by Peter Taylor
A couple of days after the riot, Ardoyne Catholics invited Major Keith round to their illegal drinking den, made him an honorary member of their Shamrock Club and presented him with a large shillelagh as the Saviour of Ardoyne. When he arrived back for his next tour in Belfast in 1971, he thought he would pop into the Shamrock Club again to see how everyone was. ‘I thought it would be rather nice to go back, say I was a life member, have a drink and see old friends.’ But the Major got a reception he had not expected. ‘I went back with an escort and we were quickly told by an old well-wisher that we were no longer welcome there and that one’s life membership had been withdrawn. There were some very hard men in the pub and it was suggested that it would be probably better if we left.’ The mood had changed and not just at the Shamrock Club. ‘You could smell the atmosphere had changed completely. There was no chance of stopping on the corner for a cup of tea where you might get a bullet between the shoulder blades.’ Soldiers were no longer saviours but, to many nationalists, the forces of an occupying army. The honeymoon was over.
Chapter Three
Divorce
December 1969—July 1970
The soldiers of the 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment who came into Belfast and swept up the embers of the Shankill riot had the same experience as Major Keith and his men. They remember being hailed as heroes by the Catholics after seemingly helping to put down the Protestants on the Shankill Road. To Catholics, the army was their saviour in August and their champion in October. Dave, a lance-corporal in the battalion, remembers arriving there ‘not having a clue about Northern Ireland’ and finding the Catholics so friendly. ‘Everyone shook our hand and said, “Nice to see ya”,’ he told me. ‘They’d come round to where we were staying and drop off a crate of beer and magazines and all kinds of stuff. I felt very good that I was doing something but not understanding what was going on.’ Dave and his mate used to patrol the area alone, greeting everybody. There was never any sign of aggression or suggestion that they should not be there. A regular stop on their round was a little corner shop where they used to buy soft drinks and sweets and odds and ends. The shop was open all hours and, even when it was closed, they could knock on the door and the shopkeeper would open up and get whatever they wanted. ‘He must have thought it was Christmas. We had nothing else to do, really. It was nice to feel appreciated.’
Dave started taking out a girl from the Falls Road whilst some of his mates dated girls from the Shankill. They all used to meet up, Catholic and Protestant girls with their soldier boyfriends, in discos. There was no hassle. The bitterness of the Shankill riot seemed to have been forgotten. Some soldiers married into Falls Road families whose sons later became prominent members of the IRA. It was quite acceptable in those days and there was no shame in a Catholic girl marrying a British soldier. The battalion left Belfast in February 1970 and Dave was sorry to go. ‘The girls were sad and the people we’d met were sad too. In those few months, we’d become good friends. I think the crime rate actually went down because we were on the streets. It was a sad day. I was really looking forward to going back again.’ One of Dave’s mates graphically echoed his feelings.
It was a day of great sadness. I was leaving friends, people we knew. Leaving the girls behind was probably the saddest thing of all. They all lined up to wave goodbye. It was like the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem. I remember a hit at the time – ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’. You know, the lines about ‘packing my bags and hating to go and don’t know when I’ll be back again’. We were singing our heads off and the girls were waving and throwing their knickers at us. God bless ’em! And they were all shouting ‘We’ll wait for you!’1
When Dave returned for his second tour in September 1970, he went back to the corner shop to say hello to the shopkeeper and his wife and got the same shock as Major Keith did when he ventured back to the Shamrock Club. ‘They didn’t want to know us. They were scared that we went into their shop. They tried to be polite but basically we were shunned at the door. I felt disappointed and hurt.’ Dave tried again and called in on an old lady who used to provide him and his mate with sausages and bacon every morning between half five and six. ‘When we went back to see her, she opened the door, looked at us and you could see there was something wrong. She didn’t want to know us. She told us to go away. We weren’t what we were to her any more.’ Dave’s mates in the 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment had similar experiences when they returned for their second tour from September 1970 until May 1972. Old friends were friends no more. Mick, who had been treated like a son by a lady who gave him and his men the key to her house for rest and refreshments, was shocked when he saw her again during a riot. ‘There she was amidst the whistles and spitting and the dustbin lids! I don’t know whether she was a combatant or a rioter or whether she was there just to be seen going along with the crowd. That’s what I’d like to believe anyway. I want to remember her as I knew her because she was such a good woman.’
The reasons for the turnaround are complex and the result of forces over which few had any control. Although the arrival of the army did calm the situation and at one stage soldiers really did have reason to think they might be home by Christmas, the sectarian tensions that had led to the deployment of the army still burned hot beneath the surface. After the bloody confrontations in the frontline areas of Belfast and Derry in August 1969, the hatred both communities felt for each other intensified. The re-emergence of the IRA simply added to the potent mixture. Had one of the great ‘what ifs’ of history happened, with Westminster introducing Direct Rule and assuming total responsibility for security, the situation might have been contained and the thirty-year ‘war’ might never have got off the ground. The problem was that although the General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland (GOC), General Sir Ian Freeland, was nominally in charge of the army, it was deployed to carry out the wishes of the Stormont Government. The unionist Government continued to pursue its own law and order agenda that consisted of trying to nip the emerging IRA in the bud and cracking down hard on the community from which it came. The result was disaster.
After the so-called ‘pogrom’ in Belfast in August 1969, the graffiti ‘IRA – I Ran Away’ had appeared on walls and the seeds were sown for the split in the organization out of which the Provisional IRA, the ‘Provos’, were born. The veteran republican Joe Cahill had resigned from the IRA in 1964 in protest against its Marxist direction but reported back following the ‘pogrom’. He was given a hard time when he tried to organize a defence group in Belfast’s nationalist Ballymurphy estate. ‘I was told to get out,’ he told me. ‘I wasn’t wanted. I was a member of the IRA. The IRA had deserted them.’
Historically, the group of dissidents or IRA traditionalists like Joe Cahill became the nucleus of what evolved into the Provisional IRA. Gradually they won over the doubters like the Ardoyne’s Martin Meehan who had joined the IRA a couple of years before and described the experience of being sworn in as ‘like joining the priesthood’.2 At the time the Provisionals were being formed, there was no master plan to drive the ‘Brits’ out of the North. The grouping came together primarily with the object of making sure that if loyalists were to attack the nationalist areas of Belfast again, the IRA would be ready, trained and equipped to defend them. Nevertheless, given the historical credentials of Cahill and the veterans of the IRA’s last border campaign, the prospect of getting rid of the ‘Brits’ and fulfilling Patrick Pearse’s dream of 1916 was always a gleam in their eye. Billy McKee, who, along with Cahill, was another founder of the ‘Provos’, told Martin Meehan as much when he tried to persuade him to come over to the dissidents’ side. ‘McKee outlined what his plans were,’ Meehan told me. ‘He guaranteed first and foremost that the nationalist areas would be defended at all costs and that what happened in August 1969 would never happen again. He didn’t indicate that there was going to be an immediate offensive against the British army. He said, “These things take time. People have to be trained. People have to be moti
vated. People have to be equipped. All this won’t just happen overnight.” But the intention was there and it sounded good to me.’3 Meehan promptly switched sides.
It was only a matter of time before the divisions in the Republican Movement – the IRA and Sinn Fein – were formalized. The IRA split at an Extraordinary Army Convention secretly held at an isolated country village in the middle of Ireland on 28 December 1969. The pivotal figure at the Convention was Sean MacStiofáin, a prominent Southerner who had previously supported the Marxist faction under Cathal Goulding. (MacStiofáin, like many IRA veterans, had spent most of the 1950s in gaol but in his case in England in Pentonville prison. Goulding was locked up with him too after both men were sentenced following an abortive raid in 1953 on the armoury of Felsted public school in Essex. Ironically, he was actually born in England of an Irish mother and his real name was John Stevenson, a fact he did not care to be reminded about. His background probably made him an even more fervent Irish republican.) The acute differences and tensions within the IRA pained MacStiofáin and it is said that he broke down and cried at the December Convention at the prospect of a formalized split. Ostensibly the rift was ideological because Goulding and the Marxist faction wanted to change the IRA’s constitution so that it would recognize the Dublin parliament, Dail Eireann, and authorize Sinn Fein to contest elections in the South and, if elected, take up its seats. To the traditionalists, such a fundamental theological departure was anathema since Dail Eireann recognized partition. But there was another underlying and even more emotional reason for the split. The IRA in Belfast had been humiliated during the loyalist ‘pogrom’ of August 1969 when it left the nationalist enclaves undefended because Goulding and the Marxists had abandoned their guns. The traditionalists did not want that to happen again. MacStiofáin agreed with this viewpoint and said so. He left the venue and, sustaining himself with cold chicken, drove straight to Belfast to address the dissidents who had refused to attend the Convention. He knew that he could count on the support of the majority of the IRA units in the city. Having listened to MacStiofáin, the dissidents then set up their own Army Convention and ‘Provisional’ military structures. The Convention elected an Army Executive which in turn selected an Army Council with Macstiofáin as Chief of Staff.4 Thus the Provisional IRA (PIRA) was born.
A fortnight later, on 11 January 1970, Sinn Fein also split at its conference held at Dublin’s Intercontinental Hotel. The political split was formalized after Sean MacStiofáin went to the microphone and announced that he was giving his allegiance to the ‘Provisional’ IRA Army Council. In the outcry that followed, the President of Sinn Fein, Ruairi O’Bradaigh, recognizing that the dissident faction (which he supported) would not be able to win the necessary two-thirds majority to carry the day, jumped up and said it was time to leave. ‘We had to fight our way out,’ he told me. ‘It was all very, very tense and very highly charged. So we made our way to another venue and elected a caretaker Sinn Fein Executive to carry on and reorganize the country.’5 The historic split in the Republican Movement was now complete with two opposing factions of the IRA and Sinn Fein, the ‘Provisionals’ and the ‘Officials’ (the name given to those who remained loyal to Cathal Goulding and the existing IRA leadership).
Few ‘Brits’ had any idea of what was going on in the dark corners of the IRA as rival republicans struggled for supremacy. Nor, perhaps, would it have been of any great concern, as the IRA was not then deemed to be a problem. British politicians and civil servants were far more concerned to ensure that the promised reforms were being implemented by the Stormont Government. To this end, the Wilson Government appointed a United Kingdom Representative whose job it was to see that the reform programme was carried out and to ensure that there was no backsliding. His office was just down the corridor from the Northern Ireland Prime Minister’s office at Stormont. Its first occupant was Oliver Wright, who had previously been Harold Wilson’s Private Secretary. He took up residence on 26 August 1969 having just returned from being Ambassador to Denmark. Wright, famous for his vivid turn of phrase, was surprised when he got the call. ‘I was on leave having just got back and I was up a ladder with a bucket of Flash wiping the orgies of my tenants off the walls when the Foreign Office telephoned and said, “We want you to go to Northern Ireland.” I said, “How long for?” They said, “Oh, two or three months. You should be home by Christmas.” ’ Wright laughed. He knew he would not have an easy ride and feared that Britain’s commitment might be open-ended. ‘Basically, my job was to superintend the redressal of grievances. I had to draw up a list and then tick them off. I reckoned that we were doing all right. I may be totally misguided, of course. I’m an Englishman and how can an Englishman be expected to understand Ireland? But we were making progress. I’m quite sure that as time went on, the Catholic community saw the British Government as their friend, trying its best to ensure that Stormont introduced the reforms that they, the Catholic community, wanted. And we did.’6
Oliver Wright was thrown in at the deep end. The day after he arrived, he found himself escorting the Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan, on a whirlwind tour of the trouble spots. As a former Foreign Office diplomat, Wright was used to officials pressing words and ideas on the Foreign Secretary who listened sagely and then decided what to do. Life with Jim Callaghan at the Home Office was different. At Wright’s first office meeting, everyone sat around in silence waiting for the Home Secretary to speak. ‘The Home Secretary may have had an idea in the back of his mind, in which case he was keeping it to himself. He didn’t speak until he arrived at Aldergrove airport. I had done a sort of John the Baptist for him, preparing the way. I went to meet him and the whole world’s television cameras were waiting. I don’t know if he knew in advance what he was going to say but if anybody had a politician’s instinct, it was Mr Callaghan. He suddenly said, “I haven’t come here with a solution to your problems. I have come here to help you find solutions to your problems.”’ There was a great gasp from everybody. “Oh, the man’s a genius!” Suddenly Jim Callaghan was enormously popular. Wright took him on a tour of the Falls and Shankill. ‘The people of the Falls were pressing cups of tea on everyone. They were touching the hem of his garment, so grateful were they that the British army had put themselves between them and the majority community. He was the Messiah at that time.’
Callaghan went on to visit Derry the following day accompanied by Ian Burns from the Home Secretary’s private office. Bums had gone ahead as Callaghan’s advance man to make sure that the Home Secretary’s safety was assured ‘since his car had been trampled over by an overweight Paddy Devlin [a famous nationalist politician]’ during his tour of the Falls. Similar brushes with politicians – overweight or not – and their over-enthusiastic supporters had to be avoided. Burns met the young John Hume who assured him that there would be no trouble and that his master would be well looked after and welcomed. Callaghan, who had to be seen to be even-handed, also visited the unionist areas of the city where Burns remembers he was received ‘loyally and respectfully’. But the scenes in the Bogside were unrestrained. ‘It was an eye-opening experience,’ Bums recalls. ‘It was a wild, enthusiastic reception. It’s the sort of thing that one had only seen before with the Beatles and I had never experienced anything like this before at first hand.’ The crowd was shouting ‘Let me touch him!’ and ‘Help us, Jim!’ and so great was the crush and so powerful the emotion that the Home Secretary had to seek refuge in a Bogside terrace house.7 Callaghan, ever the great populist and presser of the flesh, was in his element and suddenly appeared at the upstairs window to address the crowd. His message was the same: the British Government does not have a solution to your problems but will help you find one. It was more than enough for the crowd who cheered him on. Callaghan promised to return to Northern Ireland and did so six weeks later to keep up the pressure on Stormont in carrying out its reform programme and to assure both communities that the Government was determined to ensure fair play.
By the t
ime of Callaghan’s second visit in October 1969, the army had built what became ironically known as ‘the peace line’ along the sectarian interface between the Shankill and the Falls. Its purpose was to keep the two sides apart and prevent the incursions that had led to the violent clashes the previous August. The army’s strategy was for the peace line to go up and the barricades that had sprung up to come down. It was erected like an Irish Berlin Wall but not all the barricades were dismantled since nationalists argued that they needed them for their own protection. Few ‘Brits’ knew that behind them the Provisional IRA was beginning to organize, often under the guise of Citizens’ Defence Committees, many of which simply became an IRA front. At the time there was nothing surprising or contradictory in that since defence was the Provisionals’ prime purpose. Certainly at the time the army did not regard the IRA as an enemy but more as an ally in defending nationalists from loyalist attack. In the months ahead, in the still relatively relaxed atmosphere, communication gradually developed between army officers and IRA leaders on the other side of the barricades. To the IRA at that time, loyalists were the enemy, not British soldiers. Dialogue was also a good way of gathering intelligence which later paid off. By February 1970, three of the eight extra army units that had been deployed to deal with the emergency were withdrawn and sent home. The ‘Brits’ may have thought it was all over but it was only just beginning.