by Peter Taylor
Behind the barricades, the IRA was preparing not to drive out the British but to defend the nationalist population as the 1970 Protestant marching season approached. Parades by the Orange Order and the Apprentice Boys of Derry, as recent history had all too clearly shown, were the traditional recipe for sectarian confrontation. Loyalists saw marches as an assertion of their history and identity. Catholics found them triumphalist and deeply offensive since most celebrated Protestant victories over their Catholic enemies. Each parade had its traditional route, hallowed over the years, and any attempt to change it provoked vigorous protest from the loyalists who insisted that they had the right to march the Queen’s Highway without hindrance. Any deviation ordered by the authorities was seen as capitulation to Catholics. Many of these routes passed close by or actually through nationalist areas and the refusal to accept re-routing could readily cloak the desire to cause maximum offence to their enemies. The exchange of missiles and sectarian abuse became a dangerous part of the ritual as nationalist crowds refused to be humiliated and deafened by the warlike thunder of Lambeg drums.8 In such confrontations, both sides were fuelled by sectarian hatreds that had become even more implacable in the wake of August 1969. No amount of mollification by British politicians and the British army could make them go away. The ‘Brits’ became prisoners of the problem that they had created by plantation and partition. Marching dragged the army in.
The first confrontations came in Easter week 1970 and they came on both sides. In Derry on Sunday 29 March, following the annual Commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising, a crowd attacked RUC headquarters in the city centre and tried to storm its gates. The army may not have been the enemy but to most of the 5,000 nationalists who marched that day, the RUC most certainly was. Twelve soldiers were injured in the clashes and the army sealed off the Bogside when rioting broke out. On Easter Monday, there were clashes when loyalists attacked a republican parade in Armagh that had been under the surveillance of 600 troops and 500 police.
Easter Tuesday, however, was the real turning point. It was traditionally one group of junior Orangemen’s big day out at the seaside at Bangor, a day that began early in the morning on their home turf of the loyalist New Barnsley estate that stands at the top of the Springfield Road opposite republican Ballymurphy. Ballymurphy’s residents did not welcome having their morning disturbed by the sound of the young Orangemen’s flutes and drums playing what Catholics regarded as offensive sectarian tunes, especially as loyalists had attacked the republican parade in Armagh the day before. It did not need a prophet to foretell trouble when the juniors returned home that evening.
As a precaution, the army deployed seventy Scots Guards to the Ballymurphy estate in anticipation of trouble. They were not sure what to do in the event of a riot other than keep the two sides apart. Sure enough the Ballymurphy residents were waiting to welcome the young Orangemen home with a barrage of bricks and bottles hurled from behind the line the Scots Guards had formed. A full-scale riot ensued that lasted for two hours with confused soldiers standing in the middle. The following day the army, probably with Stormont’s encouragement, decided on a show of force in the expectation that the Protestants of New Barnsley and the Catholics of Ballymurphy would pick up where they had left off the previous evening. A full battalion was deployed to Ballymurphy to show that this time the army meant business and would not tolerate such behaviour. The troops arrived with a squadron of four-wheeled Humber one-ton armoured cars with barbed-wire coils on their bumpers. Each soldier carried an SLR (self-loading rifle), riot shield and short, stubby Greener gun that fired CS gas grenades.9 They must have been a formidable and unaccustomed sight to the tightly knit community of Ballymurphy, accustomed to seeing the army as their friend. Furthermore, the decision to deploy Scottish soldiers, many of whom would have had natural Protestant sympathies, was bound to antagonize the Catholic residents who would see them as the protectors of the ‘Orangies’ of New Barnsley on the other side of the Springfield Road.
That evening, the residents of Ballymurphy redirected their missiles and animosities from their old enemy to the new. The British army was now the target. The troops, under orders to take no nonsense, did not stand there offering themselves as targets and doing nothing. When baton charges failed to scatter the increasingly fired-up crowd now armed with petrol bombs, the soldiers fired canisters of CS gas into its midst. If anything was designed to weld a crowd into one it was being drowned in a cloud of throat-choking, stomach-wrenching, eye-watering gas. The rioting continued for a second night, with the Catholic crowd now radicalized and united. As the army pushed it back into the estate, loyalists followed the soldiers, tearing down an Irish Tricolour and confirming the rioters’ conviction that the army was on the Protestant side. Significantly, the newly formed Provisional IRA did not come out to take on the army and defend its people because it was not ready.
In the two nights of intense fighting, thirty-eight soldiers were injured. The following day at a press conference, the army’s GOC, General Sir Ian Freeland, announced a new, ‘get tough’ military policy, warning that petrol bombers ‘are liable to be shot dead in the street if, after a warning, they persist’.10 Jim Callaghan’s response to the controversy that followed was simple: ‘Don’t go out with a petrol bomb.’11
In the wake of the rioting, several Protestant families left the New Barnsley estate and sought refuge in Protestant strongholds elsewhere in the city away from the sectarian interface of the upper Springfield Road. It was the beginning of a huge shift in population that was said to be the biggest displacement of peoples since the end of the Second World War, defining ever more sharply the sectarian divisions of the city. Areas in which Catholics and Protestants lived together were to become a thing of the past. Territory was everything and many of the confrontations in the years ahead revolved around the holding or seizing of it. The Ballymurphy riots of Easter 1970 could be described as the starting point of the ‘war’. The Provisional IRA now had an enemy and the beginning of support from sections of the nationalist community for driving the ‘Brits’ from Northern Ireland.
The Provisionals may not have been ready at Easter when the sounds of Protestant flutes and drums began, but they were by the end of June when the serious Orange marching began. By this time there had been a British general election on 18 June 1970 which the Conservatives had won. In the Northern Ireland constituencies, Ian Paisley and Bernadette Devlin had both been elected to Westminster; in Ms Devlin’s case, re-elected after her victory in the Mid-Ulster by-election in April the previous year. Edward Heath entered Downing Street as Harold Wilson left. Wilson, having largely ignored Northern Ireland through most of the sixties, had been forced to react to events to halt the slide into anarchy triggered by the force of history and his own Government’s neglect. By the time he acted, the moment had passed. Heath’s Cabinet inherited a problem that it too did not know how to solve. The Conservative Defence Minister, Lord Carrington, told me several years later that he was new in office when the subsequent crisis hit him and did not know a great deal about Northern Ireland. On the face of it, it seemed simply a problem of law and order. If that could be restored, the Government probably reasoned, the reform programme would have the desired effect and in time the situation would settle down, although Ministers were not naïve enough to believe that Catholics and Protestants would live together happily ever after.
The new Government’s learning curve was steep. A week after Heath’s victory, there was an ominous warning in Derry that the IRA was gearing up for a new campaign. On 26 June, three middle-aged IRA men who were leading republicans in the city, Thomas McCool, Joseph Coyle and Thomas Carlin, died in a premature explosion whilst making up a bomb in a council house on the nationalist Creggan estate. McCool’s two daughters, aged nine and four, were upstairs in bed and died in the subsequent blaze.12 In Belfast the IRA were getting ready too, now with guns, many of them retrieved from dumps where they had been left after previous campaigns, in particular so
uth of the border. At that time, the word ‘decommissioning’ had never been heard.
Saturday 27 June 1970 was the day when the Provisional IRA first went into action ‘in defence’ of their community. Tension had already been building as it was the first big day of the serious Protestant marching season that begins with a series of parades that are warm-ups for the grand finale in Belfast on 12 July. That morning the city echoed to the sound of loyalist bands as Orange Lodges all over the city got ready for the parade. The main march was scheduled to go from the assembly point on the Shankill onto the Springfield Road – where the army had taken on the Ballymurphy rioters that Easter – and past the Clonard area and the charred ruins of Bombay Street burned out by loyalists in 1969. The route was bound to stoke the tension, skirting as it did the scene of the loyalist ‘pogrom’ the previous summer, but neither Chichester-Clark nor the new Conservative Government was minded to ban or re-direct the parade. For Chichester-Clark to have done so would have undermined his position, and for the Government to have overruled him would have meant destabilizing Chichester-Clark. The last thing Edward Heath wanted was to see his Northern Ireland Prime Minister toppled at this delicate moment. Heath had only been in office a week and losing a Prime Minister would not have been a very good start. The new Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, who found it tiresome to deal with such implacable enemies, chose the lesser of two evils and did not intervene.
As a result 5,000 Orangemen marched past the Clonard with an unsurprising result. Nationalists broke up lumps of road metal from a nearby building site and hurled them at the Orangemen who, like the band of the Titanic, played on.13 The rioting quickly spread to Ballymurphy further up the Springfield Road and the army fired CS gas canisters into the estate as it had done before. Later that afternoon, another Orange parade sparked even greater violence as it marched down the Crumlin Road, the interface between the Shankill and Ardoyne, and past the burned-out houses in Hooker Street that had been torched by loyalist mobs the previous August. Missiles were exchanged between the two opposing crowds but now for the first time the Provisional IRA brought out its guns. Three Protestants were shot dead, Alexander Gould (18), William Kincaid (28) and Daniel Loughlins (32). Martin Meehan, by now a senior Provisional IRA leader in Ardoyne at the time, claimed that the loyalists fired first. ‘The IRA had proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what they said they were going to do [defend the people], they had done it,’ he told me. ‘As a result, the whole broad spectrum of the nationalist people actually supported what the IRA was doing. Every man, woman and child came out and supported us in any way possible. I never saw support like it in my life. It was unbelievable.’14
Even allowing for Meehan’s hyberbole, there is no doubt that that day marked a turning point for the fledgling Provisional IRA, and not just in Ardoyne. Later that evening, the IRA went into action again across the River Lagan in the Protestant stronghold of East Belfast in defence of the 6,000 nationalists who lived in the small nationalist enclave of Short Strand surrounded by 60,000 loyalists. Again, the circumstances in which a gun battle arose are disputed. It is said that tempers rose when a Tricolour was flown as an Orange band returned home along the Newtownards Road, the spine of loyalist East Belfast, dominated by the great cranes of the Harland and Wolff shipyard. Nationalists say loyalists then attacked them and loyalists say it was the other way round. The outcome is not in dispute. St Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church that stands on the edge of Short Strand and the Newtownards Road became the focus of the battle as it came under loyalist petrol bomb attack. Billy McKee and a handful of Provisionals from West Belfast crossed the Lagan river to join local auxiliaries in defending their people and their church. The army had sent a token force across to try to stop the fighting but did not have the resources to deploy enough troops as by now there was rioting all over Belfast and the army was stretched to the limit. The GOC, General Sir Ian Freeland, dispatched a platoon to Short Strand but it is said it was prevented from getting down the Newtownards Road by a loyalist mob.15
For whatever reason, the soldiers did not or were not able to intervene, once again fuelling Catholics’ perception that the army was on the Protestants’ side. The shooting around the church lasted for five hours and, according to McKee, the Provisionals fired 800 rounds. McKee said he knew because the IRA quartermaster subsequently told him.16 McKee was badly wounded and one of the local auxiliaries, Henry McIlhone, was shot dead. ‘All I heard was a clump, like a wet log hitting the ground,’ McKee told me. ‘It was like a big tree falling. I knew he was hit when he went down. He never said a word. He was hit in the throat. He was taken to hospital but he died that night.’17 The Provisionals killed two Protestants, Robert Neill (38) and Robert McCurrie (34). ‘It was the Provisionals’ first battle,’ said McKee. The defence of St Matthew’s became an IRA legend and Billy McKee a folk hero. Now, the Provisionals claimed, when loyalists attacked nationalist areas, the IRA were there to defend them and they had five notches on their guns to prove it.
The cost of that weekend was high. Six people were dead, five of them killed by the IRA. It was the worst weekend of violence that Belfast had seen. The city had seemed to be in flames with the fire services, called to more than a hundred blazes, as over-stretched as the army. With a scorecard that said IRA five, loyalists one, it was not surprising that Protestant blood was up, with unionists demanding to know why the army had not been able to cope. The province’s Security Committee, whose core was the GOC, the Chief Constable, Stormont Ministers and the UK Representative, met on the Monday morning to survey the wreckage. They agreed on one thing: Northern Ireland was back to Square One. Ronald Burroughs, the UK Representative who had succeeded Oliver Wright and who had tried in vain to persuade Reginald Maudling to re-route the main march away from the highly sensitive Catholic areas, described the Home Secretary’s inaction as ‘the greatest single mistake I have ever seen’.18
The following day, Maudling paid his first visit to the province for meetings with the province’s Security Committee, Chichester-Clark’s Cabinet, nationalist political leaders, churchmen and trade unionists. The army was not impressed. One officer at its Lisburn headquarters described Maudling’s response to what he had seen and heard. ‘He sat in my office with his head in his hands and said, “Oh, these bloody people! How are you going to deal with them?” “Well,” I said, “Home Secretary, we are not going to deal with them. It’s you – your lot who have to deal with them. We have got to have a policy.” But we never did have a policy. That was the problem.’19 Maudling returned to the security and certainty of home the following day. His despair was clear on the flight back. ‘For God’s sake, bring me a large Scotch,’ he is reported to have said. ‘What a bloody awful country.’20
To unionists, the weekend had been a disaster because the army had not been tough enough. The Provisional IRA had flexed its muscles, killed five Protestants, and got away with it. At St Matthew’s Church, the unionist nightmare had come true and there had been no ‘B’ Specials to banish it. The pressure on Chichester-Clark from the right-wingers in his Cabinet was intense. Although the army was under the control of the GOC, constitutionally it was there in support of the civil power and therefore could be used at the civil power’s request. So far the army had simply reacted to events. Now Stormont wanted it to take the initiative and show that it meant business. Lawlessness and the IRA would not be tolerated. A show of force was needed and at the earliest opportunity. The policy was endorsed by the newly elected Conservative Government.
The opportunity for a show of strength came sooner than most had anticipated. As the following weekend approached, Maudling told the Westminster parliament, to cheers from both sides of the House, that the rule of law and not the rule of the gun would be maintained.21 He gave that assurance on Friday 3 July 1970. A few hours later an arms find in the Lower Falls Road set in motion a chain of events that was to drive many Catholics in the nationalist heartlands of Belfast into the waiting arms of both the Provision
al and Official IRA.
Around tea-time soldiers of the Royal Scots sealed off Balkan Street following a tip-off that there were arms in one of the houses. They found half a dozen pistols, an old German Schmeisser sub-machine gun and some explosives and ammunition. An angry crowd gathered, and as soldiers tried to withdraw and get back into their armoured personnel carriers, one of them reversed into 36-year-old Charles O’Neill and killed him. It was subsequently referred to by an army officer as ‘a traffic accident’.22 O’Neill had once served with the RAF. Local reports said he had been trying to warn the army that the area was hostile and it would not be wise to go further.23 A riot began and, when the Royal Scots feared their retreat was being cut off, reinforcements were sent in to rescue them. In turn the rescuers too became besieged and fired CS gas to clear the way. As evidenced in the recent Ballymurphy riots, CS affected far more people than those against whom it was directed, floating into houses in the warren of narrow terraced streets that was the Lower Falls. Barely an hour after the arms find in Balkan Street, a full-scale confrontation developed with the crowds hurling petrol bombs and nail bombs at the confused and surrounded soldiers. More reinforcements were sent in to rescue the rescuers and chaos was the end result. The Official IRA, whose fiefdom was in the Lower Falls, saw this as an invasion and opened fire against the soldiers, some of whom had just got off the ferry from Liverpool.24 The Provisionals, not to be outgunned or outflanked by their rivals, also joined in. The army was going to get tough and provide the show of force unionists had been demanding since the humiliations of the previous weekend. This time there was to be no repetition of the fiasco of St Matthew’s Church.