Ireland Since 1939

by Henry Patterson

  This system of direct rule by proxy enraged the unionist right and eventually unleashed a downward spiral of loyalist reaction and republican assertiveness. Lord Hunt's committee reported on 9 October, recommending that the RUC become an unarmed civilian force and the B Specials be disbanded to be replaced by the Ulster Defence Regiment, a locally recruited part-time military force under the control of the British Army. In response, loyalists rioted for two nights on the Shankill Road, and shot and killed the first RUC man to die as a result of political violence since the IRA's 1950s campaign. Ian Paisley's attacks on Chichester-Clark, whom he portrayed as Callaghan's submissive poodle, were increasingly influential in the Protestant community.

  Although Callaghan had privately declared his desire ‘to do down the Unionists’,12 he and his colleagues were soon convinced that there was no alternative but to support Chichester-Clark. Oliver Wright, a senior diplomat who had been Wilson's emissary to Rhodesia, was now sent to oversee the implementation of the reforms and ‘put some stiffening into the administration’.13 Although Unionist ministers feared that he would listen only to their critics,14 his reports to Downing Street were surprisingly sympathetic to the good intentions of Chichester-Clark and his colleagues, if not to their abilities: ‘They were not evil men bent on maintaining power at all costs. They were decent, but bewildered men, out of their depth in the face of the magnitude of their problem.’15 Wright was critical of the recently published Cameron Report into the 1968 disturbances because it displayed so little understanding of Protestant fears: ‘not only the loss of political power within his own community, but his absorption into the larger society of Southern Ireland – alien in smell, backward in development and inferior in politics’. His central conclusion, one followed by Wilson's administration until it lost office, was that ‘our central purpose should be to support the Northern Ireland government, both to keep the problem of Ulster at arm's length and because they alone can accomplish our joint aims by reasonably peaceful means.’16 However, Wright was well aware of the pressure which Chichester-Clark's government was under from its own supporters, who increasingly complained that it was a puppet regime implementing pro-Catholic reforms under pressure from Wilson and Callaghan:

  Her Majesty's Government is not allowing the Northern Ireland Government to do what they want to do: to issue statements about a timetable for proper action against the Catholic barricades and the extremists who seem to call the tune behind them. The result is that the Northern Ireland Government feel that the Catholics are getting away with it and they themselves are reduced more and more to the role of puppets… If and when we take over, and it will be a minor miracle if we don't have to, we shall, on present indications, have a pretty unfriendly majority party and majority community to deal with.17

  Despite this, by the beginning of 1970 there was a facile optimism in the British cabinet and Whitehall that was reflected in an Irish Times investigation into the new relationship between Stormont and Westminster: ‘The British view is that the Northern Ireland problem “has been licked”.’18 At a meeting in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London in February, Wright informed Patrick Hillery, the Irish Minister for External Affairs, that ‘a lot of steam had gone out of demonstrations’ and that the only ones making trouble were ‘professional anarchists’. Irish fears about the growing support for Paisley, whose Protestant Unionist Party had recently won two council seats in Belfast, were dismissed with the claim that Chichester-Clark had a ‘moderate and united Unionist Party’ behind him and that the prospect was one of ‘steady improvement in the situation’.19 This ignored the reverberations from the violence of the previous summer in which thousands of people, most of them Catholics, had lost their homes. There was a dangerous new sharpness to sectarian tensions in Belfast from which both Paisley's Protestant populism and the infant Provisional IRA were already benefiting.

  Traditionalist republicans had asserted themselves in the wake of the August violence. By September they had forced the Belfast IRA command to break its links with the national leadership, and by the end of the year the nucleus of an alternative republican movement had emerged, leaving Goulding's supporters to define themselves as the Official IRA. When in December an IRA convention voted in favour of ending the policy of abstention from the Dáil, Goulding's critics seceded and created a Provisional Army Council. In January 1970 the political wing of the movement, Sinn Féin, also split. While the largely southern leadership of the Provisionals – men including the new Chief of Staff Seán MacStiofáin and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh – were driven by a fundamentalist commitment to the main tenets of republican ideology, many of their new supporters in the North were motivated by a mixture of ethnic rage against loyalists and the RUC and the increasingly fraught relations between the British Army and sections of Belfast's Catholic working class.

  Although the violence of August had created a reservoir of fear, resentment and anger that the Provisionals could exploit, recent research has pointed to slow and limited growth of the organization until the spring of 1970. The first ‘general army convention’ of the Provisional IRA was attended by just thirty-four people.20 For many of the young Catholics who approached veteran republicans to get trained in the use of arms, the enemy was not the British soldiers, who were enjoying a brief honeymoon period as the saviours of their communities, but loyalists and the RUC. Republicans such as Joe Cahill and the young Gerry Adams were aghast at the behaviour of Falls Road housewives who gave cups of tea to soldiers while their daughters attended discos organized by the army. But as early as September 1969 Callaghan himself had admitted to his cabinet colleague Anthony Crosland that British troops were no longer popular: ‘He had anticipated the honeymoon period wouldn't last very long and it hadn't.’21 British soldiers soon found themselves in the unenviable position of policing major sectarian confrontations and acting as the first line of defence of a Unionist government under intense pressure from the loyalist right.

  Republicans had long denounced Stormont as a ‘police state’. However, the dominant characteristic of the RUC's response to the civil unrest after October 1968 had been its weakness and ineffectuality. In contrast, the army, whose presence had grown from the pre-Troubles garrison of 2,000 to 7,500 by September 1969,22 responded to rioting with often overwhelming force. The loyalists who rioted on the Shankill Road after the publication of the Hunt Report were the first to experience the difference. Two were shot dead and more than sixty injured, with a police surgeon commenting that the injuries were the worst he had ever seen after a riot.23 Given the atmosphere of intense sectarian animosity and potential confrontation that existed in the ‘shatter-zones’ of North and West Belfast, it was inevitable that the army's brutal and often indiscriminate response would be meted out to Catholics as well.

  The first major conflict between Catholics and the army occurred in April 1970 after an Orange parade near the Ballymurphy estate in West Belfast, which was by then home to many of those displaced by the August violence.24 The Ballymurphy riots were accompanied by the expulsion of Protestant families from the nearby New Barnsley estate. Further confrontations in West and East Belfast precipitated by Orange parades in June led to the first significant military actions by the Provisionals. IRA men defending the small Catholic enclave of the Short Strand in East Belfast shot dead two Protestants, while republicans killed three Protestants in clashes on the Crumlin Road. The brutal sectarian headcount of five Protestants to one Catholic killed established the Provisionals' ghetto credibility over that of the more squeamish Official IRA, which had remained loyal to Goulding. The Provisionals experienced their first major influx of recruits since the previous August and accelerated their plans for moving from a largely defensive to an aggressive posture.25 A bombing campaign that had begun in Belfast in March 1970 was intensified in the autumn.

  The growth of the Provisionals was encouraged by the combination of a Unionist government that was hostage to the right and by a new Conservative administration th
at republicans could portray as crudely pro-Unionist in sympathy. Ian Paisley and a supporter had been returned to Stormont in two by-elections held in April, Paisley taking particular relish from a victory in O'Neill's former constituency of Bannside. Paisley went on to win the Westminster seat of North Antrim in the June general election. Callaghan was later to blame ‘the far more relaxed and less focused regime’ of Reginald Maudling, his successor as Home Secretary, for allowing the situation to deteriorate radically.26 This too conveniently ignored the profoundly destabilizing effects of the policy of direct rule by proxy, which Wilson and he had bequeathed to Heath and Maudling. But it is true that while Callaghan and Wilson were inclined to be cautious, Maudling and Heath were disposed to give the army its head. Maudling's own character has been described as ‘brilliant if a little lazy’.27 His strong aversion to the North's warring factions – ‘these bloody people’28 as he referred to them – may have encouraged Sir Ian Freeland, the GOC in Northern Ireland, to a more aggressive approach than he would have adopted under Callaghan. It was Freeland who, without consulting Chichester-Clark's government, made the decision to impose a curfew on the Lower Falls area in July after a search for arms had provoked rioting. For two days 3,000 troops supported by armour and helicopters conducted a massive house search while saturating the area in CS gas and taking on both the Official IRA, who controlled the Lower Falls, and the Provisionals in gun battles in which five people were killed.29

  A triumphalist tour of the area by the Stormont Minister of Information, who was a son of Lord Brookeborough, contributed to the politically disastrous results of this military operation, which marked the turning point in the relations between the army and the city's Catholic working class,30 By the end of the summer the Provisionals had launched a bombing campaign against government buildings and commercial targets and were organizing the importation of weapons from the US. Their strategy was aimed at provoking a more repressive response from Stormont, including internment, which they correctly calculated would fail and lead to direct rule. Republican theology saw Britain as the enemy, and the Provisionals did all in their power to reduce the conflict in Northern Ireland to one between the British state and the ‘Irish people’ without the complication of Stormont. They would be spectacularly successful in pushing the contradictions of direct rule by proxy to their limit and in bringing down Stormont, but the price would be a low-intensity sectarian civil war.

  Republican violence exacerbated the problems that Chichester-Clark was experiencing in his attempts to maintain the momentum of a reform programme against a substantial section of his own party and the Unionist grass-roots. The decisions, post-August 1969, to create a Central Housing Authority and appoint a review body on local government reform chaired by Sir Patrick Macrory, were bitterly resented, particularly in the west of Northern Ireland where they were seen as ‘handing over half the Province to a one third minority.’31 To the consternation of many party members, Brian Faulkner, who as Minister of Development was in the forefront of reform, defended the need for a Central Housing Authority by pointing to the deficiencies in the North's housing stock: ‘half the houses were over 50 years old, 35 per cent were over 80 years old, there were 100,000 houses that should be replaced as quickly as possible.’ The usual governmental defence of its ‘progressive record’ gave way to the admission that ‘Our housing programme since the War has been badly behind the rest of the United Kingdom.’32

  When the Macrory Report was published in June 1970, it recommended the centralization of major services such as health and education in a small number of area boards and the reduction of the number of councils from seventy-three to twenty-six. Disgruntled Unionists in border areas formed the West Ulster Unionist Council, led by Harry West and other prominent Unionist and Orange opponents of reform. The concerns of border Unionists were amplified by a more general discontent with the government's security policies, where it was alleged that a weakened and demoralized RUC and the newly created Ulster Defence Regiment were failing to counter growing lawlessness and subversion. In March 1970 five of the most prominent dissidents, including Craig and West, voted against the police bill that was implementing the Hunt recommendations and were expelled from the parliamentary party.33 Chichester-Clark's refusal to reinstate them infuriated many in the party's grass-roots, as did the regime's failure to impose authority on the ‘no-go’ areas. Such criticisms intensified when on July 23 the government imposed a six-month ban on parades. In September the usually supportive Executive Committee of the Ulster Unionist Council passed a resolution of no confidence in the government's security policies.

  The Belfast IRA killed their first unarmed RUC men in August 1970 but did not manage to kill a British soldier until February 1971. In March the particularly brutal murder of three young off-duty soldiers by Ardoyne Provisionals precipitated Chichester-Clark's resignation when Heath refused his request for a toughening of security policy, including a military occupation of ‘no-go’ areas in Derry. Brian Faulkner, who easily defeated William Craig in the election to succeed Chichester-Clark, set out to restore the morale of his divided party by a determined reassertion of Stormont's role in security policy. Taking over the Home Affairs portfolio, he pressurized Heath and the new GOC, General Sir Harry Tuzo, to move from a containment policy to one of actively re-establishing the ‘rule of law’ in all parts of Northern Ireland.34 He complemented this with an attempt to court moderate nationalists by offering a new system of powerful backbench committees at Stormont, some of which would be chaired by the opposition.

  The IRA greeted Faulkner's accession with an intensification of its campaign. In Derry, where the Provisionals were still weak and where no shots had yet been fired, the RUC had been able to resume patrols in Bogside and Creggan.35 With Seán MacStiofain complaining about lack of activity in Derry, the Provisional IRA in the city deliberately and abruptly escalated their activities against the army in early July.36 They began to use the routine confrontations between the city's young unemployed rioters and the army as a cover for sniping and the throwing of gelignite bombs. Within days the army shot and killed two Catholic youths, and all Nationalist MPs withdrew from Stormont in protest.

  In the year to July 1971, fifty-five people had died violently, and there had been 300 explosions. Then the Provisionals launched their heaviest campaign of bombing in Belfast, with ten explosions along the route of the 12 July Orange parades and some ‘spectaculars’, including the total destruction of a new printing plant for the Daily Mirror.37 According to Faulkner, these summer bombings tipped the scales in favour of internment: ‘I took the decision… no one objected.’38 In fact, when he went to Downing Street on 5 August to get the approval of Heath and his colleagues, it was pointed out to him that neither the Chief of the General Staff nor the GOC believed internment was necessary from a strictly military point of view and the ‘national and international implications’ of such a serious step were stressed. Heath made the point that if internment were tried and failed, the only further option was direct rule.39

  Launched at 4.15 a.m. on 9 August, ‘Operation Demetrius’ pulled in 337 of the 520 republicans on RUC Special Branch and Military Intelligence lists. These lists turned out to be grossly inadequate: they relied on outdated information about pre-1969 republicanism, which meant that, while middle-aged veterans of earlier campaigns were arrested together with many Officials, many of the new recruits to the Provisionals were untouched.40 Not one loyalist was interned, adding to the outrage in the Catholic community. Most damaging politically were the claims, later officially verified, that internees had been brutalized during arrest and interrogation and, in particular, that eleven men had been singled out for ‘in-depth' interrogation. This involved being deprived of sleep, food and drink and forced to stand hooded and spread-eagled against a wall while subjected to high-pitched sound from a ‘noise-machine’.41

  Though the RUC and the army were satisfied that internment had damaged the Provisionals in Belfast, there w
as little evidence of this on the streets, where violence intensified dramatically. The reverse was true, in that internment had provided a major boost to Provisional recruitment. In 1971 prior to internment there had been thirty-four deaths; within two days of its introduction seventeen people had died, and by the end of the year 140 more.42 By the beginning of October, Heath was complaining that the crisis in Northern Ireland was threatening to jeopardize the success of the government's economic and defence policies and its approach to Europe. Despite this, he still gave priority to the defeat of the IRA by military means whatever this meant in terms of alienation of the minority and bad relations with Dublin.43 However, other senior ministers and officials favoured an approach that kept the option of a united Ireland open. The consensus that emerged was that Faulkner should be pressed to consider a radical political initiative that would involve bringing ‘non-militant republican Catholics' into the government, while the issue of internal reform would be separated from that of creeping reunification by the periodic holding of referendums on the border. Faulkner rebuffed the pressure, telling Heath that he could not contemplate serving in government with republicans – amongst whom he included politicians such as John Hume and Gerry Fitt. He was too mindful of previous British failure to deliver on threats of direct rule and placed too much faith in ritualistic statements by British ministers ruling it out. In fact, a belief that direct rule was likely had formed at the highest level of the British state by the autumn of 1971. The principal reason was the communal polarization generated by internment and an increasing inclination to reach out to the nationalist community by a radical break that would undermine support for the Provisionals. Suspension of Stormont had therefore become likely even before the tragedy of Bloody Sunday.