by Peter Taylor
It lasted from dusk until midnight, the cease-fire deadline, but the two sides remained poles apart and Wilson had no authority to speak for the British Government. The Provisionals had probably been more encouraged than was justified by Wilson’s remarks to the House of Commons in support of a united Ireland. John Kelly, however, remembers Wilson asking a pointed question.
He puffed on his pipe in the way that he did and asked what the Republican Movement’s intention would be towards a bombing campaign on the British mainland, in the event of there being no resolution to the conflict. We gave him a non-committal answer and said we didn’t know and that it was not for us to answer that question.4
As midnight approached, Wilson tried to persuade the IRA to extend its deadline but to no avail. At 12.00 p.m. Kelly looked at his watch and said, ‘It’s too late. The cease-fire’s over. It’s started again.’ The meeting was at an end. There was nothing else to say. ‘Well, that’s it then,’ said Wilson. ‘Off we go.’
The following day, the Provisionals exploded a 200-lb bomb in the centre of Belfast, the largest in the city to date. But there was far worse to come. On 20 March 1972, Belfast was shattered by the effect of what was probably the IRA’s first car-bomb. Two hundred pounds of explosives packed in a vehicle exploded in Donegall Street, rocking Belfast city centre and killing seven people and injuring 150. There was a telephone warning but it gave the wrong location for the bomb, with the result that people were shepherded from the street where it was not, into the street where it was. Two of the dead, Ernest McAllister (38) and Bernard O’Neill (36), were respectively Protestant and Catholic policemen who had been escorting the crowd to what they thought was a place of safety. Three of the five civilians killed were dustbin men whose lorry was parked near the car bomb. The other two were pensioners.5
Two days later, Faulkner was summoned to Downing Street. The ‘Brits’ had finally decided to bite the bullet. When he walked into Heath’s study at 11 a.m. on 22 March, he was surprised to see the large figure of William ‘Willie’ Whitelaw. He had no idea that facing him was the man who was about to take over as the British Government’s first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Without ceremony, Faulkner was told that his Government was being stripped of its security powers and that, henceforth, these would rest in the hands of British Ministers. He protested that without responsibility for law and order, Stormont would have no credibility and therefore he would have no option other than to resign. Faulkner had no choice and Heath knew it. Northern Ireland’s last Prime Minister was handed the loaded gun. Faulkner and his Cabinet were finished. ‘I was shaken and horrified, and felt completely betrayed,’ he later said.6
Stormont’s suspension was all the more galling since it was one of the demands the Provisional IRA had made in its cease-fire statement. Heath announced that Direct Rule was to be ‘a fresh start’ but to unionists it was the beginning of the road towards a united Ireland into which they believed the British Government was now bent on driving them. The IRA was jubilant. The British had delivered at least one of its three demands. If they kept up the pressure, they were confident that the ‘Brits’ would deliver the other two: troop withdrawal and amnesty. The Provisionals had no doubt they had brought Stormont down, and their slogan, ‘Victory ’72’, reflected the mood. They really believed that victory was just around the corner. Martin Meehan, one of their senior commanders in Ardoyne, was confident that the slogan was true. Sinn Fein barely got a look in. It was the IRA that made the running.
Politics was a dirty word in those days. We actually believed we could drive the British army into the sea. It was raw determination, a gut feeling that if we kept up the pressure, we could do it. All the signs were that we were on the road and we had moved mountains.7
The mountain of Stormont had hitherto been immovable.
Heath’s ‘fresh start’ meant clearing the decks at Stormont Castle, the administrative hub from which the province had been run since partition, in preparation for the army of civil servants from Whitehall who were to arrive with the new Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Willie Whitelaw, to run the new Northern Ireland Office (NIO). Stormont Castle is a baronial, grey stone pile with architecture of Disneyland gothic. As the ancien regime moved out, the new rulers moved in. The familiar political faces that had been part of the fabric of Stormont Castle were banished but the officials of the Northern Ireland civil service stayed on and were amalgamated into the NIO. The ‘Brits’ needed officials who knew their way around, as most of the mainly English newcomers were woefully ignorant of the province, its people and its manners.
One of those who stayed on was a young woman called Joan Young. Joan was a loyal and faithful unionist who had worked for the Stormont Government from 1963 and latterly for Sir Harold Black, the Secretary of the Northern Ireland Cabinet. Joan had seen it all from civil rights to ‘Bloody Sunday’. She had watched two Prime Ministers, Terence O’Neill and James Chichester-Clark, come and go and now she was seeing the third, Brian Faulkner, going. She observed the new breed of English civil servants looking round the offices, checking out who would go where. Joan had had to sketch out a floor plan since she knew the layout of the building and the new arrivals did not. When they breezed into the former Cabinet Secretary’s office, a post that was no more, she winced as they blithely said ‘that will do for so-and-so’.
‘They had little or no regard for this person who was a very senior Northern Ireland civil servant,’ she told me. ‘He was God in many ways and a genuinely very, very nice man. I felt bad for him because I thought he had been demeaned in a way by these people coming in.’ Joan was admittedly concerned ‘perhaps selfishly’ for her own future but was relieved to find that there was an opening for her in the new Secretary of State’s Private Office alongside two English civil servants. ‘They wanted “a voice”,’ she said with just a hint of sarcasm, ‘a Northern Ireland voice to give a feeling of continuity.’ Joan’s beautifully articulated unionist tones softened the edge of Direct Rule. ‘My Northern Ireland voice helped, there’s no doubt about it. There would have been people who telephoned in those days and asked for me because they felt they could communicate better with a Northern Ireland person.’
But whatever the façade, there was no hiding the fact that the ‘Brits’ were now the masters ruling the Northern Ireland natives. Joan bitterly resented it. She resented their voices, their attitude and, above all, their manners. Until Stormont was made ready for its new rulers, the influx of civil servants from the motherland was accommodated in considerable style at the Culloden Hotel, nestling in some splendour along the ‘Gold Coast’ that fringes the shores of Belfast Lough. For years, the Culloden was the place to be and be seen. On special occasions, Joan and her friends would get dressed up and go there to dine.
The Culloden was, for Northern Irish people, a very special place to go. You went there for a twenty-first birthday party or an engagement party, something very special. And I can still recall quite vividly being taken there for dinner on one occasion, some months after Direct Rule, and being disgusted and quite seriously offended by the attitude of the English civil servants living there. They came down into the dining-room, which they treated very much as their own living-room, casually dressed. It was upsetting to go into the Culloden in your long skirt, having made quite an effort to get yourself dressed up, and to be confronted by these tables of people in casual sweaters and jeans and, on many occasions, perhaps reading at the table. They were not really giving any attention at all to the local people who were there for special occasions and that upset me as well. They just didn’t treat the place the way we would have liked.
Joan admits that some of the senior English civil servants, like Philip Woodfield who had moved from the Home Office to become Deputy Secretary at the NIO, were perfect gentlemen, as were senior officials with whom she subsequently worked, like Frank Cooper and Brian Cubbon. It was the middle- and lower-ranking English officials that she could not stand. But most upsetting
of all was the attitude she detected among some of the ‘Brits’ for whom Northern Ireland had become like a colonial outpost. On one occasion, Joan was having lunch at the Culloden in a group of sixteen people. She was the only Northern Irish person there. At some point there was a brief moment of silence as people paused for breath or took stock of the various conversations going on around the table.
Suddenly this silence was interrupted by a very English voice saying, ‘Oh, the trouble with the Irish is that they’re genetically inferior to the English.’ Everyone was paralysed momentarily and then they all frantically tried to engage me in conversation. It sort of passed over and after lunch, the person concerned came to me and apologized. But I didn’t really want an apology. I mean, he was saying what he thought and he wouldn’t have apologized had I not been Northern Irish and in the party. And I didn’t know how many other people in the restaurant in the Culloden heard him saying it to whom he did not apologize.
The loud, offending voice that froze the lunch party belonged to an army officer commanding a battalion in Northern Ireland. Joan declined to say who he was but implied that his apology was purely a formality. ‘He never gave me any evidence to think that he had learned from it in his subsequent behaviour,’ she said.
Civil servants were not the only Englishmen to move into Stormont Castle. Other shadowy figures slipped through its grand entrance hall and disappeared into the woodwork. They were the ‘spooks’ of MI6, MI5 and Military Intelligence. Joan used to call them the ‘funny people’. ‘Although I knew, they didn’t realize that anybody knew who they were.’ The ‘funny people’ were the nucleus of the new intelligence cell under the direction of a senior MI6 officer that was designed to put intelligence-gathering and analysis on a proper footing to counter the ever-increasing threat from the IRA.
When Direct Rule was introduced, Peter was treading the streets of Belfast and looking forward to going home at the end of a grinding four-month tour. He had just been promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel and thought his next posting would be to teach at Sandhurst and was surprised when he was told he was going to go to Stormont Castle to be the Military Assistant to the MI6 officer who was to be the first Director and Controller of Intelligence (DCI) in the province. Nor was he to have much of a break before joining the team. He was told to find himself a house in Northern Ireland, put on plain clothes and meet ‘this very high-priced chap’ on the steps of Stormont Castle the following week.
He was going to come in and assume this job which, at that stage, frankly, was badly needed. There was a sense drawn, I think, by reference to the Malayan campaign8 that what you really needed was an overall intelligence co-ordinator, and that was what we were put in to do. We were, of course, also put in to provide the Secretary of State with the political information which he required to be able to carry out his role.
This ‘political’ information was also being provided by the new DCI’s MI6 colleague, Frank Steele, who was now based at an outpost of the NIO at ‘Laneside’, a house down a leafy lane along the ‘Gold Coast’. Together, the British intelligence agencies now hoped to get a grip on things. Although there was liaison with the RUC’s Special Branch, there was no Special Branch officer on the team. What became known euphemistically as the ‘liaison staff consisted entirely of ‘true Brits’. When the new ‘top team’ was first shown its quarters in the Castle, they were not quite as expected. Peter and his colleagues were taken up a tower by one of the Castle’s staff, known as ‘blue-bottles’, who threw open the door in an expansive gesture and indicated that this was the DCI’s office. Peter was a little taken aback. ‘There were no boards on the floor at all, just bare joists. We all roared with laughter, came back down the steps and said, ‘We think you’d better get a cheap carpenter up there to nail some floorboards down and then we’ll think of occupying it.’
The ‘spooks’ in the turret and top floor of the Castle over which they spread, kept themselves to themselves and their workings restricted to a tight circle of people, all of them ‘Brits’. Highly sensitive intelligence information was marked with the classification ‘UK Eyes Only’. ‘English Eyes Only’ would have been more appropriate. ‘Northern Irish Eyes’ were strictly out of the loop. To Joan working downstairs as Assistant Private Secretary in the Secretary of State’s office, this new classification came as a surprise. She first became aware of it a couple of days into her new job when one of the ‘funny people’ came into Whitelaw’s office and handed her an envelope for the Secretary of State marked ‘UK Eyes Only’. Joan was alone at the time as the two English officials were elsewhere. She did not take any particular notice of the classification and reached for her letter opener since part of her job was to open the Secretary of State’s post. The emissary from above hit the roof.
To say he had an apoplectic fit is not an overstatement. He really nearly lost it. He said, ‘No, you cannot open that!’ And I said, ‘Why not? We open everything for the Secretary of State in this office,’ and I held onto the envelope. He said, ‘No, no, you can’t. It says “U.K. Eyes Only”.’ I said, ‘Excuse me, I live in the United Kingdom. It’s Great Britain and Northern Ireland but it is the United Kingdom. I live here and I am a civil servant and I have been vetted. I have never given anybody cause to think that I would tell anything.’ But he said, ‘No, you cannot. This is something just for the Secretary of State.’ In fact, a colleague and I, after a particularly hurtful day, looking through the bottom of an empty bottle of gin, decided that probably we only had to buy the Irish News [the nationalist daily paper] and read it the next morning to find out what was going on. In fact I was really personally very hurt by it all, the thought that there I was, working, and working jolly hard and giving total commitment and loyalty to that office and, yet, there was still this feeling amongst the English civil servants that here was someone who couldn’t be totally trusted.
The House of Commons passed the legislation formalizing Direct Rule on 30 March 1972 but, far from curbing the violence, the constitutional change added a new and sinister dimension to it. 1972 was the bloodiest year of the ‘troubles’, with 496 deaths, 106 of which were brutal sectarian killings carried out by the loyalist paramilitaries of UVF and the recently formed Ulster Defence Association (UDA).9 Direct Rule did for them what ‘Bloody Sunday’ had done for the IRA. Recruits poured in. The loyalist paramilitaries saw the suspension of Stormont as a victory for the IRA and were determined to hit back against the organization that seemed to be making all the running and forcing the British Government to bend to its will. They did so not by killing IRA members, who were difficult to identify and locate, but by attacking the community from which the IRA came, the theory being that by killing innocent Catholics, the community would put pressure on the IRA to stop. In fact, the reverse was the case since the Provisionals had initially come into being to defend nationalists from loyalist attack. But despite the loyalist ‘offensive’ against the nationalist community, it was still the Provisional IRA that was responsible for nearly half (234) of the 496 deaths.
After Direct Rule, the ‘Brits’ faced what they had always feared and tried to avoid, a terrorist war on two fronts. In what now became a steep learning curve, they were rapidly realizing that a concession to one side produced a swift and often bloody reaction from the other. They also realized that the key to ending the spiral of violence was to get the IRA to stop. If they stopped, the ‘Brits’ calculated, the loyalists would stop too: as long, that is, as the Government did not seem to be giving the IRA more of what it wanted in the desire to make it stop. Such was the British conundrum. Although in some quarters there was a military view that the IRA could still be defeated, it was not a view shared by Frank Steele of MI6 and the ‘funny people’ in the tower. ‘Some of the army thought they could be beaten, others of us thought they could not be beaten by military means and that it would require political means to beat them.’ The ‘Brits’ knew what they had to achieve. The question was how to do it.
Chapter Ten
May 1972–July 1972
By the early summer of 1972, there was increasing pressure on the IRA from within its own community, not necessarily because of what republicans called the ‘loyalist death squads’, but because people were fed up with the violence that made normal life impossible. The turning point came on 21 May when the Official IRA shot dead a young nineteen-year-old soldier, William Best, of the Royal Irish Rangers who was serving with the British army in Germany. Ranger Best’s death was different. He came from Derry’s Creggan estate and had arrived home on leave on Monday 15 May. He had never served in Northern Ireland. The following Saturday evening, he left the house to make a telephone call and never returned. His body was found on waste ground near William Street early on Sunday morning. He had been shot through the head. Many of the nationalist community in the Bogside and Creggan were outraged that a teenager and one of their own, albeit serving in the British army, had been so brutally murdered, and murdered in their name. Four days after Ranger Best’s body was found, the Official IRA declared a cease-fire in recognition that there was ‘an overwhelming desire of the great majority of all people of the North … for an end to military actions by all sides’.1 By this time, the conflict had claimed 328 lives, including 81 soldiers and 22 policemen, since 1969.