State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  It is a myth that the tragedy of Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s was simply inevitable. Although people were deeply shaped by their political and religious traditions, often looking to the conflicts of the past for inspiration and guidance, they were not prisoners of history. Picking up the gun was a matter of choice, not destiny; for every disaffected, unemployed young man who found solidarity and excitement in a paramilitary brotherhood, there were hundreds who did not. But the conflict also owed much to the decisions of individual political leaders: not just people who consciously sought to inflame the conflict, like the anti-Catholic preacher Ian Paisley and the Provisional Sinn Fein president Ruairí Ó Brádaigh (born Peter Brady), but moderate politicians who made things worse by indifference, inaction or incompetence.

  Of the second group, Reginald Maudling was perhaps the supreme example. For all his superficial cleverness and charm, Heath’s Home Secretary cut a sadly diminished figure in the early 1970s, his mind coarsened by drink, his attention distracted by his corrupt business interests. Even his name seemed suggestive: a blend of ‘muddle’, ‘maudlin’ and ‘dawdling’. As one contemporary profile put it, he was a ‘great rambling, untidy hulk of a man with epicurean girth, a ready grin, and sardonic humour’, staggering into action ‘like an overweight prizefighter who would rather sink back into the comer and take the bell’. Maudling knew little about Northern Ireland and cared even less; on his first visit to the province, just four days after the Short Strand gun battle, he made a terrible impression. To the nationalist MP Paddy Devlin, he was ‘plainly out of his depth and bored rigid’, while even General Freeland thought that he seemed ‘completely ignorant’. And as his plane back to London climbed into the sky the next day, Maudling let out a great sigh of relief. ‘For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch,’ he exclaimed. ‘What a bloody awful country.’5

  If Maudling offered only a caricature of leadership, then the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Major James Chichester-Clark, was little better. A former Irish Guards officer and County Londonderry farmer, Chichester-Clark was a typical product of the unionist landed gentry: slow, decent and sensible, and totally out of his depth. To be fair, he was in a hideously difficult position, trapped between the British government, the Catholic minority and his own unionist electorate. Such was the tension and paranoia that with every concession, from voting reforms to the abolition of housing discrimination, he pushed more Protestant voters into the arms of Ian Paisley. And with every new report of violence, every bomb attack, every shooting, he faced more demands for a tough military crackdown. But while Chichester-Clark patently lacked the skill to juggle all these competing pressures, the truth was that even the most gifted politician would have struggled. Not only was Stormont a deeply compromised regime in the eyes of the nationalist minority, but once British troops arrived in Belfast the Northern Irish government was little more than a caricature, a client state at the mercy of its master. As early as May 1969 – even before the army was sent in – Callaghan had warned his Labour colleagues that scrapping Stormont completely ‘might be forced on us’, although the Cabinet minutes noted that ‘the difficulties of direct rule, which would probably have to be imposed against the wishes of the majority of the population, would be very great’. By the summer of 1970 the Home Office had drawn up detailed contingency plans for direct British rule, and on 9 July, after the debacle of the Falls Road curfew, Burke Trend raised the issue with Heath and Maudling. If the situation deteriorated much further, Trend said, ‘we must be prepared … to suspend the Parliament at Stormont … and to place the executive government of Ulster in the hands of a nominee of our own’.6

  While Heath hesitated, the initiative on the shabby, careworn streets of Belfast was quietly passing to a group of men who had very different priorities for Northern Ireland. After its last military campaign was crushed in the 1950s, the tiny Irish Republican Army – which was banned on both sides of the border – had turned instead to Marxism, hoping to build a working-class coalition and bring Irish unity by peaceful means. Despite the bloody events of 1969, the IRA’s leaders refused to indulge in what they saw as sectarian violence; instead, they hoped to coax the movement towards political participation both north and south of the border. For many older IRA men, however – often highly conservative Catholics who nursed a visceral hatred of the British and the unionist state – this was anathema, while a group of young militants, seasoned in the street battles of Belfast and Derry, insisted that the IRA take up arms to defend its people. Graffiti across Belfast that summer – ‘IRA = I Ran Away’ – hammered home the message: if the IRA wanted to maintain their image as the standard-bearers of the republican cause, they needed to return to the gun. At the end of August 1969, a small group of Belfast hardliners got together to plan a new direction, and a month later they launched a coup within the city’s IRA. On 18 December, twenty-six delegates secretly elected a new Provisional IRA Executive and Army Council, and ten days later they issued a public statement reaffirming their commitment to defend ‘our people’ against ‘the forces of British Imperialism’ and to build a united thirty-two-county Irish state, by force if necessary. Finally, on 11 January 1970, the IRA’s political wing Sinn Fein underwent its own split into rival Official and Provisional wings. The Provos – the group who brought the IRA back to the forefront of international attention and struck terror into the hearts of thousands of families not merely in Northern Ireland but in mainland Britain too – were born.7

  Although apologists for the IRA later claimed that the Provisionals were above all a defensive organization, formed to protect Catholic communities from Protestant attack, this is not really true. There were clear continuities between the Provos and the old IRA of the 1950s, and almost all of the Provos’ original leaders, such as ‘Seán MacStíofáin’, ‘Ruairí Ó Brádaigh’, David O’Connell, Billy McKee, Joe Cahill and Seamus Twomey, had been active in the IRA for decades; indeed, most had served time in British or Irish prisons. Even younger recruits often came from republican families of long standing: so Gerry Adams, then a West Belfast boy in his early twenties, came from a family in which both his father and uncle had been IRA men, while his mother’s family also had impeccable IRA connections. As the historian Richard English points out, it is a myth that Adams became involved because of his anger at the repression of the civil rights marches. In fact, he seems to have joined the Belfast IRA in 1965, when he was 16, well before the civil rights movement had got under way.

  From the very outset, in other words, the Provisionals saw themselves as the heirs to a long tradition of republican violence (or ‘physical force’, as they euphemistically called it). They saw the Six County state as utterly unredeemable; in the words of Adams’s collaborator Martin McGuinness, it was ‘a unionist state for a unionist people’. Whatever they might claim later, they were not interested in reforming it, only in tearing it down in the name of Irish unity. Peaceful reform was for the effete Marxists of the Official IRA; indeed, one of the major reasons the Provos had walked out was that they believed in violence. Only the gun, they thought, would bring down Stormont and bring home to the British the costs of keeping Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. On top of that, it would give their Catholic people a chance to strike back, to regain some pride after the attacks and humiliations of 1969 and 1970. The Irish people, said the Republican News in September 1970, ‘must realise that British imperialists do not respect, fear or pay much attention to people who beg, grovel or crawl for favours or concessions … If we do not respect ourselves, we need not expect our British overlords to respect us. If we act like slaves and lickspittles, we deserve to be treated as such.’8

  During the mid-1970s, some on the extreme left of British politics hailed the Provisionals as non-sectarian Marxists standing up for the rights of the working classes. This was nonsense. There was always a strong element of sectarianism in Provo thinking, and their reputation for hitting back at the Orangemen was part of their appeal. A
lthough they took their own Irish Catholic identity extremely seriously, most refused to believe that Protestant unionists were anything other than self-deluding Irishmen. When the journalist Kevin Myers asked Seamus Twomey if there was a risk of provoking a Protestant backlash, Twomey exploded: ‘THERE IS NO BACKLASH BECAUSE DEEP DOWN THE PROTESTANT PEOPLE WANT A UNITED IRELAND, only they don’t know it yet,’ which suggested an interesting relationship with reality. Their left-wing identity, too, was only skin-deep: many senior figures were extremely pious and conservative Catholics, opposed to abortion and contraception. ‘Seán MacStíofáin’, the Provos’ first chief of staff, even refused to bring contraceptives over the border to be used as acid fuses for bombs.

  But then MacStíofáin was a very peculiar character by any standards. His real name was John Stephenson; far from being some oppressed child of West Belfast, he had been born and bred in Bethnal Green. His father was English; his mother, although of Protestant Irish descent, was Bethnal Green through and through. His Irish Catholic identity, like his ‘Hollywood Darby O’Gill brogue’, as Myers put it, was entirely self-created; even many of his own comrades found it hard to take him seriously. He certainly made a very unlikely hero for British left-wingers who fancied themselves as progressive freethinkers. ‘Seán’s problem is that he spends all his time going around trying to prove to everybody that he’s as Irish as they are,’ the Official IRA’s Marxist chief Cathal Goulding once remarked, ‘and in the IRA he had to show that he was more violent than the rest.’9

  At first, the British army saw no great threat from the Provisional IRA. Behind the barricades, officers even held informal talks with Provo representatives to get a sense of the mood on the streets. As late as January 1971, indeed, there were still secret links between military intelligence and the Provisional command. All the time, however, the Provos were preparing for the great offensive. Their growth was slow and they remained relatively obscure, but by the middle of 1970 they could count on about 1,000 active supporters across Ireland, from armed street fighters to the people who ran their safe houses. Their biggest problem seemed likely to be getting their hands on some guns, but their luck was in. In 1969, the Irish government in Dublin had agreed to make money available for the Catholic victims of Protestant attacks, and much of this money found its way into the hands of the Provos, who used it to buy arms. What was more, elements within the Irish government – notably Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, but possibly even the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, himself – arranged for Irish Army intelligence to buy and ship guns to the Provisionals in the spring of 1970, an extraordinarily reckless and dangerous decision, given what was to follow.

  Finally, any group claiming the mantle of the IRA could expect considerable moral and financial support from across the Atlantic, where Irish families still toasted the Easter Rising and damned the British Empire. In particular, it was American money that paid for the massive shipments of Armalite rifles to the Provos in the early 1970s, with most of the cash coming from the Provo front organization NORAID. Smugglers even used the cruise liner QE2 as cover, bringing over half a dozen Armalites with every voyage, sometimes tucked down the legs of their trousers. By the late summer of 1970, therefore, the Provos had enough weapons to start a small war. ‘There were Belgian FN semi-automatic rifles, assault rifles, self-loading rifles and M1 carbines,’ one IRA man later recalled. ‘People didn’t question where they came from. Just the fact that the weaponry was there made people feel a lot more at ease.’10

  By this stage, the Provos had already made their first impression on the people of Belfast. Having killed five Protestants in the gun battles of late June, they had established what one historian calls their ‘ghetto credibility’ over the more restrained Official IRA, and their aid to Falls Road families during the disastrous army curfew only added to their lustre as defenders of the Catholics. It is worth repeating the fundamental point that even before these landmark events, the Provos were bent on a campaign of armed unrest. For all their claims that they acted only in self-defence, they were violent revolutionaries before they were protectors of their communities. Still, there is no doubt that the Falls Road curfew gave them an enormous boost, both in morale and in recruitment. Crucially, it shattered the relationship between Northern Irish Catholics and their British protectors, so that whereas the IRA’s standing orders in September 1969 dictated that British soldiers were ‘not to be shot’, after the Falls curfew ‘all Brits’ were ‘acceptable targets’. More broadly, it destroyed any remaining illusions that politics in Northern Ireland could be resuscitated on the basis of mutual trust. For nationalists, the attack on the Short Strand and the so-called ‘rape of the Falls’ confirmed that the British army was merely the tool of the repressive unionist state; for unionists, however, these events were a terrifying reminder of the threat of the IRA and its Catholic supporters. On both sides, moderate voices were almost drowned out by the hubbub of fear and anger. As a moderate nationalist councillor later remarked, ‘overnight the population turned from neutral or even sympathetic support for the military to outright hatred of everything related to the security forces. I witnessed voters and workers turn against us to join the Provisionals. Even some of our most dedicated workers and supporters turned against us.’11

  Behind the grey drabness of the urban landscape, the dilapidated Victorian brick façades, the ‘mean houses, tiny streets, endless rain’, old enmities were rising to the boil. And in the narrow terraced streets and bleak, grey estates – the ‘tiny, lightless kennels’ reeking of ‘coal smoke, sour milk and the rancid liquids of reproduction’, as Kevin Myers put it – the air tingled with anticipation as before a storm. Every week brought a fresh wave of IRA bombs aimed at Protestant shops and businesses across the capital, with the year’s hundredth explosion, an unhappy and ominous landmark, coming on 15 September. A report for the Ministry of Defence warned of ‘inflamed sectarian passions … deliberately exploited by the IRA and other extremists’, but Heath and Maudling still believed that Stormont must be given every chance to restore order before they resorted to the drastic option of direct rule.12

  Yet although the marching season passed off without more major incidents, the mood was bitter, nervous, tense. And if anyone doubted the fierce passions that lay beneath the surface, they needed only listen to the increasingly common stories of punishments meted out to girls who had fraternized with British soldiers – many of them teenagers who had merely gone along to the discos set up as part of the army’s hearts and minds campaign. One soldier never forgot coming across a young girl’s body tied to a lamp post late one night. She had been held down so that her head could be shaved; then hot tar had been poured over her, and she had been covered with feathers. ‘The tar actually ran down her neck and the front of her breast,’ the soldier remembered, ‘and her hands were badly affected where she’d clawed at her face to get it off. And the feathers were just stuck to the tar. We had to cut her away from the lamppost and take her to hospital. She was very badly burned … I felt utter revulsion for the type of person that had the mentality to do it – just because a human being had decided to go and dance for a couple of hours at an army barracks.’13

  It was not until the early hours of Saturday, 6 February 1971, during street fighting near Belfast’s Ardoyne area, that the potential costs of the conflict were brought home to the British public. Trouble had been brewing in the area for days, and when fighting broke out late on Friday night, the army sent in a unit of the Royal Artillery. The men had just finished a six-week tour along the Irish border and had returned to Belfast for a break; they were still lugging their kit off the troopship when the orders came through to restore order in the Ardoyne. Trained to deal with rioting crowds, they had no concept of what awaited them. ‘The crowd was in front of us, throwing bricks, bottles, petrol bombs, everything that was going,’ one soldier remembered. ‘Then all of a sudden the crowd parted and this chap just popped out with a machine gun and just opened up.’ The chap in question was
Billy Reid, a Provisional IRA volunteer, and one of his bullets hit Gunner Robert Curtis in the chest, killing him instantly. The first British soldier to be killed in Northern Ireland, Curtis was just 20 years old, a Newcastle boy who had been married for thirteen months. His wife, also 20, was three months pregnant. In the army and among the general public alike, there was widespread horror and incomprehension. Curtis’s father told the press that he had no idea ‘what my son died for’. His wife’s mother, meanwhile, said that her daughter thought the troops should be brought home immediately, and ‘the mobs left to fight it out among themselves’.14

  The troops did not come home, of course. The government was committed to restoring law and order to the troubled province, even if that meant stepping deeper into the quagmire. When Heath’s Cabinet met three days later, Maudling told his colleagues that the ‘renewed disorder in Northern Ireland was being deliberately fomented by the militant wing of the Irish Republican Army’, while the Defence Secretary, Lord Carrington, added that ‘the disorder was no longer an intercommunal matter’, since ‘a situation approaching armed conflict was developing’. Even at this early stage, the Cabinet were worried that ‘public opinion in Great Britain was beginning actively to resent the situation’; reports suggested that ‘many people would favour abandoning the Province to its fate, a course which the Government could not contemplate’ – not least because of the international outcry that would greet British withdrawal and the sectarian anarchy that would almost certainly ensue. ‘The general public’, the Cabinet agreed, ‘should be helped to realise that the disorder was no longer the result of communal strife or rebellion against political injustice but was the outcome of deliberate terrorism by the IRA.’15