The Falls Road Curfew
The Falls Road curfew is one of those events of the Northern Ireland Troubles which are ritually remembered and commemorated.1 Yet there have been few studies of it. The contemporary booklet by Séan Óg Ó Fearghail, published by the Belfast Central Citizens’ Defence Committee in September 1970, contains much useful information, but was openly designed to make a case against the British Army.2 The article by Colm Campbell and lta Connelly in 2003 is a scholarly study but is principally concerned with legal matters.3 The pamphlet entitled The Story of the Falls Road Curfew published in 2012 by the Research Department of the Workers’ Party of Ireland, provides some valuable additional information, not least because it represents the viewpoint of the Official IRA, which was much more involved in the curfew than its Provisional rivals.4 The only book on the subject, Andrew Walsh’s From Hope to Hatred, is, alas, woefully short on archival research and relies far too heavily upon the unreliable memories of events which occurred more than forty years before.5 This chapter,6 which is based mainly on contemporary sources, seeks, therefore, to paint a fuller and more accurate picture of what actually happened.
At 4 pm on Friday, 3 June 1970, the duty officer of the 39th Infantry Brigade,. the British Army formation responsible for the Belfast area, recorded the following message from the 1st Battalion Royal Scots Regiment in the brigade’s log: ‘R[oyal] U[lster] C[onstabulary] tip from housewife at 24 Balkan St[reet], lower Falls that there may be weapons and explosives hidden in the house. We are going in to search in conjunction with [the] RUC.’7 The available Army logs do not tell us when the joint Arm patrol arrived at No. 24 Balkan Street, but Ó Fearghail states that it was around 4:30 pm, a rare case of agreement between him and an Army press release designed to refute his account.8
Ó Fearghail goes on to say that when the Army cordoned off both ends of Balkan Street ‘a small crowd began to gather behind them’, and that local vigilantes summoned a priest who tried to impress on a British officer at the house the need for the search to be completed as quickly as possible if he (the priest) and the vigilantes were to contain the situation.9 It is not clear who these vigilantes were, but they most probably belonged to the Belfast Central Citizens’ Defence Committee formed after the communal rioting of August 1969 and some of whose members belonged to the Official IRA.10
It was 5:16 pm when Northern Ireland Command HQ in Lisburn was informed that a small quantity of arms and ammunition had indeed been discovered at No. 24 Balkan Street. The haul was 51 lbs of gelignite (in dangerous condition), 12 pistols and revolvers, 1 Schmeisser sub-machine gun, 1 .303 rifle and over 500 rounds of assorted ammunition.11 According to the Sunday Times ‘Insight Team’s’ book on the early history of the Troubles, the occupant of No. 24 Balkan Street, although not a full member of the IRA, was associated with the organisation and had been reluctantly persuaded to store the arms and ammunition in his house for a brief period. There was, however, a delay in their removal and the man’s wife, who was even less enthusiastic about the arrangement, rang the RUC.12
The Army’s overnight situation report, sent to the Chief of the Defence Staff in London, takes up the story: ‘Following a search by [the] l[st Battalion] R[oyal] S[cots] of 24 Balkan Street … a hostile crowd formed in Albert Street. At 18.15 … [a] crowd started forming in Service St followed by other crowds in the Falls area with the building of barricades. A crowd also formed in Boyne Bridge and Dover St. CS [gas] was used on the Dover St crowd … At 18.50 grenades were used against t[roo]ps in Raglan St. 5 soldiers of 1[st Battalion] R[oyal] S[cots] were injured.’13 At 7:18 pm the commander of the 39th Brigade, who was responsible for security in the Belfast area, ordered all units to regroup and ‘to effect the security of the area and prevent movement in or out …’ Just under an hour later, at 8:10 pm, the first shots were fired.14
According to the official Army history, as soon as they were aware that firearms were being used, both the General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland and the Belfast Brigade Commander15 came to the same conclusion: the area must be pacified, and, in order to achieve that, it had to be entered in force. Up to then the Army had been trying to cordon off the [Falls Road] area where the trouble was occurring, but it was now to be ‘strengthened and the area divided into four parts, each of which were to be entered deliberately and separately by a full battalion, who would then patrol the area. Orders were given that any house from which hostile activity had come should be searched, together with the homes of known IRA members …’16 In fact, the curfew was not formally announced until 10 pm It was relayed to the inhabitants of the Lower Falls by means of a loudspeaker in what, according to the Guardian journalist, Simon Winchester, ‘many remembered as a sepulchral doom-laden Eton accented voice’.17 Under the terms of the curfew, everyone was to stay in their houses. Anyone found on the street would be arrested, but not shot unless they were carrying weapons.18
It has been cogently argued that the curfew was illegal, as under existing law, only the Minister of Home Affairs in the Northern Ireland government could proclaim a curfew and he was not consulted. However, in undated comments on the galley proofs of the Sunday Times Insight Team’s book on the early stages of the Troubles, General Freeland argued: ‘The Resident Magistrate at Crumlin Road Courthouse, Belfast, in November 1970 ruled when dealing with offenders being charged with impeding the Army on 3/4 July on the streets of the Lower Falls during the Curfew, that the GOC was right in imposing a restriction on public movement at that time. The City Magistrate also ruled that the Army was acting under Common law and held that they were entitled in law to act as they did.’19 An undated cutting from the Belfast Telegraph in the same file confirms General Freeland’s claim, but what legal weight it carries is unclear.
According to the Army logs, the shooting went on until well after midnight. The last reference is timed 0240 in the morning of 4 July and is linked to a death which will be dealt with later.20 The Army spent Saturday morning completing its search of the area and by the conclusion of the operation it claimed that it had uncovered a total of twenty-nine rifles and carbines, three submachine guns, eight shotguns, thirty-two revolvers, nineteen automatic pistols, 24,973 rounds of ball ammunition and 621 shotgun cartridges.21 No fewer than 3,000 soldiers were involved in the operation. Between them they fired 1,452 rounds of ammunition, nearly all of it from their rifles, and used 218 CS gas grenades and 1,355 CS gas cartridges.22 An official casualty list stated that six civilians had been killed, two of whom were snipers, and fifty-seven wounded, as opposed to eighteen soldiers wounded. In addition, there were 337 arrests.23
These figures would have exacerbated bad feeling in the Lower Falls as they stood, but when it transpired that even though there were only four fatalities, all of them were civilians, the reaction was even worse. It has continued to be a live issue. The forty-sixth anniversary of the curfew was marked, among other things, by calls from the families of three of those killed for fresh inquests on their deaths. Apart from a mention of ‘closure’ by one family member, it is not clear what the relatives are seeking, but Mr Robert McClenaghan of the Falls Commemoration Committee, who referred to the four victims as the ‘four murdered’, clearly has political aims.24 It is important, therefore, that the existing inquest records be thoroughly examined in any serious study of the curfew.25
The first death was that of Charles O’Neill, aged 36, and described as an unemployed labourer. His brother-in-law added that he had served in the RAF for twelve years and had been discharged some seven years previously. He was married with two children but had separated from his wife (who was living in England) and was currently living with his mother in Belfast. He was in poor health.
A subaltern in the 2nd Battalion of the Queen’s Regiment testified that at about 6 pm on 3 July 1970 his platoon was deployed on the Falls Road. ‘Crowds were forming along the road and up side streets’, he said, and they ‘were exceedingly hostile to the Military and missiles of every type, including some explosive devices, were being thrown at soldiers and Army vehicles.’ At the junction of the Falls Road and Omar Street, a crowd was pushing two lorries across the Falls to block it. Since there was an Army sub-unit beyond this point, he thought it might be cut off, which would have been ‘most dangerous’. He was therefore ordered by his superior officer to prevent the lorries from blocking the road.
‘The obvious leader of the crowd’, the subaltern continued, ‘ran towards the leading armoured personnel carrier’ – of which he was commander – ‘waving his arms and shouting. I ordered [the carrier] to proceed.’ He went on to say that the vehicle was travelling fast as ordered and that O’Neill stepped into its path. The driver, the subaltern continued, was closed in his vehicle for obvious reasons, had only limited vision and no chance to manoeuvre, was unable to stop, and in any case had been ordered not to. O’Neill was hit by the right wing of the vehicle. The driver of the 11-ton Saracen vehicle, unsurprisingly perhaps, confirmed his superior’s account, adding that ‘[a]s he reached the gap [in the barricade across the Falls Road] he saw a man appear waving his arms. He was so close and [I] was travelling at 25-30 mph so there was no way of stopping in time.’
A sergeant from the same unit had more to say about O’Neill. He caught his attention, he said, because ‘he was directing the men and vehicles in a very forceful way waving his arms and shouting. He had a wild look and in my opinion had been drinking.’ As the Saracens neared the gap in the lorries, the man, still ‘waving his arms and shouting’ seemed to step into the path of them, was hit and tossed into the air, landing on his head.
There was obvious collusion between the testimony of the subaltern and the sergeant in portraying O’Neill as the rowdy leader of those seeking to block the road. Civilian witnesses gave a rather different impression. One, in particular, spoke to him as they both stood in the middle of the Falls Road. He asked O’Neill, whom he described as grey-haired and bespectacled, what was happening, but received no reply. As the Saracens rolled forward, the witness could see they were not going to stop and moved quickly to the pavement while shouting to O’Neill to do the same. However, ‘[h]e just stood there with his arms raised until the tank was practically on top of him and then he started to move …’ It was too late, however, and the Saracen hit him. The witness ran over to an army officer to complain about what had happened, but the officer told him not to touch O’Neill, adding that he would call an ambulance: ‘When the crowd saw what had happened all hell seemed to break loose.’ The impression he got, he told the inquest, ‘was that he [O’Neill] was trying to keep the Military from charging the crowd so that he could reason with them.’
The autopsy report on O’Neill stated that he suffered from emphysema and that his death was due to a blow to his head that caused his brain to swell. However, there was no evidence that he had been run over by the Saracen, as some witnesses claimed. An important revelation, however, confirmed the sergeant’s suspicions: O’Neill had 288 mg of alcohol to every 100 ml of blood in his body, which was more than three times the drink-drive limit in the United Kingdom. This, according to the pathologist, could have led to a lack of coordination, staggering and an inability to take steps to secure his own safety. In other words, O’Neill may have been an agitator or a peacemaker, but if the pathologist was right, it would have been difficult for someone who had imbibed such a large amount of alcohol to move quickly.
The verdict was death by misadventure.
The second fatality was that of William Burns, a 54-year-old maintenance operator, who lived at No. 57 in the Falls Road. The autopsy report showed that he had died as a result of being hit by a 7.62 mm round which had entered the front of his right chest between the second and third rib, passing through the right lung. It did not however exit his body, but was found lodged in muscle. The fact that the bullet was flattened and grooved on one side indicated that it had ricocheted before striking Mr Burns.
With him at the time was a man who had a shop next to Mr Burns’ house. The two men, anticipating trouble, had boarded up the windows of the shop. As the troops slowly moved up the Falls Road, clearing the barricades as they went, they used tear gas to disperse the rioters. The shopkeeper was standing in the entrance of his shop with Mr Burns on his right. ‘As the soldiers broke through the barricades’, he told the inquest, ‘there was a loud explosion … Suddenly splinters of wood hit me on the face and in the chest. Billy Burns turned and walked inside, he never spoke to me. I stood on for about 30 seconds and I noticed a chip out of the doorpost on the city side. I thought perhaps it was a piece of shrapnel from the explosion. I did not hear any shots being fired … I did not realise Billy had been hit. I then went inside and as I did I saw blood on the hallway. Billy was then lying stretched out on a couch with his shirt and vest off and I could see a wound on his chest and there was blood on his head.’ Mr Burns was unconscious and the shopkeeper went next door and dialed 999 for an ambulance.’
According to the testimony of a Private from the 1st Battalion Royal Scots, he had seen a group of four men come out of Leeson Street, which was on the opposite side of the Falls Road to Burns’ house and the neighbouring shop. They were carrying what looked like petrol bombs and they had a light. The soldier’s Major had already warned the crowd that that if anyone threw petrol bombs and grenades, they were liable to be shot.26 The Private therefore cocked his rifle and took aim. Three of the men turned and ran back down Leeson Street, but the fourth lit his bomb and threw it, whereupon it burst into flames. The bomb-thrower then turned tail and followed his accomplices back down Leeson Street. The Private went on to tell the inquest:
Seeing that there was a blank wall behind him [the petrol bomb thrower] and no danger of harming anyone else I took a quick shot at this man. I could not actually say whether I hit him or not but I don’t possibly see how the shot I fired could have injured anyone on the opposite side of the road owing to the angle I fired in and we had very strict orders not to pull the trigger if there was any danger of hitting anyone else other than the petrol bomber.
This no doubt carefully rehearsed testimony almost certainly contains the truth about the tragedy of William Burns’ death. The standard NATO 7.62 mm rifle was a battlefield weapon and its high muzzle velocity made it unsuitable for urban firefights, not least because there was an ever-present danger of ricochets. This was known from the early days of British Army involvement in Northern Ireland.27
The verdict, once again, was Misadventure.
If the circumstances surrounding the death of William Burns are reasonably clear, those of Patrick Elliman are anything but. Whereas the deaths of Reid and Burns occurred on the Falls Road, that of Elliman took place to the south of the curfew zone at the junction of Marchioness Street and the Cullingtree Road, not far from the Grosvenor Road. In a statement for the inquest, Mr Elliman’s sister, who was the houseeper and tenant of No. 12 Marchioness Street, said that between 11:30 pm and midnight her brother decided to ‘go out to try and get some fresh air’, as he had been affected by the gas. All was quiet when he left, but as he was walking down to the junction with the Cullingtree Road, she saw what she believed to be an Army searchlight travelling along the wall in her street. She then heard three very loud shots and four or six shots fired very quickly. ‘The next thing I saw’, she continued, ‘was about four men carrying someone from the corner. I thought Paddy [Elliman] was helping them. It was not until they brought the carried person into the house that I realised it was my brother …’
Mr Elliman’s brother also lived in Marchioness Street, a few doors up. He testified that, at about 11:30 pm, he saw his sister standing at the door of her house. She told him that their brother had gone down to the corner. He went too, in order to bring him back. As he neared the junction with Cullingtree Road, he saw Patrick standing a couple of yards up from the corner. He warned his brother not to go too far out into the Cullingtree Road as two soldiers were there lying under a car. Nevertheless, they both peered around the corner, whereupon two or three quick shots were fired. There was also ‘a big flash’ and Patrick’s brother hurried back up the street towards his own house. Almost as an afterthought, it appears, he added that ‘there was one other person at the corner but I do not know who it was. He was there when I first arrived at the corner.’
Not long afterwards, his son-in-law appeared to tell him that Patrick Elliman had been shot and he asked the son-in-law to fetch an ambulance. According to the son-in-law’s testimony, however, he was already at Elliman’s brother’s house and both men had gone down to the corner of Marchioness Street and the Cullingtree Road in order to bring Patrick back. He said that his father-in-law and Patrick had said something when they met and had peered up the Cullingtree Road, whereupon three shots rang out. His father-in-law, clearly frightened, hared off back up Marchioness Street as Patrick staggered and fell on to the roadway. With the help of two other men, the son in-law carried Patrick back to his house, and, ‘leaving the other two chaps’ to look after him, took his sister off to some unnamed destination. He then went to Sultan Street to the Knights of Malta in order to call an ambulance and, within ten minutes, Patrick was on his way to hospital.
The ambulance was stopped and searched twice en route to the Royal Victoria Hospital by the Army.28 Whether the delay had any effect upon the outcome is not known, but the autopsy stated that Mr Elliman ‘had a gaping wound extending from front to back on the top of the head[,] the hole in the skull measuring about 5 X 1 inches. The underlying brain tissue was severely lacerated and bruised and as a reaction to this injury the brain swelled. This brain damage caused his death 8 days after he was injured.’
The important Army witness at the inquest was a sergeant from the 1st Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. ‘There was considerable firing in the area’, he said. A bus and some corrugated iron sheeting formed a barricade across the junction between the Grosvenor and Cullingtree Roads and it was occupied by troops. ‘The whole area of the barricade’, he continued, ‘was under fire. Bullets were hitting the bus … houses in the area and passing overhead … The firing seemed to be coming from street ends on the West side of Cullingtree Road … I could see where the shooting originated by observing the flash of weapons and the angle of fire.’ He, together with a corporal, went through the barricade and took shelter behind a car parked in Cullingtre Road at the junction with Ton Street, which was the next street to Marchioness Street. A man poked his head round the corner of the latter and shouted ‘something about “English cowardly bastards” and “Come and get me before I get you.”’ The sergeant ordered him to get off the streets, but the banter continued. He then saw another man’s head appear around the corner. This was followed by the appearance of a rifle, whereupon he fired three rounds ‘as fast as I could squeeze the trigger’. The heads disappeared. He ran across Cullingtree Road and looked up Marchioness Street, but it was ‘completely clear’.
‘Much later’, according to the testimony of a Major from the same regiment, ‘a patrol reported a blood trail at the Cullingtree Road, Marchioness Street junction, including a pair of slippers. This trail was followed to 12 Marchioness Street, which was searched by us …’ The corporal added that the house was empty. It was subsequently taken over by troops of another regiment.
What are we to make of this strange affair? It would seem obvious that the sergeant was the man who shot and killed Mr Elliman, although a deposition by a member of the Department of the Northern Ireland Department of Industrial and Forensic Science stated that a bullet fragment recovered from the latter’s body was not from the standard 7.62 mm rifle, the weapon the sergeant carried and which, by his own admission, he had fired in the direction of Marshioness Street. But what of the other people involved? Who were ‘the other two chaps’ who helped carry Mr Elliman back to his house only to disappear into the night? More importantly, what were they all doing at the junction of Marchioness and Cullingtree Streets in the middle of the night when there was a curfew in force and gunfire was being exchanged? Finally, why was Mr Elliman’s sister whisked off to another location and No. 12 Marchioness Street left deserted?
The plot is thickened by two entries in the log of the Duty Officer of 39th Brigade received from the 1st Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. The first, at 0240 on 4 July 1970, stated that one of its soldiers had shot an armed man in Marchioness Street and that blood trails had led to No. 12, where a search was about to begin. This was followed, almost immediately, by the relay of a report from the RUC which stated that 12 Marchioness Street was the address from which the ‘Free Citizen’ was published.29 The ‘Free Citizen’ was a periodical put out by the People’s Democracy, a Marxist revolutionary movement which was involved in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights agitation of 1968–9. Only a day and a half earlier, on the morning of 2 July 1970, the Chief Superintendent of the RUC’s Special Branch had given the Joint Security Committee notice of possible ‘PD/IRA association’ to cause trouble.30 None of this, however, was revealed at the inquest which, for the third time, pronounced a verdict of misadventure.
Although much clearer, the facts underlying the fourth and final death, that of Zbigniew Uglik, were equally if not more bizarre. At about 9 pm on the evening of 3 July 1970, a young man – Uglik was 21 – arrived at the Army Operations Room in Belfast where he gave his name as Quigley and said that he was employed by the Daily Telegraph. He asked to be given an Army escort to the Falls Road and anywhere else he chose to go. Asked where his press pass was, he replied that he had stopped carrying one since he had been beaten up by the Paris police for doing so. On the way out, he told the sceptical Army captain to whom he had been speaking that ‘Belfast was a picnic compared to Grosvenor Square’31, which prompted his interlocutor to retort that perhaps he had not spent much time in the city. He urged Uglik to obtain a press pass from Army HQ at Lisburn and warned him that it would be silly to venture into the Falls Road area without Army cooperation.
Uglik may have wanted to be ‘a news photographer’, as he is described in the issue of the Irish News cited at the beginning of this chapter, but, as his brotherin-law explained for the inquest, he had been a student at Chiswick Polytechnic in West London and after failing his exams, had been working as a postman in Brentford. He had not mentioned to his brother-in-law that he was even going to Ireland when they last met on 27 June 1970, but on 4 July Uglik’s mother told him that her son had gone on holiday to Dublin with a group of scouts.
Uglik next turned up at a house in Albert Street in the Lower Falls at about 11 pm on 3 July. He spun a similar yarn to the occupant, a plumber, as he had done to the Army captain earlier in the evening and the former invited him in. After watching television until close-down, Uglik told his host that ‘some men’ had taken his spool of film off him and that he wanted to go back to his hotel in order to pick up a spare. He asked whether there was a back way out of the house. His host replied that there was not, but that he might be able to get out via a high wall leading to a builder’s yard. He cautioned against it, however, as the masonry was unsafe and urged his visitor to stay until the morning. Ignoring this sensible advice, Uglik left the house between 1 and 1:30 am on the morning of 4 July and the last his host saw of him was as he climbed up on to the wall of the outside toilet. Uglik left his jacket, his camera and a packet of cigarettes behind him which would suggest that he intended to return. About half an hour later, the plumber heard shooting but did not associate it with his guest. It was only when he read the description of an unidentified dead man at the Royal Victoria Hospital in his Sunday newspaper that he took Uglick’s belongings to the Army and explained what had happened.
What occurred after Uglik left the plumber’s house is clear from the Army testimony at his inquest. A private in the 2nd Battalion, Queen’s Regiment, stated that he was in the back room of an empty house in Albert Street on the lookout for snipers. Shortly after hearing some shots nearby he ‘saw a dark figure emerging from [his] left. He appeared to be walking along a yard wall.’ He loosed off a shot and the figure disappeared. A corporal, who was positioned in the same house, told a Colour Sergeant that a man had been firing from behind the house ‘and the Private thinks he has hit him.’ Presumably in order to avoid any reaction from possible further snipers, the Colour Sergeant ordered his men not to investigate but to remain in their positions. It was not until an hour and a half later that a body, later identified as Uglik’s, was discovered by a search party and taken to the hospital.
The fact that Uglik was a fantasist does not mean that he deserved the fate which befell him. It is also true that the Private who almost certainly killed him does not appear to have shouted any kind of warning before firing the fatal shot, as he should have done. At the same time, Uglik, who emerges as a Walter Mitty figure, was extremely foolish to go climbing over and walking along walls in the middle of the night during a curfew when shots were being fired.
A fourth and final verdict of death by Misadventure was delivered.*
On the afternoon of Saturday, 4 July 1970, the Army arranged a tour of the Lower Falls by representatives of the media. This was being done, General Freeland explained to a meeting of the Northern Ireland Joint Security Committee that same morning, in order to demonstrate ‘(a) [the] police presence in the area along with the military; (b) the arms haul; and (c) the justification for the action taken by the Army.’32
Whether this was a wise decision is questionable. It was not only journalists who were given a tour of the curfew area, but two Northern Ireland government ministers. At the same time, the Westminster MP for the area, Gerry Fitt, was excluded. A draft letter to Mr Fitt attempted to explain that whereas the two ministers, Walter Long and John Brooke, ‘had … a particular job that had to be done at the time’, Fitt was merely the local MP and, as such, had no more right to enter the Curfew area than any other citizen.33 This was absurd, not only because both the Northern Ireland and UK governments should have been cultivating Fitt, who, although a nationalist, was not an extremist, while Long, as Minister for Education, had no particular reason for touring the area, and Brooke, although Minister for Information, was the son of Lord Brookeborough, the former Northern Ireland Prime Minister, and known to share his father’s hardline views on Irish nationalism. As far as the inhabitants of the Lower Falls were concerned, the sight of these two men, riding around the district in Army vehicles, could only be seen as a symbol of the Unionist establishment lording it over their Catholic ‘subjects’.34
A neutral five-minute clip of news footage of the tour is available on YouTube under the title ‘Operation Banner 2 the Falls Road Curfew with Street Names’.35 Shot from one of the vehicles carrying the press, it begins with a brief introduction by a journalist and then goes on show a series of working class streets. Once into the curfew area, the latter are virtually empty of ordinary people, but there are plenty of Army vehicles, armed soldiers (some apparently snatching a nap on the pavement after a sleepless night), barbed wire and sandbagged firing positions. A small group of children on a street corner waves and shouts at the passing truck. Two women can be seen standing in a doorway and a third at her window. The slogan ‘Join a local Slua of Na Fianna Éireann’ can be read on one wall as the truck drives past.36 The impression is one of total military occupation.
There had been discussion during the morning of Saturday, 4 July concerning the possibility of a temporary relaxation of the curfew, but the idea was rejected until the arms searches had been completed.37 Tempers were certainly rising as the day went on and just after 5 pm on Saturday afternoon the 1st Battalion Royal Scots reported a crowd of women ‘shouting and trying to force way through barrier.’ They were warned that if they did not disperse, CS gas would be used against them. The HQ of 39th Brigade promptly advised against this on the grounds that ‘it may lead to further trouble’. It was pointed out that the women wanted to do their shopping and that some of them wished to return to their homes which they had not been able to do the previous night. As a result, the curfew was temporarily lifted for two hours until 7 pm.38
The curfew was not finally lifted until 9 am on the morning of Sunday, 5 July 1970. A persistent myth has it that it was broken by a march of women, who pushed their way past the Army into the Lower Falls on Sunday, 5 July 1970.39 In fact, there were two marches on the Sunday and both took place after the curfew had been lifted. The second march was led by Maire Drumm, a leading light in Provisional Sinn Féin, but both marches were allegedly used by supporters of the two branches of the IRA to carry out weapons and ammunition not discovered by the Army during the course of its searches and concealed in children’s prams.40
Immediately after the curfew, stories about alleged depredations perpetrated by British soldiers during the course of their searches for weapons began to circulate. On 6 July 1970, for example, the Daily Telegraph carried a story by William Burton and Ronald Clare in which they referred to allegations of looting and unnecessary violence by troops during the curfew.’ … [W]hereas on Saturday when we went into the curfew area under military escort everywhere was silent,’ they wrote, ‘yesterday saw people stood around in little knots outside their houses. Most were bitterly resentful at the 33 hours they had been confined in their homes.’ The charges levelled against the troops, particularly those in the Scottish 1st Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers and the 1st Battalion Black Watch, were of looting a bar and unnecessary violence during the house-to-house searches. Men, it was said, were forced to kneel on the road or lean against the wall for hours, during which time they were kicked and hit around the legs with batons. One girl alleged that her wages were stolen and another householder claimed that £67 was taken during a search for weapons.
There is no doubt that there was some truth in these allegations. A British NCO, who took part in the operation and whose service record belies any suggestion that he was a malcontent, recalled his own concern at what occurred. ‘I knew full well’, he wrote twenty years later,
that a lot of the lads were taking this opportunity to vent their anger over things already done. Heads were being cracked and houses trashed from top to bottom … [O]ut of the blur, little sharp details still cut through: school photos; smiley family pictures (cracked); trinkets and crucifixes (snapped); kids crying; crunching on the glass of the Pope’s picture … This is when I did feel like we’d invaded.41
How widespread this behaviour was is difficult to judge. According to the Army, 2,500 houses had been searched during the curfew. The number canvassed by Ó Fearghail’s university students after the event was around 2,100.42 Yet only 277 complaints were presented by the Central Citizens Defence Committee, and a mere 40 to confirm them in person.43 Moreover, Ó Fearghail conceded that ‘there was some sort of praise for the conduct of the troops’ in 130 of the households visited, while the Workers’ Party pamphlet, too, recognised amid its criticisms of the soldiers’ behaviour that ‘some behaved properly, treating the homes and persons they were searching well …’44
Since the Army insisted that all complainants must be interviewed in person,45 it is not surprising that the number of formal complaints was so small. After all, who would want to be grilled by the military and have all manner of personal information collected about them and most likely stored for future reference? The percentages of those households canvassed by Ó Fearghail’s team who complained about various issues are likely to be a more accurate measure of popular discontent. They were: loss of liberty/confinement, 23 per cent; effects of CS gas, 21 per cent; damage to property, 19 per cent; shortage of food, 10 per cent; loss of income, 8 per cent; and looting/pilfering, 4 per cent.46
More criticism of the Falls Road curfew came from the Irish Republic. This must be considered in the context of the political crisis which had recently thrown the Fianna Fáil government of Jack Lynch into disarray. Just two months earlier, on 6 May 1970, Lynch had sacked two of the most important ministers in his cabinet, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, for opposing the government’s policy towards Northern Ireland. A third member of the cabinet, Kevin Boland, resigned in sympathy. On 28 May Haughey and Blaney were arrested and charged with involvement in a conspiracy to supply arms to the Catholic minority in the north, and more particularly to the Provisional IRA.
Analysing the crisis in a despatch to London on 30 June 1970, the British ambassador in Dublin, John Peck, pointed out that no Irish politician could afford ‘not to declare himself a republican, nor to pretend that republicanism does not mean an end to partition, sooner of later.’ He went on to explain that there was ‘a fundamental cleavage’ in Fianna Fáil about how to bring about a united Ireland, with the Taoiseach advocating a peaceful, gradualist approach and his opponents a more militant one, with the immediate issue of how to protect the Catholics in the north. ‘The old guard says send them guns,’ wrote Peck. ‘Mr Lynch says trust the British.’ However, his government was unlikely to survive ‘a prolonged breakdown of law and order in the North’, which ‘would be immeasurably harder to maintain if there were much greater illegal intervention from the South of the type which Blaney and Boland would tolerate, if not positively connive at, were they to supplant the Lynch government’.47
All charges against Blaney were dropped on 2 July 1970 and the Falls Road curfew, which began the following day, could all too easily be exploited to justify his views and those of his supporters. On the evening of 4 July 1970, the Irish ambassador in London, Dr Donal O’Sullivan, telephoned the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to inform the latter of the ‘tremendous pressure’ which was being put on his minister, Dr Patrick Hillery, by events in Belfast. Among other things, the ambassador said, the Irish government wanted an immediate decision by the Northern Ireland or British governments to ban the Orange Order marches on 13 July.48
To make matters worse, Dr Hillery paid a clandestine visit to the Falls Road area on Monday, 6 July 1970, which lasted – in his estimate – ‘about an hour and a half. At a press conference on his return, he told reporters that his ‘impressions of the people were that they had a sudden, unexpected and to them quite unwarranted visitation from the British army and I am afraid they don’t regard the British army as any longer their friends and protectors.’ When asked if he had met any Protestants or members of the IRA, he replied that he did not ask people their religion or their organisational affiliations. ‘The people I met’, he explained, ‘I met by chance.’ Asked what his visit had achieved in practical terms, he replied, ‘It is very hard to answer that. We want to demonstrate to the people that we are there, that they are not isolated.’
In a further interview for the BBC’s Panorama programme, Hillery was asked whether the Falls Road curfew was not ‘in a sense a reprisal against the shooting of Protestants the previous week-end’. These events will be touched upon later in this article, but Hillery neatly dodged the point his interviewer was rather clumsily trying to make – i.e. that six Protestants had been killed in rioting the previous weekend – by arguing that some of that fighting had been near a Catholic church and, in any case, he ‘didn’t believe the British Army would be expected to take reprisals in a quiet area for that.’49
Whatever Hillery had done or said, he had broken diplomatic protocol with his clandestine visit to the Lower Falls. The counsellor at the British embassy in Dublin, whom Hillery saw very soon after his return, ‘judged it impolite to suggest to him that he might have given us advance notice of his intention to visit Belfast’,50 but the following day in the House of Commons, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, acidly commented that while it was natural that Hillery should wish to keep himself informed on Northern Ireland, ‘I should have expected him to have consulted Her Majesty’s Government if he wished to make a visit. Not to have done so, particularly in present circumstances, is a serious diplomatic discourtesy. His visit has magnified the difficulties of those who are working so hard for peace and harmony in Northern Ireland.’ 51
Hillery admitted that this rebuke ‘was fair enough’ but ‘observed that a dressing down from HMG would in fact be the reversal of harmful in Dublin’ and went on to say that ‘[t]he great fear of the Irish Government was that the mass of moderate Catholic opinion in the North would feel it had no voice or outlet except the extremists and subversives and had lost all contact with the South.’ Indeed, ‘[r]ecent events … had conspired to convince Catholics that Stormont, HMG and the army were all in league against them …’ It was, therefore, ‘really essential’ to do something to redress the situation and ‘[t]he rerouting of provocative marches was the obvious urgent step.’ 52
Turning from the actual events and immediate consequences of the Falls Road curfew to its causes, some have argued that it was a sign of a new, tough policy introduced following the change of government in London when the Conservatives won the general election of 18 June 1970. Thus, Lewis Baston’s biography of Reginald Maudling, the new British Home Secretary and cabinet minister responsible for Northern Ireland, relates how General Freeland told Maudling on 30 June 1970 that only the Army was in a position to get tough, since the RUC’s morale was low and it had ‘almost retired from the difficult business of controlling rioters’. The Army could do one of two things, Freeland explained: fire on rioters – which would solve nothing and cause IRA retaliation – or ‘put in a massive military presence to keep order.’ To this end, a number of actions would be stepped up, including arms searches. In Baston’s view, Freeland’s remarks were ‘effectively a blueprint for the Falls curfew’.53
The Sunday Times Insight Team went a great deal further. It stated that, at a meeting on 1 July 1970, the Joint Security Committee decided that ‘[t]he very next incident which sparked trouble in Belfast should be put down by the Army with maximum force’, and that the junior defence minister, Lord Balniel, approved this decision on the occasion of his visit to Belfast the following day. The result was the Falls Road curfew.54 The flaw in this argument is that there was no meeting of the JSC on 1 July 1970 and that, according to the minutes of the meetings on 28, 29, 30 June and 2 July, no such decision was reached. As for Lord Balniel, he did not ‘approve’ anything, but was merely informed of the precautions which the GOC intended to take regarding the Protestant marches on 13 July 1970 and which had already been communicated to Maudling during his visit.55 It was these marches which preoccupied the Army at the time. It was not anticipating trouble on the Lower Falls.
The principal weakness of the conspiracy theory of the Falls Road curfew, however, is that it can so easily be turned on its head. Who else stood to gain from provoking a fight with the British Army? Reference has already been made to the rioting of the previous weekend when six Protestants had been killed in two other locations in Belfast: the Crumlin Road–Ardoyne interface in the north of the city and the Catholic island of the Short Strand just across the River Lagan in East Belfast.56 As Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie write in their history of the Provisional IRA, the Provos’ rivals in the Official IRA had mixed feelings about the fighting that weekend. ‘The vision of [Billy] McKee’ – the Provisonals’ leader in Belfast – ‘and his men holed up in a Catholic churchyard blazing away at the Protestant hordes was about as far as one could get from the image of republicanism they were trying to project …’ However, they had come forward to protect the Catholic population, whereas the Officials had not.57
Even after the curfew, the Officials were concerned at what had happened during the previous weekend. ‘The hatred and bitterness engendered by the killing of six Protestants’, they stated on 6 July 1970, ‘can only increase the likelihood of further pogroms in the future’. Indeed, they went on to argue that ‘[t]he Falls, the best organised, most peaceful and least bigoted area in Belfast, has paid the price for the bigoted sectarian actions of the previous week for which they were in no way responsible’.58 Nevertheless, the Officials were now showing that they, too, could protect their people and beat the Provisionals at their own game.
At 9:15 pm on 3 July 1970, the Army liaison officer with the RUC reported that the IRA ‘intends to have [an] all out battle with the mil[itary] tonight. Barricades erected tonight were prefabricated.’ 59 According to the journalist Hugh Jordan, who had good contacts with the RUC, Billy McMillen, the leader of Belfast’s Officials, told his men ‘[t]hat this was not a confrontation they had wanted … but rather one which had been forced upon them. They had to take a stance because the Provos were watching from the wings and whatever happened now would determine how that organisation would view the Officials in the future.’60 The Officials certainly assumed the credit for defending the Lower Falls. The curfew, their monthly journal proudly proclaimed, ‘saw [t]he biggest and most sustained battle between the forces of British imperialism and the Irish Republican Army since Dublin in 1916’. It confirmed the decision to resist the British incursion ‘by all means possible’.61
After the curfew ended, an anonymous Provisional IRA spokesman described the fighting in the Lower Falls as ‘a great mistake’. Admitting that there had been ‘some ill feeling’ between the two Republican factions, he suggested that if there had been better coordination between them, ‘[d]iversionary action would have been taken by units all over the North.’ As it was, when the serious nature of the fighting became clear, at around midnight on 3 July 1970, ‘there was little we could do as the Army had the place surrounded.’ Nevertheless, the Provisionals did organise a diversionary operation by blowing up a savings bank in Andersonstown at 3:30 am on the morning of 4 July 1970 and ambushing the British Army unit which came to respond. He added that there were ‘plenty of Provisionals’ in the curfew area and they did what they could on their own initiative.62
Determined not to allow the Provos to steal any part of the Officials’ thunder, the latter’s all-Ireland leader, Cathal Goulding, retorted that one reason for the split in the Republican movement was that many people had been led to believe that the Officials ‘had gone altogether “political” and didn’t intend to fight.’ What took place in the Lower Falls, he said, had demonstrated that this was untrue.63
None of this proves that either the Official or the Provisional IRA commands deliberately provoked the Falls Road curfew any more than the British Army did. If one has to pin the blame on anyone, it should be those Officials who failed to remove the weapons which had been temporarily stored in No. 24, Balkan Street when they said they would, or the irate housewife who rang the RUC. Poor timekeeping and domestic discord was a more likely explanation than any pre-planned conspiracy.
In conclusion, it is necessary to explore, however briefly, the longer-term consequences of the Falls Road curfew? It has been seen by many as the major turning-point in the Troubles. The Provisional IRA, in particular, took this line. Its then chief-of-staff, Sean MacStiofain, wrote a few years later, ‘Far from intimidating the Irish people, the behaviour of the British that weekend alienated them in tens of thousands. Coming on top of the successful IRA-led defence of Ballymacarrett and other districts,64 what the battle of the Lower Falls did was to provide endless water for the Republican guerrilla fish to swim in.’65 Gerry Adams was only marginally less bullish in his assessment, written just over twenty years after MacStiofain’s. ‘Thousands of people who had never been republicans’, he wrote, ‘now gave their active support to the IRA; others who never had any time for physical force now accepted it as a practical necessity.’66 The author of the biography of another leading Provisional, Joe Cahill, was equally positive. ‘[T]here was an upsurge in the number of young people attempting to join the IRA,’ he enthused. ‘Belfast Brigade had many more potential recruits than they could handle.’67
In his book on the British Army in Northern Ireland, Colonel Michael Dewar claimed that the strength of the Provisionals grew from fewer than 100 activists in May–June 1970 to approximately 800 in December, which is indeed a considerable increase.68 However, the RUC’s Special Branch had put the Provisionals’ strength at a suspiciously precise 458 in April 1970,69 so how does one judge the reliability of Dewar’s figures or anyone else’s? In any event, it is hard to see why all the eager new recruits would have rushed to join the Provisionals when it was the Officials who bore the brunt of the fighting on and around the Falls Road.
Contemporary assessments paint a more nuanced picture. Ronald Burroughs, the British government’s official representative in Northern Ireland, thought that ‘the recent Falls Road operation has alienated virtually all Catholic opinion whether moderate or extremist’, a view which was echoed a month later in the Home Office’s weekly summary of events in Northern Ireland. ‘[T]he Catholic community in Northern Ireland’, it noted, ‘has lost much of its confidence in the Army to control the situation in an impartial way, and feeling against the Army is running high amongst Catholics in general.’ A contemporary Northern Irish Catholic view can be found in the domestic chronicle of the Clonard Monastery, which was, of course, situated in the Lower Falls. After a critical account of the curfew itself, it went on to record that in August and September 1970 ‘[r]esentment towards the British Army grows in Catholic areas generally, while support for the IRA grows.’70
At the same time, however, feelings could always change. In a classified account of the Army’s first year in Northern Ireland, the anonymous author wrote of the impact of the severe flooding in Belfast on the night of 15 August 1970, just over a month after the Falls Road curfew. ‘By dawn’, he wrote, ‘soldiers were wading through the streets and using boats to rescue and supply food … In these streets, where the Security Forces had twice come under hostile fire during the course of the year, it seemed that the cycle of events was complete as soldiers were welcomed once again as saviours on the anniversary of their first intervention.’71 And almost thirty years later, Raymond Quinn, a local historian whose views carry all the more weight since they come from a Republican viewpoint, wrote that ‘[i]n spite of the curfew, relations between the Catholic community and the British Army [were] generally good but quickly eroding.’ Indeed, he went on, ‘a whole spectrum of friendliness still existed in the latter half of 1970’ and it was only at the end of that year that the IRA began actively to discourage friendly relations between the Catholic community and the army by means of warnings, shaving the heads of girls who ‘fraternised’ with off-duty soldiers and tarring and feathering alleged collaborators.72
How, then, are we to sum up the available evidence on the Falls Road curfew? It seems clear that neither the British Army nor the Official or Provisional IRA anticipated, let alone planned it. Instead, what was intended as a routine arms search ballooned into a large-scale riot during which a great deal of damage was caused and four civilians, one of whom (Burns) was completely innocent, another (Reid) who may have been, a third (Uglik) who was simply foolish, and a fourth (Elliman) whose role remains unclear, were killed. Both wings of the IRA felt obliged to exploit the situation, as much to enhance their respective reputations among the Catholic population as to defend the latter from the British Army, whose own action can certainly be criticised as heavyhanded. The Curfew, in fact, was not the landmark in the history of the Troubles it has been made out to be, although it will doubtless continue to be commemorated as such.
* Zbigniew Uglik inquest, PRONI, BELF/6/1/1/24.