of hit and run assaults from highly mobile and elusive gangs of stone-throwing hooligans, the majority of whom were in their teens’.87

A few days later, a telegram from the Director of Intelligence in Northern Ireland to the Joint Intelligence Committee in London provided an attempt at an explanation. ‘When hooligans took possession of houses evacuated by Protestants’, he wrote, ‘women and children were put in as squatters later. This was not [the] action of [a] teenage mob.’ Provisional IRA volunteers and Republican sympathizers, he continued, were among those arrested and they were carrying offensive weapons and taking part in the violence. Finally, he noted, a meeting of ‘Brady group Republicans’ in the area had decided to ‘cool down Ballymurphy temporarily’, while promising to deal firmly with the Protestants in New Barnsley when the troops were occupied elsewhere. ‘It is very much in [the] interests of IRA/extreme Republicans to get the army fighting with Catholics in order to destroy [the] army image as protectors of [the] Catholics. It is the IRA activists who want to assume this role.’88

It appears from another account that, if McKee had had his way, the Provisional IRA would have opened fire on the troops. According to Ed Moloney, ‘When the Ballymurphy riots erupted, he ordered an armed unit from D Coy in the Lower Falls Road to go to Ballymurphy and take on the British army. When Adams found out, he was furious and detained McKee’s men at gunpoint’. One of those held explained to Moloney, ‘McKee wanted a gunfight, but Adams didn’t. Adams wanted ordinary people involved in the rioting as a way of radicalizing them. That impressed me’.89 It was not long before McKee was to get his gunfight, but it was not against the army and he was almost killed as a result of it.