Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland

by Ed Moloney

  Only later, when I was in jail, I think that some of the things that had been said to me inspired me to dig deeper and inspired me to look a little bit deeper. But you could argue that because I had the time and the reflective opportunity, that maybe if I hadn’t gone to jail I never would have dug any deeper and never would have exposed myself to any of that. But, you know, in jail I learned more. I learned about the Pope’s sponsorship of King Billy§ and I learned that the United Irishmen rebellion was put down in the main by Catholic militia. I know lots of things now that I didn’t know [then] …

  David Ervine had just celebrated his sixteenth birthday when, in August 1969, British troops marched up the Falls Road, bayonets fixed, to take positions on an imaginary line that divided Nationalist, Catholic West Belfast from the Unionist, Protestant Shankill Road. Days of fierce rioting in Derry between the Bogsiders and the RUC had left the police exhausted, demoralised and, as far as the bulk of Catholics were concerned, discredited. The civil rights campaign had set out to reform and democratise the Northern Ireland state but instead had exposed tensions and fissures within Unionism and intensified sectarian friction between Nationalists and Unionists. Unionism was separating between those, like supporters of Prime Minister Captain Terence O’Neill, who recognised a need to accommodate Nationalist complaints and others, not a few in O’Neill’s own cabinet, for whom the idea was complete anathema. For them the clamour for Catholic civil rights was just a devious IRA plot to undo the union with Britain which must be put down with as much determination as if it was a dangerous military threat. Outside the confines of the ruling Unionist Party, a young firebrand preacher by the name of Ian Paisley was setting himself up as the bane of O’Neillism, and the man with the courage and foresight to expose the civil rights conspiracy on the streets of Ulster by blocking, hindering and hampering their marches and protests. From January 1969 onwards, sectarian friction ramped up and confrontations between Nationalists and the RUC grew more frequent and violent. The Apprentice Boys’ parade in Derry that August was the spark for a wider conflagration, which spread further afield to other Nationalist towns and to Belfast where Protestant attempts to burn down chunks of Catholic West and North Belfast forced the government in London to intervene militarily. The troops dispatched to Belfast were seen instinctively in places such as David Ervine’s neighbourhood as the friends and protectors of Catholics, their presence evidence that the British had sided with Unionism’s enemies.

  I can remember the Army coming in and the clear implication was that the Unionist community were the aggressors because they pointed their weapons at us and I think that this psychology was deeply damaging. It was perceived in the Unionist community, and I absolutely shared this … that those who advocated for civil rights were a mask for the behaviour of bad people … The perception that I had at that time was that … bad people were hell bent on causing mayhem. Shortly thereafter it was bodies up entries and alleyways and people being tortured and drive-by shootings and bombings of public houses … and I’m not sure it was a time of clear thinking.

  David Ervine’s route into the UVF was a classic example of how personal experience joined together with communal pressure to nudge and cajole people to join paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland. Much more than mother’s milk, an ideological fixation or words spoken on television, the anger-making experience of aggressive violence was by far the most compelling recruiting tool during the Troubles. The urge to hit back, to balance the scales, was a powerful, almost irresistible force, even though it might have been justified as an act of communal defence. It worked that way on the Falls Road, on the Shankill and in East Belfast. Except, in those early days, the Unionists were the bad guys in the eyes of most of the world, including Britain, while Nationalists were seen as the victims, and a source of guilt for many in Britain and the Irish Republic. The Nationalist narrative was accepted almost without question while the Unionist version was, except in their own community, largely ignored or repudiated.

  One iconic event during the early stages of the Troubles captured all of this perfectly. It was the so-called ‘Siege of St Matthew’s’, an event that entered Republican folklore, and most histories of the Troubles, as a watershed moment in the life of the infant Provisional IRA. It happened on one of the most tumultuous days yet in the Troubles, 27 June 1970, the last Saturday in June and traditionally the occasion for a mini-Twelfth of July parade in Belfast along a route that, at least back in 1970, took Orange lodges and their bands through many flashpoint areas of North and West Belfast up to the Whiterock Orange Lodge near Ballymurphy, in those days a mixed but increasingly Catholic housing estate. The parade that year was engulfed in major violence; clashes along the route spread to the interface in North Belfast between the Shankill and Catholic Ardoyne areas and soon the evening air was alive with the crackle of gunfire. The firing seemed to have come mostly from the Republican side, as evidenced by the fact that the three people killed that day were Protestants, all killed, it seemed, by the IRA snipers. From the ferocity of the violence it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, contrived or not, the events had presented the IRA with an ideal opportunity to give the Shankill Loyalists a bloody nose that day, and a warning that any attempt to repeat the burnings and mini-pogroms of August 1969 would provoke a ferocious response. The trouble moved to the East of the city that evening when local bands and lodges dispersed and the IRA had another chance to drive the point home.

  The small Catholic area known as Short Strand is at the inner perimeter of East Belfast, situated near the River Lagan at the apex of two roads, the Newtownards and Albertbridge Roads, which lead to the main two bridges into the city centre from that part of town. David Ervine lived further up that apex, only a few streets away from the Short Strand. The area is surrounded by Loyalist streets on all sides and has its back to the river. Historically, the Short Strand had been the scene of some of the most vicious sectarian violence in Belfast’s turbulent history, especially in the 1920s, and was regarded as the most vulnerable Catholic district in Belfast, a hostage to the good behaviour of Nationalists elsewhere in the city. That Saturday, a gun battle and rioting that lasted almost the entire night would dramatically change that calculation.

  The Republican version of what happened is simple: when the Orangemen returned from the Whiterock parade they stormed the local Catholic church, St Matthew’s, throwing petrol bombs and firing shots, while the British Army and the RUC stayed outside the area, seemingly on purpose. Had the Loyalists succeeded in destroying the church, Republicans said later, the heart would have been ripped from the community, which might then have been destroyed. But the IRA, under the command of Billy McKee, the Brigade Commander, came to the rescue and fought off the Loyalists, killing two of them. McKee was badly wounded and an IRA Volunteer, Henry McIlhone, shot dead. The narrative was crucial to the infant Provisional IRA because it made good the promise implicit in its raison d’être, to defend Catholic Belfast from Unionist extremism. There was another bonus. Having protected the Short Strand in such a violent way, the IRA was then at liberty to start bombing Belfast city centre and to attack British soldiers without fear of the consequences being visited on the Short Strand. Mostly though, the story fitted neatly into the larger narrative: Catholics were trapped in a hostile state, and were under siege from bigots. As a local Sinn Fein activist, Deborah Devenney, recently put it: ‘… we were under attack by Loyalist mobs assisted by the British government and the RUC. After Bombay Street there was writing on a wall in the Falls – IRA: I Ran Away. After the battle of St Matthew’s, no one could say that any more.’6

  The Protestant version of the ‘Siege of St Matthew’s’ is very different and, interestingly, the most recent account7 from within that community draws its evidence in large measure from Nationalist accounts of the battle published over a quarter of a century later when the passage of time had permitted greater candour. This rendering of events claims that East Belfast Protestants had fallen into a trap carefully
laid by the IRA, one that had been set in order to create the circumstances that would allow the IRA to present itself to Catholics as their defenders. Their evidence comes in a description of preparations for the battle inside Short Strand compiled in 1997 by a Nationalist community body, the Ballymacarrett Research Group. The preparations suggest not a hurried defence of the area but something more organised and planned: ‘When the IRA formed up that night in Lowry Street just off Seaforde Street’, the Group’s account read, ‘it was the first time since the 1920s that the IRA had paraded before going into action. There were around thirty men that night which comprised of Brigade Staff Officers, local volunteers and volunteers from the Falls. Supporting them were Fianna who acted as runners ferrying ammunition and messages between the various positions taken up around Seaforde Street and the Church.’8 In other words IRA leaders and members from elsewhere in the city had been drafted in before the trouble started and the fact that they had time to form up for a parade suggests the gunfire had yet to begin. The violence erupted, both sides agree, when Nationalist youths began waving Irish Tricolours at the Orange marchers. Nationalists say shots were fired from within the crowd, which the IRA answered, while the Unionists say the only firing came from the grounds of St Matthew’s Church. According to the Unionist version of that night’s violence it was not until much later, long after the initial bursts of IRA gunfire, that the local Protestants were able to arm themselves – with two pistols, a .303 breech-loading rifle and a Mauser rifle that had been smuggled from Germany to Carson’s UVF in 1914 – and return fire. All the while the British Army and the RUC stood aside, unwilling or unable to come to their defence, while the IRA poured fire into the Loyalist streets.

  So the version to which David Ervine would have been exposed was the mirror image of that believed by Nationalists. In his community, the IRA was the aggressor; in one local Protestant account the violence is called ‘our Pearl Harbor’;9 whose immediate con sequence was ‘the formation of both the UDA and the UVF in East Belfast’. 10 That account was published only in 2003, thirty years after the event, and evidence of how emotive the violence still is for Loyalists in the area. In a sense the truth of what happened on the night is secondary, since the competing mythologies are too firmly embedded in the group psyche to be dislodged. What is beyond doubt is that the violence in Short Strand set the tone for the Troubles that followed. It is worth noting, however, that one important part of the IRA’s version has now been exposed as a falsehood. The sole Catholic killed that night, Henry McIlhone, was not, in fact, a member of the IRA, even though Billy McKee and Gerry Adams among others have claimed he was, and nor was he shot dead by a Loyalist gunman. He was killed, it now seems, by his own side, very possibly by Britain’s IRA spy, Denis Donaldson, in a friendly-fire accident.11 So the question becomes: if the IRA lied about that part of the incident, did it lie about others?

  David Ervine was present on the Newtownards Road that night when the gunfire erupted and it is clear that it was an important way point on his journey into the UVF.

  I didn’t go rioting … but, you know, young people are inclined to follow excitement. There was a lot of rioting at the bottom of the Woodstock and Lower Newtownards Road [and] I can remember going and having a juke. I was there the night in 1970, when two people were shot dead, three actually, two outside the chapel grounds and one inside, and [Robert] Neill, [James] McCurrie and [Henry] McIlhone, and I can remember a guy getting shot and it wasn’t like the movies. The guy got shot in the hip and, and the blood spurted about three feet, and I just thought ‘Jesus’ you know, you saw John Wayne and there was a stain. That just wasn’t the way the world worked; it was horrendous, the noise, the fear, the atmosphere, it was incredible stuff … My community was savagely beaten that night, it was savagely wounded, and I remember walking up the next day. It was the road that I was born and reared on … and it was just like a war zone, you know, it was like something you’d seen in the Second World War, gutted properties and rubble and all of that. It was a rather horrendous time I have to say, and I have no doubt in my mind whose side I was on then, although I hadn’t yet made a move towards being active in any of that. In some ways I think I probably saw [the growth of the UDA and UVF] as a community rallying to its needs, I think that’s what it was … It has become many other things since then but for many I think that’s what it was. It came from the process of vigilantism and vigilantism was protecting your own little street, your own little house, and then [it] generated into something much larger. Now the UVF already existed, but in general terms the growth in paramilitarism came from vigilantism which was a determination that you were under attack and you were going to do something about it … and then it was one step away from defence to attack …

  Notes – 2

  6 Daily Ireland, 27 June 2006.

  7 Murder in Ballymacarrett: The Untold Story.

  8 The Lagan Enclave.

  9 Murder in Ballymacarrett, p. 60.

  10 Ibid., p. 37.

  11 The Sunday Times, 24 May 2009.

  * A series of ecumenical debates hosted by the Redemptorists of Clonard monastery in the 1950s and early 1960s.

  † McCracken, a radical Presbyterian and industrialist, was a founder member of the Society of United Irishmen along with fellow Protestant radicals, Wolfe Tone, James Napper Tandy, James Hope, Thomas Russell and Robert Emmet. McCracken took part in the United Irishmen rebellion of 1798 and led an unsuccessful rebel attack on Antrim town. Afterwards he was arrested, court-martialled and hanged at Corn Market in central Belfast in July 1798. The United Irishmen rebellion, which was inspired in part by the French and American revolutions, marked the birth of modern Irish Republicanism although the dominating role played in it by Protestants is rarely acknowledged by their modern co-religionists.

  ‡ The Sixteenth and Tenth Divisions of Kitchener’s Army were Irish units formed around the Irish National Volunteers who remained loyal to John Redmond, head of the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1914. Redmond helped raise the regiments in the hope this would ensure Home Rule for Ireland when the war ended. The 16th Division lost more men killed in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, some five thousand killed, than the 36th Ulster Division, formed out of Edward Carson’s UVF, which lost some two thousand.

  § The Dutch prince, William of Orange, known in Ireland as ‘King Billy’, became a hero for Irish Protestants when he acceded to the British throne in 1689 and defeated the rival Catholic monarch, James II, in 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne, a victory celebrated to this day each 12 July by Northern Ireland Loyalists. His invasion of England and then Ireland is widely represented as consolidating the Protestant reformation and ensuring a Protestant ascendancy and monarchy in both countries. The Orange Order, which David Ervine briefly joined, was named after him but less well known is the fact that William’s overthrow of James II was supported financially by Pope Innocent XI who saw his success as a way to undermine King Louis XIV of France whose defiance of Innocent had angered the Vatican. The Orange roots of Northern Loyalism therefore lie as much in the tangled European politics of the day as in hostility towards Catholicism.

  3

  The Ulster Unionist leader Jim Molyneaux once said that, for Northern Ireland Protestants, loyalty to Britain was a two-way street. It is rare indeed for a politician, especially one as ill at ease with words as Molyneaux was, to capture in such a pithy way the dominating, even defining, characteristic of his community’s political culture. But the ‘wee man’, as his colleagues fondly called him, put it well. He was setting forth in simpler terms what political scientists call ‘conditional loyalty’, which is the idea that citizens and the state are bound together by a contract in which the citizens agree to support and defend the state only as long as the state supports and defends them. It is almost impossible to understand the world of Ulster Loyalism, to grasp why Protestants take up arms and threaten to defy the government they claim as their own, or why someone like David Ervine would join the UVF, with
out recognising how fundamental the doctrine is to the culture of Northern Unionism.

  The centrality of this contractual relationship to government in Northern Irish politics has its origins in the Plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century. The Plantation was an extraordinarily ambitious effort by the late Tudor and early Stuart monarchies to secure England’s western flank and subdue the most lawless and rebellious part of Ireland. The English fear of an enemy invasion through the back door of Catholic Ireland – by the Spanish, the French or the Germans – shaped the relationship between the two countries from the Reformation through to the Second World War, providing the strategic interest that invested Britain’s claim over the country. The idea of transplanting loyal, dependable Protestants from England and Scotland to Ulster took root in the final years of the reign of Elizabeth I, when fear of another Spanish armada was still very real, and it was put into place by her Stuart successor, James VI of Scotland, when he ascended to the English throne in 1603. Not only did the presence of a trustworthy population in the part of Ireland that is nearest to England and Scotland offer a buffer to an invading foreign army, but granting the new inhabitants land once owned by the rebellious O’Neill and O’Donnell clans also helped deny the successors of these troublesome tribes the resources for new uprisings and mischief-making.

  The Planters were supposed to be half English and half Scots but in practice the numbers who migrated from the Scottish lowlands exceeded by nearly sixfold those from England. Over the next century or so they brought with them the distinctive values of the Kirk, Scotland’s Calvinistic Presbyterianism, prime among which was the dogma of conditional loyalty. James VI, who was crowned James I in England, had conceded the principle in 1581 to the Scottish Kirk in the face of fear that Catholic plots originating in France and Spain could undo the Reformation and restore the Papacy to Scotland. In return for James’s promise to ‘maintain true religion’, his Scottish subjects pledged themselves to defend his person and his authority. In other words as long as he kept his word to keep Scotand Protestant the Kirk would be loyal to James but if he didn’t then the deal was off. This covenant was renewed in 1590 and again in 1638, during the rule of Charles I, when the monarch’s threats to impose his Catholic-sounding prayer book on the Scots put Scottish Presbyterianism again under threat.12 Prior to all this, it had been the practice of the Scots gentry and nobility to ‘band’ together for self-defence when their interests were under threat, a product of decades of weak central government, and that practice was absorbed and imitated by the Kirk and the Covenanters. It meant that if the monarch threatened to renege on his or her part of the deal then it was permissible to use force against the Crown for self-protection, as the Covenanters demonstrated to Charles I on the eve of the English Civil War. The doctrine of conditional loyalty failed to be assimilated into English political culture but it survived and thrived, along with banding, in the political climate of Ulster and it provides a way to understand the Unionist paradox: Loyalists being disloyal. Both the UVF and the UDA owe their origin to the idea.