by Daniel Finn
Sixty-Niners
For the Provisionals, everything was falling into place. There was a steady flow of recruits into their ranks, and the authorities could be relied upon to keep hostility between nationalists and the Army simmering. The vast majority of those new recruits were in their late teens or early twenties, and they came overwhelmingly from the Catholic working class.71 Republican militants also tended to be male, although there were some high-profile female Volunteers at the time, such as Rita O’Hare and the Price sisters, Dolours and Marion.
One study identified three main pathways into ‘active service’. Some had already joined the IRA before 1969, and opted for the Provos after the split; people in this category usually came from well-established republican families. Others had been active with groups like NICRA or People’s Democracy, before deciding to join the IRA in response to political events. Finally, there was the largest group of recruits, who signed up with a clean organizational slate, known to their comrades as ‘sixty-niners’.72
Gerry Adams, one of the most influential Provos in Belfast, straddled the first two categories: his father, Gerry Sr, was an IRA veteran from the 40s, but Adams had also taken part in NICRA protests and met with PD activists like Michael Farrell before the violence of 1969.73 That hybrid formation gave him a clear advantage. While his family background made it easier for Adams to work with older IRA leaders, he was still young enough to establish a rapport with the new generation of republicans.
As a child, Adams had passed the selective eleven-plus exam and attended a grammar school in Belfast, where he encountered ‘an entirely different crowd of boys from the ones I had previously associated with’, whose parents belonged to the Catholic middle class.74 His later comments on the experience suggest an underlying bitterness towards the Catholic establishment: ‘We were being groomed. Certain people finished that grooming, and became bishops, parish priests, leaders of the SDLP – and other “responsible” positions.’ According to Adams, the Church’s hostility towards the Provos owed a great deal to the class background shared by most of his comrades, who hadn’t received the appropriate training for ‘positions of leadership’ in the nationalist community.75
One figure Adams clearly had in mind when making that remark was his ally Martin McGuinness. McGuinness, the most senior Provisional in Derry by the age of twenty-one, exemplified the third category of recruit, those with no experience of political activity before the conflict began. Unlike Adams, he had failed the eleven-plus exam and seemed destined for a life of unskilled manual labour before he joined the IRA. His leadership qualities soon became obvious to his peers.76 Michael Oatley, an MI6 officer who negotiated with McGuinness on behalf of the British government, compared his instinctive military bearing to that of ‘a middle-ranking Army officer in one of the tougher regiments like the Paras or the SAS’ – a double-edged compliment for a son of the Bogside, as Oatley must have been aware.77
An interview with McGuinness that appeared in 1972 gave a sense of the life experiences that drove so many young men to join the IRA at the time. The Provo leader explained that, in spite of his republican duties, he sometimes liked to fall in with a group of rioters throwing stones at the British Army: ‘It’s a way of being with my mates, the ones who have not joined the movement, and I feel just ordinary again.’78
The ‘sixty-niners’ soon rose to prominence, but for now, it was a much older group of republican activists that held the reins. The Officials derided those men as apolitical militarists with a deeply conservative mentality (‘the Rosary Beads Brigade’). Some Provo commanders like Billy McKee certainly fit that stereotype, and the movement’s early rhetoric drew heavily on McCarthyite tropes. Statements from the Provisional leadership denounced the Official IRA as ‘Red Guards’ who were propagating an ‘alien social philosophy’.79 The Provos still argued for a certain kind of ‘socialism’, but distinguished it sharply from the Marxism of the Officials, ‘repugnant to the great mass of ordinary Irish people’.80 Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, who now led the movement’s political wing, was the main architect of its programme, Éire Nua (New Ireland). Sinn Féin’s ‘democratic socialist republic’ would have a federal structure with four regional parliaments. The banks and major industries were to be taken into state hands, and an upper limit placed on the ownership of land, although private enterprise would still have a place in the economy.81
It would be a mistake to read too much into the finer details of these blueprints. According to one Provo activist, Kieran Conway, ‘the vast majority of IRA members were so taken up with “military” matters and “politics” was so reviled – not least on account of where it had taken the previous leadership – that those with any interest were simply let run with it.’82 A consensus on the need for armed struggle against British rule could bring together conservative Catholics such as McKee with radicals like Conway and Brian Keenan, who held quasi-Marxist views.83
Many Provos were simply agnostic about such questions, believing they could be postponed until a later stage. Martin McGuinness knew that he wanted ‘a united Ireland where everyone has a good job and enough to live on’, but had his doubts about whether socialism could be made to work: ‘Do you not think now that people are just too greedy? Somebody always wants to make a million. Anyway, before you can try, you have to get this country united.’84
It was only a matter of time before the Provos were ready to take the offensive. In February 1971, after more clashes in Belfast, a Provisional sniper killed the first British soldier to die on Irish soil in half a century. James Chichester-Clark responded with a portentous declaration that ‘Northern Ireland is at war with the Irish Republican Army Provisionals’.85 The following month he tendered his resignation after Edward Heath refused to support a package of hard-line security measures.
Earlier that year, Chichester-Clark had delivered a speech that combined ideological myopia with real insight into the new republican challenge:
Between 1956 and 1962 the IRA were seeking to achieve by force alone ends which force could never achieve, because in a straight contest of firepower and discipline the forces of the Crown were bound to prevail. But now we face a two-pronged campaign, military and political. It hoped to use not just, as before, the bomb and the gun, but also the resentments, fears and aspirations of whole masses of people.86
Chichester-Clark’s error was to assume the existence of an overarching strategic plan behind the disorder. However, he correctly identified ‘the growing militancy of people who were not members of subversive organizations’ as the most important problem facing the authorities.87 The new Unionist leader Brian Faulkner paid little heed to his predecessor’s message and began urging Edward Heath to allow internment of suspects without trial. In order to precipitate that decisive trial of strength, the Provos just had to maintain the pressure. Their bombing campaign reinforced the sense that Northern Ireland was becoming ungovernable. In the months leading up to internment day in August 1971, there were an average of two bomb explosions a day, leaving over 100 civilians injured.88
The Official IRA’s Easter message pledged that its members would ‘assist the people with all necessary measures in defence of their homes and their area against jackboot aggression’.89 In the months since the ‘Battle of the Falls’, the Officials had been strengthening their armouries and training new recruits. However, the Provisionals had clearly outpaced them in Belfast, with the exception of a few areas like the Markets and the Lower Falls.90 In Derry, the competition between the two groups was more evenly balanced, and the Officials’ Easter parade in 1971 was significantly larger. Under the leadership of Johnnie White, the Officials managed to enlist some of Derry’s young rioters, including a teenage Martin McGuinness, who was impatient for action and soon defected to the Provisionals.91 Partly in the hope of stemming further defections, the OIRA leadership now gave their units permission to launch attacks on the Army. A British security assessment from April 1971 suggested that they had little choice in the
matter: ‘If they do not maintain a manifest level of terrorist action much of their “military” membership will either desert to the Provisionals or initiate violence at random.’92
If the reformist civil rights strategy of the Officials was now facing collapse, conditions were even less promising for the approach favoured by People’s Democracy. Its supporters had withdrawn from NICRA at the start of 1970, declaring their intention to campaign around economic issues in the hope of uniting workers across the sectarian divide. Now reduced to a hard core of a few dozen radicals, PD still involved itself in a whole range of campaigns, from bus fares in Belfast to fishing rights on Lough Neagh. Moving beyond its origins as a campus-based organization, the group sought to translate its non-sectarian rhetoric into reality by leafleting outside the shipyards of east Belfast and on the Shankill Road.93 But the physical space for such activity was rapidly shrinking in the face of communal polarization, as it simply became too dangerous to enter Protestant areas.94
On the eve of internment, People’s Democracy had been beaten back into the Catholic ghettoes to await Faulkner’s next move along with the other anti-Unionist forces. As the moment approached, its leader Michael Farrell warned that any gains made by the civil rights struggle would be ‘lost for good’ if Britain decided on a policy of coercion: ‘The only thing that will stop the military juggernaut will be a mass movement which can once again bring thousands of people into the streets.’95 While internment would lead to a dramatic escalation of violence, amid scenes unknown in Western Europe since the war, it also inspired fresh attempts to build mass opposition to the Unionist system. The watchword of the earlier period had been civil rights. Now, it would be civil resistance.
5
The Year of Civil Resistance
Looming Realities
Operation Demetrius began in the early hours of 4 August 1971. Throughout Northern Ireland, soldiers fanned out to arrest suspects, kicking down doors and dragging their targets away. They made over 300 arrests in the first wave, with many more to come over the following months. The authorities set up a camp to house the detainees at Long Kesh, where they were kept in prefabricated huts, surrounded by observation towers and barbed wire – a symbolic own goal for the British Army, as it reminded many people of the German POW camps from movies like The Great Escape.
The descriptions of brutal interrogation methods that began filtering out were much more damaging.1 Detainees reported abuse of various kinds, from beatings to sleep deprivation. Soldiers had thrown some blindfolded men from helicopters that were hovering a few feet above the ground, after telling them they were about to plunge to their deaths. The authorities singled out a group of fourteen prisoners, dubbed the ‘Hooded Men’, for especially brutal treatment, using techniques that had been fine-tuned in colonial wars.2
The most immediate result of internment was a dramatic upsurge in violence across the region. In the first seven months of 1971, there had been thirty-four deaths. Now, seventeen people lost their lives within two days, with 140 to follow by the end of the year. In Ballymurphy, the Army killed ten civilians over the space of thirty-six hours.3 The chaos transformed large parts of Belfast and Derry into battle-zones, with Provos and Officials temporarily forgetting their political differences to fight side by side. Recruitment to both groups skyrocketed.4
In contrast to its handling of the two IRAs, Faulkner’s government chose not to arrest any loyalist paramilitaries in August, claiming that the banned Ulster Volunteer Force was not a significant threat.5 In November 1971, the UVF bombed a Catholic pub in Belfast, killing fifteen civilians. The security forces falsely presented the bombing as an IRA ‘own goal’, making the refusal to intern loyalists easier to justify.6 By then, a new group called the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) had taken its place alongside the UVF. It soon claimed a membership of 40,000.
A civil service briefing, drafted shortly after the arrests began, warned that the region now stood on the brink of disaster: ‘Economic collapse and social chaos are not remote contingencies but are looming realities within a period which is to be measured in weeks or months rather than years.’7 Unsurprisingly, most historians have agreed that Demetrius was a fiasco. Many attribute the failure to technical problems: lacking good intelligence, and unable to persuade Jack Lynch’s government to move simultaneously against republicans in the South, the Army enraged nationalist communities by arresting the wrong people while the most important Provo leaders slipped across the border.8 Such arguments imply that internment could perhaps have been made to work, if only the Army had possessed a more accurate picture of its enemy, and taken greater care to avoid scooping up blameless citizens in the net. But the real obstacles were political rather than technical.
As Paddy Devlin noted, the intelligence gap was not simply the result of incompetence: ‘The old Catholic informers had disappeared once the Catholic community had been attacked, and the “no go” areas behind the barricades, which excluded the police, killed off any hope they had of cultivating new sources.’9 Plotting a delicate course between his wish for good relations with Britain and widespread sympathy for northern nationalists in the South, Jack Lynch could never have assisted Faulkner by arresting known republicans (as Edward Heath grudgingly acknowledged in a message to Lynch).10 Above all, it was the popular mood in the Catholic ghettoes that scuppered Operation Demetrius. Internment, far from stabilizing the local power structure, merely paved the way for its collapse.
Brian Faulkner had been Stormont’s home affairs minister at the time of the Border Campaign, and was convinced that internment had ensured the IRA’s defeat – hence his eagerness to repeat the trick. But the real problem for the IRA during Operation Harvest had been the indifference of the nationalist population. It was easy for the authorities to hook the republican fish when they were cut off from the main body of water.
However, by 1971, northern nationalists had experienced several years of intense political agitation. They had marched and rioted, built barricades and organized self-defence committees. As Eamonn McCann pointed out, the IRA of the early 70s was quite unlike its 50s predecessor:
It had grown out of the community, was physically of the community’s flesh, emotionally and ideologically an element in its consciousness. As a result, when the state’s forces attacked the IRA, a sizeable part of the Catholic community felt itself attacked too. The fact that many of those lifted in the internment swoop were the wrong people may not have been as important as is commonly imagined.11
This dramatic shift in popular consciousness would have been unthinkable without the preparatory work of those republicans and left-wing radicals who had given the civil rights movement its militant, confrontational edge. Many of those involved in such activity paid a high price for their efforts, as it made them prime candidates for the Army’s arrest sheets. Official IRA members were usually active in the Republican Clubs, as the movement’s political wing was known in the North, selling the United Irishman in defiance of a government ban and engaging in other activities that made it easy to identify them as republican militants. By October, more than a hundred Officials were behind bars, while many others had to flee south or go on the run.12 The first wave of arrests also targeted People’s Democracy members such as Michael Farrell. The Insight reporters of the Sunday Times described them as belonging to a ‘special group’ that had been arrested ‘simply because they were active politicians who, in the wake of internment, could cause a fuss’.13
On the first day of internment, an emergency bulletin from NICRA’s Belfast branch called for ‘total withdrawal by non-Unionists from every governmental structure, rent and rates strikes by the people, barricades for defence where necessary and total non-cooperation with a regime which has been stigmatized by the British establishment itself’.14 Nationalists quickly turned this blueprint into reality. The SDLP had already withdrawn from Stormont in July after the killing of two young nationalists by the Army in Derry, and there was no question of that boycott no
w being reversed. An unprecedented campaign of mass civil disobedience added to the pressure on Faulkner’s government. A rent-and-rates strike by council tenants won solid backing among working-class nationalists. By the end of September, there were 26,000 households on strike, representing one-fifth of the 135,000 local authority tenants. Participation rates were particularly high in certain areas, such as Strabane (87 per cent of tenants) and Belfast’s Divis estate (almost 100 per cent).15
A coalition of republicans and left-wing activists in Derry that called itself the Socialist Resistance Group issued the call for a strike in the city.16 Their proposal simply gave organized expression to the mood among nationalists, as Eamonn McCann acknowledged: ‘If the Plymouth Brethren had parked a soap-box at the bottom of Wellington Street and called for a rent strike they would have got it. The people were avid for action and it just so happened that we were first in the field suggesting what action they should take.’17 Faulkner’s government claimed that republicans had coerced tenants into withholding payments, but in private his civil servants recognized ‘the great mass of sincere and immediate support from the rank and file’ that lay behind it: ‘The relative success of the campaign from the beginning is probably due less to any organization behind it, which can only have been minimal, than to the conviction of individual participants that their cause was just.’18 They began drawing up legislation that would allow the authorities to deduct rent arrears from government benefits.
In tandem with the strike, nationalist anger expressed itself in the form of ‘no-go areas’ in Derry and Belfast where it was no longer safe for British troops to enter. Local people re-established the barricades that had been gradually dismantled after August 1969 and turned them into impressive fortifications. A report in PD’s newspaper at the beginning of 1972 described the ones in Derry as ‘not just token barricades but substantial structures which frequently consist of steel girders or concrete blocks sunk into the ground’, with just two entry points left for the Army into Creggan and the Bogside.19