by Daniel Finn
Republican guerrillas may have posed the greatest threat to British soldiers who tried to breach the no-go zones, but their efforts alone would not have been enough to deter a full-scale invasion by the Army. It was the opposition they faced from the nationalist population as a whole that kept the troops out. A confidential briefing at the end of 1971 described the challenge facing the authorities in Derry: ‘At present neither the RUC nor the military have control of the Bogside and Creggan areas, law and order are not being effectively maintained and the Security Forces now face an entirely hostile Catholic community numbering 33,000 in these two areas alone.’20 The United Irishman spoke in exultant terms of ‘mass total participation’ by nationalists in the civil resistance campaign, which had ‘brought the struggle of the people to a new height’.21 For the Joint Intelligence Committee at Westminster, that campaign was ‘perhaps the most threatening feature of the present situation in Northern Ireland’.22
‘Smash Stormont!’
The British government continued to back Stormont in spite of all the turmoil. When Jack Lynch spoke to Edward Heath soon after Operation Demetrius began, he warned Heath that its effect had been to give the IRA a tremendous boost: ‘Urban guerrilla warfare can only work if there is cooperation from the people. This cooperation certainly exists because the minority are looking to the Provisionals for protection.’23 Lynch returned to Chequers a few weeks later for a meeting with Heath and Brian Faulkner. He argued that sweeping political reforms would now be required to isolate the Provos and shore up the SDLP, with a share in government for the minority ‘provided as a right and not by grace and favour’. But Faulkner insisted there could be no question of allowing Nationalist politicians to enter the cabinet.24 Soon afterwards, the Irish civil servant Eamonn Gallagher paid a visit to the North and found that ‘moderate leaders’ on the nationalist side were close to despair: ‘Even the most pacific of them have now begun to say that they have a vested interest in the continuance of violence for as long as Stormont exists.’25
In January 1972, Faulkner drafted a memo that presented Operation Demetrius as a clear-cut success, but still had to acknowledge some unpleasant facts: ‘Insofar as internment has not yet succeeded, this is due in no small measure to the fact that there are many people outside the IRA who do not want it to work.’ The Unionist leader railed against unnamed individuals who did not want to see the IRA defeated outright ‘until some at least of the organization’s aims have been achieved’.26 If Faulkner considered the fall of Stormont to be one of those aims, that complaint now applied to much of the nationalist population.
Naturally, the Provos were delighted to see nationalists turning their back on the state, and their Volunteers took full advantage of the no-go areas to evade the British Army. But it was their rivals who tried to give some political direction to the civil resistance campaign. The Officials continued to work with their Communist allies on the NICRA executive, despite tensions over the question of armed struggle.27 They saw NICRA as the main vehicle for a new wave of protest that would combine the original platform of the civil rights movement with demands that sprang from the security crisis itself: the end of internment and an amnesty for political prisoners; cancellation of debts for those participating in the rent-and-rates strike; and withdrawal of British troops to barracks, pending their ultimate departure.
During the 1980s, opponents accused Sinn Féin politicians like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of representing the party in public while directing the IRA’s military campaign from behind closed doors. However, at this point in their history, most Provisionals concentrated on guerrilla warfare to the exclusion of any other tactic. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh did float the idea of running candidates on an abstentionist platform at Sinn Féin’s Ard Fheis in 1971, but nothing came of that proposal at the time.28
As a result, it was the Officials who sought to bridge the gap between armed struggle and political agitation. Malachy McGurran combined his duties as head of the OIRA’s northern command with a public role as chair of the Republican Clubs. Soon after internment day, McGurran addressed a rally of 10,000 people in Belfast’s Casement Park, calling for resistance to the British Army.29 The Clubs were still illegal, and leaders such as McGurran and Billy McMillen had to spend much of their time dodging the security forces, who knew all about their military functions.
Maintaining the movement’s political focus was no easy task. The Starry Plough, mouthpiece of the Derry Officials, later remarked on the double-edged character of the recruitment surge after 9 August: ‘Almost all of them wanted to “have a go” at the British Army. One quite obvious and glaring problem which faced all of us was how best we could deploy our newly acquired vast membership and at the same time advance our political and socialist ideas.’30
Outside observers could be forgiven for losing sight of the distinction between Official and Provisional IRAs, as the two factions appeared to be competing to strike the hardest blows against the British Army; yet clear differences remained. While the Official IRA’s New Year’s statement for 1972 praised its Volunteers as ‘the army of the people’ and boasted of ‘the many casualties which they have inflicted on the forces of imperialism’, it went on to insist that ‘armed struggle on its own, or as an end in itself, is doomed to failure’.31 The Provisionals had no such qualms, as their Ardoyne commander Martin Meehan later recalled: ‘We actually believed we could throw the British Army into the sea. It was raw determination, a gut feeling that if we kept up the pressure, we could do it.’32
The two groups also diverged in their analysis of the unionist community. The Officials believed that Protestant attitudes were ‘one of the major obstacles to the achievement of a socialist republic, and to the creation of a genuinely independent united Irish nation’.33 Until those attitudes shifted, the focus should be on replacing the ‘discredited and gerrymandered’ Stormont system with a new regional government based on NICRA’s reform programme.34 They still refused to argue for direct rule from London, insisting it would be the first step towards a new Act of Union. The sound and fury of the conflict often drowned out such arguments, and many recent OIRA recruits doubtless overlooked them entirely. But they proved crucial for the subsequent trajectory of the movement.
The Provos, on the other hand, saw no reason to worry about the reaction from unionists if Britain decided to leave without their consent. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh conceded that a peace-keeping force might be necessary during the transition, but felt that the majority of Protestants would ‘come to terms to make the best of it’.35 Seán Mac Stíofáin, whose mode of expression was always much cruder than Ó Brádaigh’s, inadvertently revealed some of the fault lines that ran through the Provisional mindset. He dismissed the idea of a Protestant backlash as something that would ‘come and go and that would be that’. In the event of a showdown, the IRA was sure to come out on top: ‘I can’t see these people preparing themselves for a protracted guerrilla war. It’s just not in them.’ However, Mac Stíofáin did anticipate ‘an exodus of the more bigoted elements’ in the event of British withdrawal: ‘There would be no place for those who say they want their British heritage. They’ve got to accept their Irish heritage, and the Irish way of life, no matter who they are, otherwise there would be no place for them.’36
The Provisional chief of staff was formally committed to an ideology that defined Ulster Protestants as fellow Irishmen. But his comments hinted at a darker view of the unionist population as foreign settlers – ‘planters’, in the local idiom – who would have to choose between assimilation and flight when Britain was forced to pull out. In areas like rural Tyrone, which were to produce some of the most active Provisional units, such attitudes ran deep.
People’s Democracy echoed the Officials with a call for mass opposition to Unionist rule. The group developed a more supportive view of armed struggle as the crisis intensified. In the early months of 1971, it had described the Provo campaign as ‘futile and doomed to failure’; by the start of the f
ollowing year PD was arguing that republican guerrillas ‘must be encouraged and not stabbed in the back’.37 But its members related to that campaign from the outside, and channelled most of their energy into building support for civil resistance.
Before the arrival of British troops, Michael Farrell had asked whether it might be possible for left-wing radicals to advance their goals by ‘posing the question of dual power in areas where the Catholic population is concentrated and militant – by getting the local Catholic population to take over and run its own affairs, a sort of “Catholic power”.’38 Now he hailed the partial fulfilment of this vision: ‘The Unionists and their imperial master are far more concerned about the Civil Resistance campaign than about the current campaign of violence. The reason is simple. If the Civil Resistance campaign was defeated they could deal with the violence very quickly. If the physical force campaign was defeated, the Civil Resistance campaign would still go on.’39
To guide that campaign, Farrell’s group put forward a clear, emphatic slogan, ‘Smash Stormont!’, that was all the more effective for its ambiguity. The demand could bring together Provos who saw the demise of the local assembly as a step towards British withdrawal with SDLP supporters who would be satisfied with direct rule from London as an alternative to Unionist power.
Arguing that NICRA had become ‘too closely identified with a particular political viewpoint – that of the Official Republicans and the Communist Party – to be fully representative of the current mass movement’, PD moved to establish a new campaigning front, the Northern Resistance Movement (NRM).40 The NRM attracted support from the Provisionals, and from Bernadette Devlin and her fellow Westminster MP Frank McManus, an independent republican. PD argued that many Provos were already ‘seeing the need for deeper involvement in politics’, and just needed encouragement to go further down that path: ‘With their courage, natural militancy and working-class roots, many are natural revolutionaries. Instead of screaming abuse at these men forced into fighting a war against imperialism, socialists should be trying to involve them in political action.’41 Gerry Adams later recalled being exposed to the group’s arguments because of their involvement in the NRM: ‘PD argued quite correctly for wider popular mobilizations, and it struck me that all of the potential for mobilization was ours, while PD had the theory.’42
As 1971 drew to a close, opponents of the Unionist government began to revive the tactic of street marches that had been the catalyst for the current unrest. The division between NICRA and the NRM meant that this attempt to bring the movement back onto the streets came from two competing sources. All the same, it is striking to note that three years after the first civil rights marches, it was the same loose coalition of forces – the Officials and the Communist Party, People’s Democracy and the Derry radicals – who were pushing for a revival of mass action as an alternative to armed struggle. Ironically, the result of their efforts was to give the Provos their greatest boost to date.
Bloody Sunday
The importance of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry should require no emphasis. The killing of fourteen nationalist civilians by the British Army in January 1972 has received more attention than any other incident of the Troubles, and was the subject of a decade-spanning inquiry that cost several hundred million pounds. However, for all the ink spilt on the events of that day, the wider context in which Bloody Sunday was embedded has not been given the same attention. Without examining that context, it is impossible to make political sense of what happened in Derry.
In the final weeks of 1971, Brian Faulkner suddenly had to grapple with an upsurge of protest. On Christmas Day, the NRM led an anti-internment march that reached the gates of Long Kesh. Then, on the first weekend of January 1972, NICRA organized a demonstration on the Falls Road.43 Five thousand people heard Paddy Devlin and Austin Currie of the SDLP pledge there would be no talks with the British government until it released all the internees.44 These protests posed an immediate challenge to Stormont’s authority, as Faulkner had imposed a ban on all street processions to coincide with internment, which he extended in January.45 But the forces behind the new wave of protest were determined to assert the legitimacy of such tactics, as Eamonn McCann later explained: ‘None of the other forms of protest provided a way for the mass of working-class people to become actively involved in the fight. The rent-and-rates strike had its attractions, but it was a passive sort of activity. The armed struggle could, of its nature, involve only a few, while rioting was appropriate mainly to the energetic young.’46
NICRA raised the stakes higher still by organizing a march on 22 January to Magilligan, just north of Derry, where the authorities had recently opened another camp for internees. Soldiers of the Parachute Regiment prevented the marchers from reaching the camp by firing rubber bullets and striking freely with their batons. One soldier was heard remarking to his officer: ‘I thought we were here to stop them, not massacre them.’47 NICRA then announced its intention to defy the ban once more with a demonstration in Derry on 30 January. The local branch of Paisley’s DUP called off its plan for a counter-protest at the last minute, claiming to have received assurances that the marchers would be stopped ‘by force if necessary’.48 NICRA urged its supporters not to give the authorities any pretext for the use of such methods.49
The local RUC commander, Frank Lagan, also wanted to minimize the danger of a violent confrontation. According to Brendan Duddy, who acted as an intermediary between Lagan and the two IRAs, he received assurances from both factions that their members would not bring weapons on the march or use it as an opportunity to attack the Army. But the Army commander Robert Ford ignored Lagan’s advice and decided to use the protest as the occasion for mass arrests, aiming to ‘scoop up as many hooligans as possible’.50
Ford chose the Paras, known to be the most aggressive of all the regiments stationed in Northern Ireland, as the agent of his plan. By one reporter’s estimate, 20,000 people joined the demonstration as it made its way towards the city centre.51 When the marchers reached the Army barricade, the Paras went into action, cheered on by Ford. By the time they were finished, the soldiers had shot thirteen civilians dead; another victim later died of his wounds.
Journalists quickly established that every known fact and every available eyewitness contradicted the Army’s version of events.52 But Home Secretary Reginald Maudling still used that account as the basis for his speech in the House of Commons, claiming that the soldiers had acted in self-defence after coming under sustained fire. Bernadette Devlin, who had been present on the march, could not endure Maudling’s performance and threw a punch at him. A Conservative MP spoke about Devlin as if she was an exotic anthropological specimen: ‘It is only by listening to her words that one can plumb the depths of the bitterness and hatred that is rampant amongst the minority in Northern Ireland today.’ But the SDLP leader Gerry Fitt gave Devlin his firm support. Facing a chorus of heckling from Tory backbenchers, Fitt lashed out at his fellow MPs: ‘I realize more and more as this debate progresses that I am an Irishman, and you are Englishmen. You have no understanding, no sympathy, and no conscience for the people who live in Londonderry.’53
For supporters of the Provisional IRA, Bloody Sunday sounded the death knell for the tactic of unarmed protest: from now on, force would have to be met with force. That was certainly the view of the young men and women who flocked to join the Provos after the Derry massacre.54 But in fact the civil resistance campaign entered its most intense phase in the weeks that followed. On 6 February, a NICRA demonstration in Newry attracted more than 50,000 people, despite warnings that the violence in Derry might be repeated and threats of mass arrest broadcast to the marchers from a low-flying helicopter.55
Sympathy for northern nationalists in the South began to assume organized form for the first time, with protest committees springing up and trade unionists calling for a general strike, hastily rebranded as a day of national mourning by Jack Lynch’s government. In his statement to the Dáil, Ly
nch demanded the withdrawal of British troops from the Catholic ghettoes, and promised to fund ‘peaceful action by the minority in Northern Ireland, designed to obtain their freedom from Unionist misgovernment’.56 Meanwhile an angry crowd burnt the British Embassy in Dublin to the ground as police stood by helpless. The no-go areas were consolidated, the rent-and-rates strike strengthened. With the SDLP still boycotting Stormont and refusing to negotiate while internment continued, Faulkner and Heath now faced a nationalist population united in rejection of their authority.
Two months after Bloody Sunday, the British ambassador in Dublin passed on a copy of the report by Lord Widgery, who had been tasked by Heath with investigating the events in Derry. The civil servant who received the ambassador drily observed that Widgery’s account appeared to be ‘a rather one-sided interpretation’, and wondered ‘how those in Derry, who were fully familiar with what had happened, would take the report’.57 This proved to be a classic case of diplomatic understatement. The Widgery Report did almost as much to inflame nationalist fury as the massacre itself. Its author held the organizers of the march responsible for what had happened, expressed ‘strong suspicion’ that some of the victims had been ‘firing weapons or handling bombs’, and found ‘no reason to suppose that the soldiers would have opened fire if they had not been fired upon first’.58