by Peter Taylor
Over the next two years, the IRA fought a savage guerrilla campaign against British soldiers in Ireland and the native Irish police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) who were their allies. Terrible atrocities were committed by both sides in what the Irish called the War of Independence and the British called the war against terrorism. To augment their forces, the British recruited hundreds of unemployed Great War veterans, dressed them in makeshift uniforms of dark green, black and khaki and sent them to Ireland to assist the beleaguered RIC and terrorize any local populations minded to give succour and support to the IRA. They became notorious as the ‘Black and Tans’ and to republicans were synonymous with British butchery. They were also aided by demobilized British officers known as the ‘Auxiliaries’ who enjoyed a similar reputation. To the British, the IRA excited the same feelings, not least when gunmen under the direction of the IRA leader, Michael Collins, effectively wiped out British intelligence in Dublin on 21 November 1920 by shooting dead fourteen of its key operators in the space of one night. Retaliation followed later the same day when a mixed force of soldiers, ‘Black and Tans’, ‘Auxiliaries’ and RIC opened fire on 15,000 spectators watching a Gaelic football match at Dublin’s Croke Park. They were said to be looking for Collins’s gunmen. The troops killed twelve civilians in a day that became known as the original ‘Bloody Sunday’. As with ‘Bloody Sunday’ in 1972, the official account was that the soldiers had been fired on and shot back in self-defence.
The war became increasingly brutal and, as has happened in the current conflict, provoked a degree of outrage back home at what was being done in Britain’s name. Herbert Henry Asquith, the former Liberal Party leader who had been Prime Minister at the time of the Easter Rising and who had been uneasy about the execution of the rebel leaders, although he had not stopped them,4 declared, ‘Things are being done in Ireland which would disgrace the blackest annals of the lowest despotisms in Europe.’5 By the spring of 1921, both sides recognized that neither could be defeated, and negotiations followed, culminating in the Treaty of 6 December 1921 signed in Downing Street by the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and the IRA leader, Michael Collins, who led the Irish delegation. The human cost of the war to both sides had been great, with over 500 soldiers and policemen and over 700 IRA volunteers killed.6 But the Treaty, although repealing the 1801 Act of Union, fell far short of the complete independence that the IRA had fought for. It was, in the words of Michael Collins, a settlement that gave Ireland ‘the freedom to achieve freedom’.
British prime ministers from Gladstone at the end of the nineteenth century to Asquith at the beginning of the twentieth had recognized the imperative of reaching a political accommodation with nationalist Ireland by granting a form of limited self-government known as Home Rule. Their efforts, however, were continually thwarted by an alliance of the Ulster Unionists who would have none of it, Southern Irish Unionists and the Conservative Party at Westminster who saw Home Rule as the thin end of the wedge of complete Irish independence. The situation was even more precarious because there were fears that if Home Rule were granted, Ulster unionists’ resistance might be supported by sympathetic British army officers, some of whom, on the eve of the Great War, had indicated their potentially mutinous intentions should Ulster be coerced into a Home Rule settlement.7 A compromise was eventually reached in the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 in which Ireland’s thirty-two counties were divided into two separate political entities each with its own Home Rule parliament. It was known as partition. Twenty-six counties became the Irish Free State and the remaining six counties in the North became Northern Ireland. Elections to the new parliaments were held in 1921.
To create the new state, a new boundary was drawn around the ancient province of Ulster to guarantee that a majority of its citizens were Protestants. To achieve this end, three of Ulster’s original nine counties were excluded.8 To have left Ulster as it had been for centuries would not have guaranteed the Protestant majority that was the whole purpose of partition. From the outset, the new six-county state was a gerrymander. To the dismay of Irish republicans, the pens that signed the Treaty did not write out partition but institutionalized it. The sop to Irish republicans was that it gave the Irish Free State the Dominion status enjoyed by Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. This meant it no longer sent MPs to Westminster but elected representatives to its own parliament in Dublin known as Dail Eireann. What stuck in Collins’s throat – and he had been forced to accept it at Downing Street – was that those elected to the new parliament had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown, modified though it was to ‘fidelity’ to the King.9 Nevertheless Collins remained optimistic that the Treaty gave Ireland the ‘freedom to achieve freedom’ in the expectation that at some stage in the not-too-distant future the two Home Rule parliaments would become one and independence would not be far behind. This was the carrot that Lloyd George dangled before him, the stick being the threat of renewed war against a depleted and exhausted IRA.10
But Collins’s expectation proved false. In the wake of the Treaty, the IRA split into two factions, one that endorsed Collins’s signature and one that bitterly opposed it on the grounds that he had sold out. In 1922 the fledgling Free State was plunged into a murderous civil war that lasted for almost a year. It not only left 500 republicans on both sides dead but buried any prospect of the new Northern Ireland parliament and Dail Eireann ever coming together. It also had dramatic repercussions in the North where sectarian violence in Belfast resulted in the deaths of 257 Catholics and 157 Protestants. The Treaty had divided the two communities even more, with Protestants fearing that the next stop was Irish unity and Catholics bitterly resentful of being cut off from their nationalist brethren by partition. The British made sure the Treaty and with it partition survived by supplying the new Free State army, the pro-Treaty faction of the IRA, with 10,000 rifles to make sure that the IRA’s anti-Treaty forces were defeated.11 Collins never survived to see the outcome. He was shot dead on 22 August 1922 by the anti-Treaty faction in an ambush when he was thought to be travelling to a meeting to talk peace.12
With the civil war over and both sides left to count the fratricidal cost, the anti-Treaty IRA laid down its arms in recognition of the fact that the Republic it had fought for could not, for the moment, be achieved. Nevertheless, a rump of it was determined to fight on when the right moment arose to destroy the Northern Ireland state and British rule in the North and win Ireland’s complete independence by force of arms. The IRA of today has fought its thirty-year ‘war’ in the hope of completing that unfinished business.
From the beginning, Northern Ireland had instability built into it. It was designed to be ‘a Protestant state for a Protestant people’ and was run as such. Nationalists, who made up roughly one-third of its population, were citizens of a state to which most had no wish to belong, and most of their leaders boycotted its institutions. With good reason, the Catholic minority regarded themselves as second-class citizens and were treated as such by the Protestant hierarchy that ran the state and its economy. Discrimination was institutionalized, most notoriously in the way that local government boundaries were rigged. The most blatant example was in Derry where, although Catholics were in a majority in the city, Londonderry City Council was run by Protestants. This perversion of the democratic principle was achieved by a gerrymander of the electoral wards whereby 14,000 Catholic voters ended up with eight councillors whilst 9,000 Protestant voters ended up with twelve.
Such practices extended into other areas too. Industry and business was run by Protestants and, again, most saw to it that jobs went to members of their own community. The most notorious example lay with the province’s biggest employer, the giant Harland and Wolff shipyard that had once built the Titanic. It employed 10,000 workers, only 400 of whom were Catholics. There was also political discrimination that was unique in the United Kingdom. Many Catholics were not able to vote in local elections because the franchise only ext
ended to ratepayers and to pay rates you had to be the owner or tenant of a house or flat. Since Catholics were not only the minority population but the poorest section of it, they were caught in a poverty trap that effectively denied them the vote and any access to political power.
This discrimination that permeated every level of political, social and economic life was no accident but designed to ensure that the state and its institutions were run by and for the Protestant majority for whom the political entity of Northern Ireland had been designed.13 The fact was that many Protestants regarded many Catholics as a fifth column for the IRA and felt everything had to be done to ensure that the Trojan Horse remained outside the walls. This was to be achieved by a mixture of draconian legislation and practical steps. The Special Powers Act allowed the state to lock people up without trial and the Ulster Special Constabulary, the ‘B’ Specials, was constituted to nip subversion in the bud. To many of the loyalist ‘B’ men who volunteered their services, any Catholic was a potential subversive. It was not surprising that Northern Ireland was a society waiting to explode. What was surprising was that for so many years successive British governments did nothing about it.
Since partition, Westminster had kept Northern Ireland at arm’s length with most of its politicians of the view that no good would come of interference in the internal affairs of a province that had the machinery to sort out the problems itself. The province’s matters were matters for the province’s parliament. There was even a convention at Westminster, in place since the Speaker’s ruling in 1922, that questions relating to Northern Ireland could not be raised in the House of Commons. The result was that, from partition until the outbreak of serious rioting in Derry in October 1968, the time spent on Northern Ireland affairs at Westminster averaged less than two hours a year.14 British politicians therefore could always blame the convention and the constitutional position of the province. The problem was that the levers of power at Stormont were in the hands of those who, far from wanting to change the status quo and the condition of the minority of its citizenry, had a vested interest in maintaining it. To the unionist establishment that ran the state, change was seen as an encouragement to nationalists to demand more that would eventually lead to the erosion of all that unionists held dear and perhaps even of the state itself.
That this state of affairs was tolerated for so long by Westminster was bad enough but that it was largely ignored by Harold Wilson’s Labour Government in the critical years of the mid-sixties is a political disgrace. Wilson came to power in 1964 promising reform and change but clearly it was not to apply to Northern Ireland, despite the urgings of a handful of his left-wing backbenchers who visited the province in 1967 to investigate discrimination, electoral practice and unemployment. They returned appalled at what they had found and urged the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, to set up a Royal Commission to report on conditions in the province. Jenkins, the biographer of Asquith, knew more about Ireland than anyone else in the Cabinet and was loath to act on the grounds that, historically, any English attempt to solve the Irish Question had always failed. Northern Ireland was like Brer Rabbit’s ‘Tar Baby’ – touch it once and you’re stuck.15 There was to be no Royal Commission.
One of the Labour MPs who visited the province was Paul Rose, who was also Parliamentary Private Secretary to Barbara Castle, a Minister in Wilson’s Cabinet. Rose took his Minister to task and found his concerns lightly brushed aside. Government, Castle told him, had more weighty matters to consider.
I remember her patting me on the head and saying, ‘Why is a young man like you concerned about Northern Ireland? What about Vietnam? What about Rhodesia?’ I just looked at her with incomprehension and said, ‘You’ll see when they start shooting one another.’ She was totally oblivious to this. I think their priorities were focused on other things to the extent that they were totally blinded as to what was going on in their own backyard.16
A better bet, the Government reasoned, was to pin its faith on Captain Terence O’Neill, who had been elected as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in 1963, the year before Wilson came to power. There were good reasons for thinking that the strategy would work. O’Neill was a reformer and, in 1967, had even entertained the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Jack Lynch, at Stormont, facing down the wrath of the Reverend Ian Paisley, the Protestant fundamentalist preacher who denounced him from pulpit and platform as a traitor prepared to sell Ulster to the Irish Republic and the Pope. With the right encouragement, the Wilson Government surmised, O’Neill would lead Ulster into the light and the new era of equality the second half of the twentieth century demanded. But be it from ignorance or negligence, no realistic appraisal was made in London of the powerful forces ranged against O’Neill on his own home ground, not only from the legendary lungs of his arch enemy, Paisley, but from within his own Ulster Unionist Party. Paisley articulated what many Protestants felt, although not all were prepared to admit it.
It was only a matter of time before the explosion came. 1968 was the year of change as 1848 had been the year of revolution in the previous century. In America, blacks marched for civil rights fired by the powerful oratory of Dr Martin Luther King; in France and Germany, students took to the streets for a variety of causes, more for what they were against than what they were for; and in England, anti-Vietnam protests culminated in the violence of Grosvenor Square. The Rolling Stones’ anthem ‘Street Fighting Man’ seemed to sum up the mood of the time. Nor was Northern Ireland immune to the spirit that defied authority and demanded change. Catholics led by a new generation of articulate and charismatic young leaders, from John Hume to Bernadette Devlin, insisted on equality of treatment and an end to their status as second-class citizens. In 1968, the civil rights movement was born, a mirror of its American counterpart and a reflection of the same issues. It even imported its anthem, ‘We Shall Overcome’. Young Catholics, many now first-generation university students, had found a voice and leadership. Some Protestants too marched alongside them to show the world that civil rights was not a sectarian issue. Many of these protests across Europe and America provoked violence as demonstrators encountered state forces that were either resistant to change or insistent on maintaining law and order. In Northern Ireland, civil rights marchers clashed with the police. The Royal Ulster Constabulary and the ‘B’ Specials were arms of the Protestant state and as such were called upon to meet the challenge to the legally constituted authority of the Stormont Government.
Most unionists simply saw the civil rights movement as an IRA front. There is no doubt the IRA was involved in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) but it was not the driving force behind it. By then the IRA had changed tactics following the humiliation of its recent border campaign, known as ‘Operation Harvest’. It began in 1956 with the bold declaration that this generation would be the one to free Ireland from the British and ended ignominiously in 1962 with an order to dump arms. The harvest was blighted. There was no decommissioning. Casualties were remarkably light. Only eight IRA men and six RUC officers were killed. Most of the IRA leaders had spent most of the campaign behind bars because internment had been introduced by both the Stormont and Dublin Governments. The campaign failed not just because of internment but because it never got beyond the border: the IRA had negligible support in urban areas and partition had long ceased to be a popular rallying cry. ‘Operation Harvest’ ended with a defiant statement from the IRA’s ruling body, the Army Council, that future generations would carry on the fight. In the wake of the campaign’s failure, the Marxists in the IRA gained the upper hand over the traditionalists, who advocated the use of physical force, and revolutionized IRA strategy, arguing that it was necessary to adapt to changing times.
The new Chief of Staff, the Dubliner Cathal Goulding, was realistic about the IRA’s prospects. ‘The notion that the IRA was going to rise up some day and free Ireland and get rid of the British was a ridiculous pipedream for the simple reason that we never had the support of the people No
rth and South to do it.’17 Although the IRA’s Army Council did not rule out for ever the use of physical force to achieve its historic goal, it decided to concentrate on political agitation and mobilization of the masses in the hope of undermining the state in the North and gaining support in the South for its left-wing policies. It reasoned that with its arms now removed from the equation, support would flow to an IRA that had become a revolutionary political party, above all supporting the legitimate demands of the North’s nationalist minority. But to unionists, it was still the IRA whatever its peaceful protestations. They claimed that the violence that erupted was orchestrated by the IRA whereas the reality was that IRA members acted as stewards on many of the marches to prevent not promote violence.
As the civil rights movement gained strength through 1968, most people in the rest of the United Kingdom were probably only dimly aware of what was happening on the other side of the Irish Sea. The Wilson Government too remained on the Westminster sidelines, watching and assuming that its liberal champion, Terence O’Neill, would respond to the challenge and introduce the reforms the demonstrators were demanding – one man, one vote and an end to discrimination. All would then live happily ever after. But it was not to be. O’Neill may have been a liberal in Northern Ireland unionist terms but his party certainly was not. For most, compromise was not a word in their vocabulary.
Then, on 5 October 1968, the rest of the United Kingdom suddenly woke up to what was happening on its doorstep. Television news brought dramatic images into millions of living rooms of the violence that flared during a civil rights march in Derry. Scenes of policemen charging into what appeared to be a peaceful crowd of demonstrators and batoning them over the head were shocking at the time and still appear shocking today. The image of the nationalist Gerry Fitt, the Westminster MP for West Belfast, holding his bleeding head seemed to say it all. Here was a Catholic Member of Parliament being beaten by what appeared to be a sectarian Protestant police force in part of the United Kingdom. Although these images were a propaganda gift for the demonstrators as they showed the state to be the repressive instrument they had always maintained it was, they increased unionist pressure on Terence O’Neill and the Stormont Government to resist and restore law and order to the province’s streets.