One Man's Terrorist

by Daniel Finn

  Widgery’s conclusions are no longer considered defensible by the British authorities after the publication of Lord Saville’s 2010 report and the acceptance of its findings by the Conservative prime minister, David Cameron. However, Saville’s report did not resolve the dispute about political responsibility for the massacre. In the wake of Bloody Sunday, those who had been pressing for a return to the streets had no doubt the killings were the intended outcome of British policy. The goal, according to the Officials, was to abort the revival of protest before it developed unstoppable momentum: ‘While they can outshoot purely military campaigns, mass action on the streets will be their downfall. This was why the British government ordered their troops to fire on a defenceless and peaceful crowd.’59

  Saville rejected such arguments, placing the blame firmly on the soldiers and their immediate commanding officer, Derek Wilford. But his report glossed over the role played by Wilford’s superior Robert Ford and his deputy Mike Jackson, who later became the Army’s chief of staff.60 If Saville had given Ford and Jackson their due share of attention, it would have been much harder for David Cameron to endorse his findings without discrediting the Army as an institution.

  In any case, the question of responsibility cannot be limited to the decisions made before and during the march. Widgery’s report was as much a part of the story as the shots fired three months earlier. By carefully obscuring all the evidence that members of 1 Para were guilty of unlawful killings, Britain’s most eminent judge gave his stamp of approval to the battalion’s conduct in Derry, indicating to nationalists that participation in a banned march could now be punished by summary execution. The Heath government fully endorsed this verdict.

  Those who spoke of a carefully planned massacre designed to force protest off the streets exaggerated the degree of political forethought behind the killings. It appears much more likely that the Army’s intention was to goad the IRA into a shoot-out that it expected to win.61 But they were right to insist that Bloody Sunday was no accidental misfortune. Westminster’s policy of upholding Unionist rule was bound to provoke a test of strength between the Army and the nationalist population. Once NICRA and the NRM started to revive street demonstrations as the cutting-edge of resistance to the ‘Orange State’, British soldiers had to shoulder the burden of confronting them. Robert Ford’s decision to use the march in Derry as cover for his reckless plan then turned the risk of disaster into a near-certainty. Instead of breaking the IRA, Ford gave it an impetus and popular legitimacy that would have been unimaginable a year earlier.

  In March 1972, as Stormont descended into a terminal crisis, a court in Belfast gave the PD activists Michael Farrell and Kevin Boyle six months in jail for their role in organizing the marches that preceded Bloody Sunday. According to a report in PD’s Unfree Citizen, the courtroom was packed with soldiers who ‘amused themselves by clicking and unclicking the safety catches of their rifles in the crowded room’.62 Farrell spoke from the dock, surrounded by his NRM allies, Kevin Agnew and Gerry O’Hare of the Provisionals, and the Westminster MPs Bernadette Devlin and Frank McManus. After objecting to the presence of the soldiers, which, he suggested, made the court resemble a scene from the dictatorships of southern Europe, the People’s Democracy leader went on to deliver a passionate defence of the entire civil resistance campaign:

  Some evidence is being offered that I have committed certain actions but I want to challenge the whole basis of the legal set-up here which decides what is legal or illegal. I am not guilty of any offence, because it appears to me that the system of law and justice in this state has broken down and collapsed. On the 9th August 1971, the door of my house was broken in and armed soldiers burst in and took me away at gunpoint. Later that day I was assaulted, beaten up and maltreated at Girdwood Park military barracks and then lodged in Crumlin Road jail. I was held there for five weeks and then released. At no time was I given any explanation for this treatment. It was later shown that it was all quite illegal even under the terms of the Special Powers Act. Yet I have no redress and there are some 700 or 800 others like me, still being held.

  Farrell ended his speech with a rhetorical flourish: ‘The law in any society is based on a contract between the State and the citizen. When the State oversteps this authority, when it tramples on the rights of citizens, when it shoots down people in cold blood, then that contract is dissolved.’63

  The End of Civil Resistance

  By the time Farrell and his comrades brought an appeal against their convictions, the regime that had prosecuted them was no more. The turbulent aftermath of Bloody Sunday dealt the final blow to Stormont and obliged the Heath government to change direction. When Faulkner refused to hand over security powers to Westminster, Heath imposed direct rule on 24 March, ending half a century of Unionist Party rule. British civil servants began putting out feelers for a new political initiative that might bring the SDLP and the Irish government back onside and isolate the republican guerrillas. As Faulkner and William Craig addressed a rally of supporters outside their suspended parliament, those who had raised the slogan ‘Smash Stormont!’ had to ask themselves: what now?

  A few months earlier, a prescient article in PD’s newspaper had suggested that, while the Provos were determined to keep fighting until Irish unity was achieved, ‘in practice much of the Catholic support would evaporate – and probably many of the Volunteers would be satisfied – if the internees were released, Stormont smashed and the British Army removed.’64 One of these conditions had now been fulfilled, and the mood among nationalists was predictably triumphant. Divisions within the nationalist community that had been papered over since internment – between radicals and conservatives, militarists and those who favoured civil resistance – now reasserted themselves.

  For a time, it looked as if the Officials would continue to wage war on the British Army. In the weeks following Bloody Sunday, they planted a bomb at the headquarters of the Parachute Regiment in Aldershot, killing a number of civilian workers, and tried to assassinate the Unionist home affairs minister, John Taylor. When British soldiers gunned down the Official IRA’s most charismatic figurehead, Joe McCann, in April 1972, Cathal Goulding promised revenge at McCann’s funeral in Belfast: ‘Those who are responsible for the terrorism that is Britain’s age-old reaction to Irish demands will be the victims of that terrorism, paying richly in their own red blood for their crimes.’65 But Goulding also declared that the Officials would ‘fight them on our terms, not on theirs’. The OIRA’s chief of staff was already contemplating a ceasefire at the time of McCann’s death, although most of his audience probably missed the hint.

  That move came in May 1972, with a message from the Official IRA that described ‘a growing awareness by the leadership of the Republican Movement that we had been drawn into a war that was not of our choosing’.66 The immediate cue for the ceasefire was a controversy that engulfed one of the movement’s strongest northern units in early May. After the Army shot dead a teenage boy, the Derry Officials responded by killing a young British soldier from a regiment deployed in West Germany who was home on leave in the Bogside. The death of William Best provoked a hostile reaction from many Derry nationalists who saw him as one of their own, greatly encouraged by the Catholic Church. The Starry Plough hit back with a firm anti-clerical line: ‘One of the curses of this area for ages past has been the identification of religion with politics. We are not part of that set-up, we are fighting to destroy it. We are out for a socialist Ireland in which, among other things, religion will be a thing for a man’s private conscience.’67

  When the Official IRA leadership in Dublin announced the ceasefire three weeks later, they denied having been influenced by the turmoil in Derry, and were widely disbelieved. In fact, the Ranger Best affair merely supplied the opportunity for a move that had much deeper political roots. But the use of this pretext stored up trouble for the leadership with their Derry unit, whose members felt they had been the targets of a spurious ‘peace campaign’
, orchestrated by a Church that was highly selective in its moral indignation.68

  A confidential briefing prepared for Edward Heath in the summer of 1972 gave a shrewd assessment of the OIRA ceasefire, noting that Cathal Goulding’s movement had ‘always been more willing than the Provisionals to envisage the possibility of working through the institutions of Northern Ireland – as an intermediate measure – and to cooperate so far as they have been able with the Protestant working class’. The Officials had felt obliged to match the violence of the Provos in order to keep their own members on board and maintain their position in the Catholic ghettoes, but their desire to avoid sectarian conflict was perfectly genuine: ‘Secret sources have confirmed their feelings in this regard.’69

  OIRA commanders often sold the ceasefire to rank-and-file members as a tactical expedient that left plenty of room for manoeuvre. Two years later, the United Irishman could still carry a report that the Army had shot two OIRA Volunteers dead while they were planting a landmine ‘as retaliation for the intimidation and harassment of the working-class people of Newry’, prompting a revenge attack that killed one soldier.70 But May 1972 marked a clear turning point in the history of the Officials, after which they gradually wound down their armed wing and gave priority to political action.

  The OIRA ceasefire made it easier for the Provisionals to call a truce of their own. When the British government imposed direct rule, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh warned against a ‘truce hysteria’ that would stampede the IRA into a premature halt: ‘Let there be no settlement short of the mark. If we do, we are sentencing the next generation to death and destruction.’ Seán Mac Stíofáin was much blunter: ‘Concessions be damned, we want freedom!’71 But the Provos still came out with their own set of peace proposals and indicated a willingness to talk. An MI6 officer, Frank Steele, held preliminary discussions with two Provo commanders, Dáithí Ó Conaill and Gerry Adams, which paved the way for a ceasefire in June. The briefing given to Steele described Adams as one of the most senior IRA men in Belfast. Expecting to meet an ‘arrogant, streetwise young thug’, Steele instead found Adams to be ‘a very personable, intelligent, articulate and self-disciplined man’, who ‘obviously had a terrific future ahead of him’.72

  As soon as the truce began, Heath’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, invited the Provisional leadership for secret talks on the region’s future. Mac Stíofáin headed a delegation that included several younger militants such as Adams, Martin McGuinness and Ivor Bell, who had to be talked out of wearing his combat fatigues for the occasion.73 The Provos insisted that Britain should declare its intention to withdraw all troops by the end of 1974, and allow the island’s future to be determined by an all-Ireland poll. Along with this maximum programme, the movement’s political wing also put forward a more limited set of demands that bore some resemblance to NICRA’s platform: release of internees; repeal of the Special Powers Act; PR for all elections; a lifting of the ban on Provisional Sinn Féin, and the scrapping of all oaths of allegiance to the British Crown.74

  British officials who took part in these abortive negotiations later accused the Provisional leaders of adopting a completely unrealistic attitude.75 According to one participant from the British side, Seán Mac Stíofáin conducted himself ‘like Montgomery at Lüneberg Heath telling the German generals what they should and shouldn’t do if they wanted peace’.76 This description of Mac Stíofáin’s outlook appears close to the truth, judging by his own recollections of Provo super-confidence after the fall of Stormont, as well as the account of the talks that Gerry Adams later supplied. According to Adams, when the Provisional delegation broke off to discuss what their British counterparts had said, Mac Stíofáin exclaimed, ‘Jesus, we have it!’77

  If so, the Provisional chief of staff had a greatly exaggerated sense of what could be achieved at the time. Sinn Féin’s short-term programme probably represented the outer limit of what the British government would have been willing to concede. Having failed to achieve their maximum goals, the Provos had little alternative but to return to war, since the movement had no political wing that could advance their agenda in the absence of a military campaign. A stand-off provoked by loyalist paramilitaries in Belfast was the immediate trigger for the resumption of hostilities, but there would most likely have been another incident to scupper the ceasefire if the loyalists had not intervened.

  The Provisionals were now keen to make full use of a weapon that they had stumbled upon almost by accident: the car bomb. As Mike Davis points out in his history of the ‘poor man’s air force’, the conflict in Northern Ireland became a grisly milestone: the first time that urban guerrillas combined homemade bombs with motor vehicles to ravage a modern city.78 The military potential of this innovation exhilarated Mac Stíofáin and his comrades, who geared up for a final push that would eject Britain from Irish soil once and for all.79

  However, they had not reflected on another aspect of the new weapon noted by Davis: ‘Like even the “smartest” of aerial bombs, car bombs are inherently indiscriminate: “collateral damage” is virtually inevitable. If the logic of an attack is to slaughter civilians and sow panic in the widest circles, to operate a “strategy of tension” or just demoralize a society, car bombs are ideal. But they are equally effective at destroying the moral credibility of a cause and alienating its mass base of support.’80

  On the afternoon of 21 July 1972, twenty-one bombs went off in Belfast’s city centre, killing seven civilians and two soldiers and leaving more than 130 people wounded. Although the IRA had phoned in warnings, there were too many devices for the security forces to cope with at once. Gruesome scenes of human flesh and body parts being shovelled into plastic bags featured on the national news.

  ‘Bloody Friday’ was a propaganda disaster for the Provos, and provided William Whitelaw and the Army with the opportunity they had been waiting for. Ten days later, Operation Motorman swept aside the no-go areas in Belfast and Derry. The Army started to impose a new military architecture of barracks and observation towers on the Catholic ghettoes, destined to overshadow the urban landscape for the next two decades.81

  The Derry Officials urged their republican rivals to end the dalliance with car bombs: ‘Bombing is an elitist tactic. It does not involve the people. This is true, of course, of all military activity, of the armed defence of the area or of offensive guerrilla activities such as we, as well as the Provisionals, engaged in until recently. But it is uniquely true of urban bombing which demands a tiny group, or perhaps a single person acting clandestinely.’ Such methods were no substitute for a political organization ‘confident of its own strength, conscious of its own involvement in real politics and clear about its objectives. You cannot bomb an organization like that into existence. You have to build it, and there are no short-cuts.’82

  But the exhortation fell on deaf ears. Car bombs had a long future ahead of them in Northern Ireland. The Provisionals went on to devise ever-more sophisticated versions and take their war to the heart of Britain’s elite, claiming hundreds of civilian lives along the way. They would also belatedly accept the need for a political struggle to be waged alongside their military campaign. But civil resistance never reached the heights it had known between Demetrius and Motorman again.

  6

  Roads Not Taken

  The Gun and the Typewriter

  In its history of the conflict, the British Army identified the summer of 1972 as a crucial turning point: the moment when republican guerrillas shifted from ‘insurgency’ to ‘terrorism’ in their methods.1 Operation Motorman had eliminated the no-go areas for good, and the casualty figures for 1972 – almost 500 deaths, including 130 British soldiers – were never to be repeated. However, the Provos had no intention of accepting defeat. Arrests on both sides of the border took a number of leading IRA commanders out of circulation, but those still at liberty now drew up plans to extend their bombing campaign to Britain.2

  Sinn Féin remained the poor cousin
of the movement’s military wing, with no real life of its own, but the IRA leadership saw little cause for concern. The movement’s Army Council turned down another proposal from Ruairí Ó Brádaigh to contest elections in the North if legal barriers could be overcome: partly on grounds of principle, partly for fear of being trounced by the SDLP.3 A year after Motorman, Ó Brádaigh assured supporters that in any case, salvation was at hand: ‘We are in sight of the British declaration of intent to withdraw.’4

  The outlook of their republican rivals could hardly have been more different. In July 1972, Tomás Mac Giolla delivered a speech in Tyrone that set out the thinking behind the Official IRA’s ceasefire, putting forward two main arguments against Provo militarism. First of all, it was bound to alienate the unionist population, whose opposition to a united Ireland meant partition would have to remain in place for the time being: ‘Understanding the justified and unjustified fears of the Protestant working class we have correctly decided that a form of government will exist in the Six Counties, but it must be a government based on the democratic demands of the Civil Rights Association.’5 Mac Giolla was also concerned about the effect of a narrow military campaign on nationalist opinion. When the moment of exhaustion arrived – as it inevitably would – ‘without political guidance, without a leadership that articulates their demands, the people will blindly opt for peace at any price. And their paper hero will become a paper monster overnight, isolated and remote.’6

  Having rejected the military road, the Official republicans had to find another way to advance their agenda. They had set great store by NICRA as a campaigning group that could spearhead the struggle for reform in Northern Ireland. But the civil rights body was now a greatly diminished force, lacking the broad support it had formerly enjoyed. The Officials also cherished hopes that the trade union movement could be used for their purposes, as it was ‘the only mass organization capable of achieving success without irreparably dividing our people’.7