Ireland Since 1939

by Henry Patterson

  Rees's successor as Secretary of State, the tough ex-miner Roy Mason, pursued the policies of criminalization and Ulsterization with a crude vigour. At his first press conference in September 1976 he announced that the IRA was ‘reeling’.143 A new Chief Constable, Kenneth Newman, who had come from the Metropolitan Police to implement the policy of police primacy, oversaw a process through which a major expansion of resources was focused on four new regional crime squads targeted at the IRA's most active units. Suspects were held under detention orders for up to seven days at RUC holding centres at Castlereagh in East Belfast and Gough Barracks, Armagh. Making use of Lord Diplock's permissive recommendation that confessions made under interrogation could be accepted unless it was proved that they had been extracted by torture, the RUC was able to deal such serious blows to the IRA that an IRA ‘Staff Report’ captured by the police in Dublin referred to it as ‘contributing to our defeat’.144 By the end of 1977 Mason was claiming that ‘the tide had turned against the terrorists and the message for 1978 is one of real hope’.145 In fact, 1978 was to see clear signs that the Provisionals had been able to regroup and reorganize.

  The prime architect of the strategic redirection of the Provisionals was Gerry Adams. A senior member of the Belfast IRA when he was rearrested in July 1973, Adams spent the next four years in the IRA compounds at the Long Kesh Prison. Here he took an increasingly critical line against the still largely southern leadership of the Provisionals. This in part reflected the hard sectarian edge of northern republicanism that detected in the southerners’ Éire Nua document a deplorable tendency to accommodate Unionists. There was also a realistic assessment that the British state was not in the process of withdrawing from the North. But the main criticism that Adams and his supporters levelled against the leadership was their support for the ceasefire that had divided and demoralized the IRA. With their main targets temporaily out of reach, sections of the IRA became unofficially involved in violent conflict with the Official IRA, who themselves had recently suffered a split: a more militaristic and ultra-leftist group broke away and founded an Irish Republican Socialist Party with its own military wing, the Irish National Liberation Army. Even more politically damaging to the Provisionals was their response to the loyalist paramilitaries who had intensified their activities during the ceasefire. Acting under the flag of convenience of ‘South Armagh Republican Action Force’, Provisionals shot dead six Protestants in Tullyvallen Orange Hall in September 1975 and on 5 January 1976 stopped a minibus carrying workers, separated out the Protestants and machine-gunned them, killing ten. The eruption of support for a grass-roots anti-violence movement, the Peace People – after a car driven by an IRA man attempting to escape from soldiers ploughed into a Catholic mother and her four children in West Belfast, killing three of the children – was also a worrying sign of a potential drying-up of toleration for the ‘armed struggle’ in Provisional heartlands.

  The basis for Adams's rise to a dominant position in the republican movement was his role in ensuring that the IRA recovered from its near defeat in the mid 1970s. He promoted a reorganization of the IRA, replacing its old structure of geographically based brigades, battalions and companies with small Active Service Units, whose members would be drawn from different areas for a specific task such as assassination or robbery. This cellular structure was designed to be less vulnerable to infiltration and disruption by the security forces. A new Northern Command was established, which ensured that Adams and his allies controlled the main area of IRA operations. The northerners made it clear that they did not expect an imminent British withdrawal but were prepared for a ‘Long War’ that could last for two decades or more. IRA activity would be refined and increasingly take the form of ‘armed propaganda’ aimed at a process of attrition of the British will to remain in the North.

  The ‘Long War’ would be fought as much politically as militarily, and Adams looked enviously at his rivals in the Officials who were enjoying increasing success as a left-wing political force in the South. He advocated that Sinn Féin become a campaigning political party rather than simply an IRA support organization. Adams and some of his lieutenants, for example Tom Hartley and Danny Morrison, adopted an increasingly left-wing language, which won them allies on the left wing of the British Labour Party. However, their major political breakthrough would come about not because of this rather superficial radicalism but through the unleashing of much more primordial passions in the North.

  Mason had tried to buttress his robust security policies with a strong commitment to use the public sector and state investment to undermine the economic and social deprivation that he was convinced exacerbated communal conflict: ‘The terrorists needed unhappiness and hopelessness.’146 In the 1960s Northern Ireland had a thriving manufacturing sector, employing over 30 per cent of the workforce and returning the highest rates of productivity growth amongst the UK regions. The engine driving this impressive performance was the large number of multinationals that came to the region in this decade and the still-sizeable indigenous industrial base in shipbuilding, aircraft production and textiles. The twin pillars of this success were badly hit by the worldwide economic recession of the 1970s. The multinationals left the region as quickly as they had arrived, employment in manufacturing fell to 18 per cent of the overall workforce, and unemployment rose significantly.147 In 1976 unemployment in the North, at 10 per cent, was double the UK rate and in some areas in Catholic West Belfast the rate amongst adult males was over 50 per cent.148

  Mason's response was to try to follow the recommendations of the Quigley Report, produced by four senior civil servants in 1976, which proposed a heavily subsidized economy, with the state playing a much greater role until market conditions improved. Employment in the public sector increased by over 50 per cent during the 1970s, compared to 22 per cent in the UK as a whole, and Mason's period at the Northern Ireland Office accounted for a substantial part of this.149 So strong was his view of the causes of support for violence that he persuaded the cabinet to support an extremely high-risk venture in which an American entrepreneur proposed to build a futuristic sports car on a green-field site in West Belfast. The project eventually collapsed when Thatcher was in office in part because of a lack of demand for its cars but also because of the embezzling activities of its founder, John DeLorean, who had siphoned off millions of pounds of public money for his private use.150

  Mason's strong commitment to direct rule as an acceptable interim form of governing Northern Ireland, together with his tough rhetoric on security, endeared him to many unionists but did little to counter an increasingly militant tone in nationalist politics, reflected in John Hume's ascendancy in the SDLP. Hume, who as Minister of Commerce had denounced the UWC strike as a fascist takeover,151 blamed the Wilson government for political cowardice in not standing firm and in using troops to break it. The SDLP was traumatized by the collapse of the Executive, and in its immediate aftermath Hume told an official from the Department of Foreign Affairs that any hope of Irish unity was gone for ever. The members of the party's Assembly group reported a ‘massive swing’ of support away from them towards both wings of the IRA, while Fitt and Paddy Devlin claimed that they no longer had any support in Belfast.152 The year 1974 now entered the Irish nationalist chronology of shameful British capitulations to loyalist threats, along with 1912 and 1921. Although Fitt and Devlin had been prepared to respond to Craig's proposals during the Convention, Hume was hostile. Even if Craig had been able to win the support of Unionists for voluntary coalition, the SDLP would probably have split over participation in what Hume and many of its members would have seen as a ‘partitionist’ administration.153 The defeat of Craig's proposal ensured that the SDLP continued to shift in a more traditionally nationalist direction. At their conference in 1976 a motion calling for a British declaration of intent to withdraw was only narrowly defeated.154

  Hume, who recognized the dangers for the party of adopting a policy that would make it indistinguishable fro
m the Provisionals, countered with a proposal for a ‘third way’ between the constitutional status quo and British withdrawal. This ‘agreed Ireland’ would be the result of a process beginning with a statement from the British government that ‘its objective in Ireland was the bringing together of both Irish traditions in reconciliation and agreement’.155 Subsequent talks amongst the northern parties should be jointly chaired by the British and Irish governments. By this time Hume had begun the process of constructing a coalition of important allies in Europe and the US that he hoped to mobilize to apply sufficient pressure on Britain to bring a shift in policy. All this was too much for Paddy Devlin, who detected behind the language of ‘agreement’ and ‘process’ an iron determination to have the British state ‘educate’ the Protestants as to what their true interests were. For Devlin, the essence of ‘Hume-speak’ was the desire to impose a settlement over the heads of the unionist population. He resigned from the SDLP in 1977 and was soon followed by Fitt.

  The ‘greening’ of the SDLP in 1978–9 was accelerated by increasing evidence that some RUC officers had brutalized suspects in Castlereagh and the fear that British policy was taking an integrationist direction. The Callaghan government's increasing vulnerability in the House of Commons led to negotiations with James Molyneaux to obtain Unionist votes and produced a commitment to deal with Northern Ireland's under-representation at Westminster. The promise of more seats enraged the SDLP and strengthened Hume's argument that the conflict could be resolved only through a process of internationalization involving the US and the Irish government.

  However, even with this alienation of mainstream nationalists, the Provisionals faced the new Tory government with little evidence that, despite a successful reorganization of their military machine, they had overcome their political weakness. This was in part a reflection of popular revulsion at some of their actions, particularly the fire-bombing of the La Mon House Hotel in County Down on 17 February 1978 when twelve people were incinerated. Gerry Adams recalls being ‘depressed’ at the carnage and fearing that his two years of work at reviving the Provisionals was in danger of going down the drain.156 The victory of Hume in the election for the European parliament in June 1979, in which he came second to Paisley, with almost a quarter of the votes cast, seemed to emphasize republicans’ political irrelevance. Yet within two years, more by accident than by calculation, Adams would find himself in a position to launch an unprecedented political breakthrough for Sinn Féin.

  A hint of what was to come was the 38,000 voters, 6 per cent of the total, in the European poll who had supported the former student revolutionary Bernadette McAliskey, née Devlin. She had stood as an independent supporting the demands of republican prisoners for political status. Since 1976 those convicted of terrorist offences had been placed in new cellular accommodation at what was now called the Maze Prison, although republicans continued to refer to it as Long Kesh. In protest they had first refused to wear prison clothes, covering themselves with blankets, and subsequently radicalized their campaign by smearing the walls of their cells with excrement. By 1978 there were over 300 prisoners involved in the ‘dirty protest’. Regardless of the fact that the squalor was self-inflicted and the Provisionals on the outside were carrying on a campaign of assassinating prison officers, in which eighteen were killed between 1976 and 1980,157 the strongly nationalistic Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All-Ireland, Dr Tomás Ó Fiaich, denounced the H Blocks at the Maze as ‘unfit for animals’ and compared them unfavourably with the sewers of Calcutta. Yet, potent though the mixture of religion and nationalism that Ó Fiaich embodied was, it did not acquire an overwhelming power until the IRA prisoners decided, against the advice of their leaders on the outside, to go on hunger strike. The strike, which began in October 1980, was called off after fifty-three days when it seemed that concessions were coming. When they did not materialize, a second, more determined strike led by Bobby Sands, the Provisionals' Commanding Officer in the Maze, began in March 1981.

  Marches in support of the prisoners, which prior to the hunger strikes had brought out a few hundred from the republican heartlands, now numbered tens of thousands motivated by what one commentator described as a ‘tribal voice of martyrdom deeply embedded in the Gaelic, catholic nationalist tradition’. 158 By dying for their cause in this way, Sands and his comrades succeeded in overlaying the reality of the Provisionals’ role as the main agency of violent death in the North with the cloak of victimhood. The death of Frank Maguire, the MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone who was a republican sympathizer, provided an opportunity for a political breakthrough.

  The usually cautious Adams was extremely nervous about putting forward a prisoners' candidate and decided to do so only after Bernadette McAliskey had expressed an interest in running as an independent. Bobby Sands was the choice. In a constituency evenly balanced between nationalists and unionists, a decision by the SDLP to stand would have denied the hunger striker victory. Instead, responding to the emotional upsurge of support for the hunger strikers, the party decided not to enter the contest. With a turnout of 87 per cent, Sands won by 30,492 votes to 29,046 for the Ulster Unionist Harry West.159 Sands's victory was a propaganda coup of major proportions, and it was soon followed by more gains as first Sands and then nine of his comrades died. By the time the hunger strikes were called off in October 1981, two hunger strikers had been elected to the Dáil and Sands's election agent, Owen Carron, had won the by-election caused by his death. Thatcher had kept an inflexible position throughout, maintaining ‘Crime is crime is crime, it's not political.’ In doing so, she may have won the battle and lost the war. A more flexible position would have exposed the increasingly rigid position adopted by Gerry Adams and the republican leadership, who sabotaged various attempts by clerics and the Irish government to broker a compromise.160 Instead the 100,000 who turned out for Sands's funeral on 7 May demonstrated the political harvest that republicans would reap from this series of agonizing and drawn-out suicides. In the election for a new Assembly in Northern Ireland in 1982, Sinn Féin won 10 per cent of the vote to the SDLP's 18 per cent. In a politically even more significant result, they won 13 per cent in the 1983 Westminster election to the SDLP's 17 per cent, and Gerry Adams defeated Gerry Fitt to become MP for West Belfast. The party of constitutional nationalism had paid a heavy price for its loss of nerve in Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

  Fears of the imminent demise of constitutional nationalism propelled Thatcher towards the most radical British initiative on Ireland since partition. Ironically, although it was her mishandling of the hunger strikes that had done so much to transform the political fortunes of republicanism, it would be the unionist community, many of whom had applauded her hard line, who would be the main losers from the political repercussions of the ten deaths.

  The fact that Thatcher's close friend and former Northern Ireland spokesman Airey Neave had been a staunch ally of the Ulster Unionist Party and a supporter of integration had encouraged James Molyneaux in an uncritical faith in Thatcher's self-proclaimed ‘Unionist instincts’.161 However, there is some evidence that he was aware of the dangers posed to the Unionist position by the return of a Conservative government with a substantial majority. The high point of his time at Westminster had been before he became UUP leader, during the Callaghan administration (1976–9), when the votes of the UUP MPs had been eagerly sought by Labour. This had allowed him to extract a number of concessions, most importantly the increase in Northern Ireland seats at Westminster from twelve to seventeen. He explained to those with an anti-Labour bias in his party that it was not necessarily in Unionists’ interest that a Tory government be returned: ‘The Unionist Party aimed to hold the balance of power. The position could be destroyed by a general election. Do you really believe that we would be listened to by the Conservatives if they had a majority of 200?’162 Prior to the 1979 election he warned that ‘If the Conservatives win we will have to be on our guard and avoid falling into a carefully baited trap. We mig
ht be faced with a nicely coated pill in the form of a type of Sunningdale.’163 Both Molyneaux and Powell were convinced that the Atkins conference was part of a NIO–Foreign Office strategy of extrication from Northern Ireland and that Paisley's participation in the talks would undermine support for the DUP.164 Molyneaux's self-confidence was maintained despite grass-roots concern that the UUP's focus on Westminster and lack of activism in Northern Ireland was playing into the hands of the DUP. He was encouraged when the Reverend Martin Smyth defeated the DUP's William McCrea in the by-election for South Belfast after the IRA had murdered the sitting MP, the Reverend Robert Bradford, in November 1981. In 1982 the new Secretary of State, James Prior, who had been banished to Belfast because of his leftist brand of Toryism, proposed elections for a new assembly and a scheme of ‘rolling devolution’. The SDLP boycotted the assembly because no ‘Irish Dimension’ was included, and the UUP's attitude was much less enthusiastic than that of the DUP. Ironically for Molyneaux, who persisted in seeing the Prior initiative as part of the extrication process, Thatcher herself had little faith in it and was considering a much more radical approach. But, although she shared Neave's scepticism about a power-sharing deal between parties who had such conflicting national aspirations, she did not believe in the feasibility of any policy initiative that would, like integration, be rejected by the Dublin government. Concerned above all with the fact that Northern Ireland was the only place in the world where British soldiers were losing their lives, she looked to political leaders in the Republic for more cooperation in the intelligence, security and judicial fields. It was this that had motivated her 1980 summit with Haughey and the subsequent agreement with Garret FitzGerald to establish an Anglo-Irish Inter-Governmental Council in November 1981. Although the refusal of Haughey's government to support European Union sanctions against Argentina during the Falklands War in 1982 had temporarily disrupted the emerging Anglo-Irish axis, FitzGerald's return to power, coinciding as it did with the eruption of Sinn Féin into Northern Irish politics, led to a renewed and more intensive engagement.