by Peter Taylor
The second hunger strike began on 1 March 1981, the fifth anniversary of the ending of special category status. I asked Sir Kenneth Stowe if he thought Bobby Sands would go through with it.
I feared he would and he did. That was what we were fearful of when we dealt with the first hunger strike. Yes, we did believe that they had the resolution to go through with this and that men would die. That was why we tried to avert it and did so on the first hunger strike. But having averted it once, I could well see that there was very, very little that anybody could do to avert it a second time. There was no room for compromise and none was sought.
From the outset Mrs Thatcher made her position clear. ‘We are not prepared to consider special category status for certain groups of people serving sentences for crime. Crime is crime. It is not political.’24 The Prime Minister meant it and stuck to it.
At first the second hunger strike failed to attract the support that had been generated by the first. On the Sunday before Sands embarked on his fast, 3,500 people turned out in West Belfast in a rally to support him. It was not a bad crowd but nothing like the 10,000 or so who had marched four months earlier. It seemed like we all had been here before. I must confess to feeling the same, not convinced that, second time around, the hunger strike would end in death. I thought it would go to the brink once again and then another compromise would be reached. We were all wrong. Few of us reckoned with the fierce determination of the hunger strikers and the steely resolve of Mrs Thatcher.
Then, suddenly, five days after Sands first refused food, there was an accident of history that was to transform the hunger strike and the future of the Republican Movement. It was neither planned nor foreseen. On 5 March 1981, Frank Maguire, the Independent republican MP for Fermanagh–South Tyrone, died. (It was Maguire’s abstention that had contributed to the fall of the Callaghan government in the crucial vote of confidence two years earlier.) In an inspired stroke of political opportunism, the Republican Movement decided to run Bobby Sands as a candidate in the by-election. After a combination of gentle persuasion and some heavy political arm-twisting, other nationalist candidates agreed to stand down to give Sands a clear run against his unionist opponent, the Fermanagh farmer Harry West, who had briefly held the seat in 1974.
The election was held on 9 April 1981, the fortieth day of Sands’s hunger strike. The result was cataclysmic. In a straight fight, Sands, the ‘H Block–Armagh’ candidate, beat West by almost 1,500 votes. The turn-out was an astonishing 86.9 per cent.25 An IRA prisoner and hunger striker had been elected to Westminster, confounding the legion of British politicians down the years who had repeatedly claimed that the IRA was a minority terrorist group whose support was based on intimidation and fear. Although the circumstances in which Sands was elected were unique and he did not stand as an IRA or even a Sinn Fein candidate, which would have put many people off, his victory came as a profound shock to the British and gave the Republican Movement a political impetus it had never dreamed of. ‘This was a beginning of a time of troubles,’ Mrs Thatcher wrote. ‘There was some suggestion, to which even some of my advisers gave credence, that the IRA were contemplating ending their terrorist campaign and seeking power through the ballot box. I never believed this.’26 In the short term, Mrs Thatcher was right. Long term, it was a different matter. Gerry Adams and those around him who had long argued that ‘armed struggle’ was never an end in itself but only a means to it, saw the election of Sands as proof that, properly harnessed, there was a vast reservoir of political support that could lead the Republican Movement on to the next phase of its ‘struggle’ against the ‘Brits’. The increasing success that Sinn Fein was to enjoy through the next two decades had its seeds in Sands’s historic victory. Hitherto Sinn Fein had been very much the junior partner in the Republican Movement, now it began to stand on equal footing with the IRA. Mrs Thatcher added a grim and prophetic postscript to Sands’s death. ‘It was possible to admire the courage of Sands and the other hunger strikers … but not to sympathize with their murderous cause,’ she wrote. ‘From this time forward I became the IRA’s top target for assassination.’27
On 5 May 1981, almost a month after his election to Westminster, Bobby Sands MP died on the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike. About 100,000 people came to his funeral – not all of them republicans – who came to pay tribute to the IRA man who, as they saw it, had laid down his life for his cause. In the last entry of his prison diary Sands wrote, ‘They won’t break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart.’28 Mrs Thatcher was unmoved. ‘Mr Sands was a convicted criminal,’ she said. ‘He chose to take his own life. It was a choice his organization did not allow to many of its victims.’29 The ‘Brits’ did not break Bobby Sands nor the nine hunger strikers who followed his example. Francis Hughes died on 12 May on the fifty-ninth day of his hunger strike; Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara (INLA) on 21 May on their sixty-first day; Joe McDonnell on 8 July on his sixty-first day; Martin Hurson on 13 July on his forty-sixth day; Kevin Lynch (INLA) on 1 August on his seventy-first day; Kieran Doherty on 2 August on his seventy-third day, less than two months after he had been elected in absentia to the Irish Parliament; Thomas McElwee on 8 August on his sixty-second day, and Michael Devine (INLA) on 20 August on his sixtieth day.
As the procession of coffins emerged from the Maze, the prisoners wondered how many more of their comrades Mrs Thatcher would let die, and the ‘Brits’ wondered how many more were prepared to. Neither side could afford to give in. After four hunger strikers had been buried with full IRA military honours, Mrs Thatcher famously poured scorn on the IRA. ‘Faced with the failure of their discredited campaign, the men of violence have chosen in recent months to play what may well be their last card.’30 The Prime Minister was wrong on two counts. The IRA was neither instigator nor manipulator of the hunger strike and the card ‘the men of violence’ played turned out to be an ace, although few at the time had any idea how decisive it would be. As the summer drew on, with ten men dead, the hunger strike finally collapsed as families, who had the legal right to intervention, began taking their sons off the strike because they believed the prisoners were dying for nothing in the face of Mrs Thatcher’s unshakeable resolution. Despite repeated attempts at mediation, ranging from the Pope’s personal emissary to the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace, no compromise could be brokered. The hunger strikers themselves were caught. For them to have accepted anything less than the ‘Five Demands’ that Bobby Sands had been prepared to die for would have been a betrayal of his sacrifice.
The hunger strike was finally and formally called off on 3 October 1981 after it had become clear that there was nothing more to be gained by men dying. A grim reality had also become clear: the more men died, the less media attention they got. In a macabre way, deaths in the Maze and IRA funerals had almost become routine. James Prior, who succeeded Humphrey Atkins as Northern Ireland Secretary on 13 September 1981, finally drew a line under it. He told me he had been sent to the province because Mrs Thatcher ‘wanted to get rid of me from London and wanted me out of the way’. He had never wanted to go to a post that was regarded as a bed of nails, but he was determined to do what he could to make a new beginning. ‘I saw the hunger strike as a great obstacle to making progress on anything else,’ he said, ‘and I didn’t think I could make political progress with the hunger strike still in operation and therefore I wanted it ended.’31 Shortly after the prisoners called off their fast, the Government made concessions on clothing, free association and loss of remission. Mrs Thatcher described the outcome as ‘a significant defeat for the IRA’.32
In the short term, the ending of the hunger strike was seen as a victory for the Iron Lady but ultimately it was a victory for the Iron Men. Within a few years, with minimum fanfare, the prisoners got all that they wanted. When almost a decade later I spent several weeks inside the H Blocks during the summer of 1990 making a BBC documentary, ‘Enemies Within’, republican and loy
alist prisoners were running their wings just like the compounds, wearing their own clothes and mixing freely together with little interference from the prison officers. They even went on to have telephones installed on the wings. The prison authorities, who had seen fifteen of their officers and a deputy-governor killed by the IRA – most of them during the ‘dirty’ protest – had no wish to trigger another confrontation nor to lose any more of their men. For their part, IRA prisoners had no wish to play the hunger strike card again and lose more of their comrades. Both sides had learned their lessons. Both sides had decided that accommodation, not confrontation, was the way forward. It was a remarkable turnaround.
Given all that had happened and all that was to come, would it not have been better for the ‘Brits’ to have let the prisoners wear their own clothes? Sir Kenneth Stowe who, with Michael Oatley and the Contact, skilfully negotiated an end to the first hunger strike, made a remarkably frank admission. ‘Probably, yes,’ he said. ‘But once the stakes are raised on both sides, it becomes very difficult. It developed its own emotional language that made it harder and harder for anyone to take a rational view on what should be done.’ The agonizing deaths of the ten hunger strikers reinvigorated the IRA and provided Sinn Fein with the launch-pad for its remarkable political rise over the next two decades. In the year 2000, when Martin McGuinness became Minister for Education in the new Government of Northern Ireland, many republicans (but by no means all of them) decided that Bobby Sands and his comrades had not died in vain.
Chapter Twenty-One
‘Firepower, Speed and Aggression’
Autumn 1982
After the series of controversial killings by the SAS in 1978, the brakes were put on the Regiment. Although the SAS carried on operating in the province, it did not kill anyone for another five years. The RUC now did the shooting. Nevertheless, the ‘shoot to kill’ allegations did not die away. The focus of them simply moved from the army to the police. In a sense, such controversy was inevitable once a decision had been made that the RUC should set up its own versions of the ‘Det’ and the SAS. The longterm strategic thinking was for the police to take over the army’s role, and if this were to happen, it was recognized that the RUC would have to develop its own specialist covert units.
The RUC’s equivalent of the ‘Det’ became known as ‘E4A’ (the letter ‘E’ being the code to signify ‘Special Branch’ in the RUC’s structure). One of those involved in setting up the new unit was ‘Paul’, the Special Branch officer who told Brendan Hughes that he had had a good run for his money when he arrested him at Myrtlefield Park in 1974. Although it was an entirely new departure for the RUC and was a direct response to the terrorist threat, such covert units were already being used by other mainland police forces, like the Metropolitan Police, and forces in other parts of the world, primarily against organized crime and drug traffickers. ‘Paul’ and his colleagues clocked up many miles studying how it was done outside the United Kingdom. ‘Paul’ also exchanged ideas with the Garda Siochána who were thinking along the same lines. This was possible because, unlike in times past, the Garda and the RUC now had ‘a good working relationship’.
Undercover E4A operators were trained at the SAS main base in Hereford and other locations by experienced ‘Det’ and SAS instructors. For policemen, selection and training was almost as rigorous as it was for soldiers. They were about to run the same risks and therefore could not be expected to be any less prepared. ‘Paul’ recognized that his new recruits initially had an advantage: the IRA knew about the ‘Det’ but not about E4A. ‘They were looking so much in one direction that they were ignoring Special Branch which gave us a breather over those years,’ he said. ‘We learned too from the “Det’s” evolutionary mistakes.’ He described the new E4A operators as ‘absolutely fantastic, very brave and very effective’. All were Special Branch officers. They were also trained to use the technical resources of the ‘Det’: ‘cameras, lenses and covert photography’.
The RUC’s equivalent of the SAS was known as Headquarters Mobile Support Unit (HMSU) and also made up of Special Branch officers. Its officers underwent the same rigorous training as their E4A colleagues, in particular being instructed by the SAS on how to confront armed terrorists with ‘firepower, speed and aggression’. Acting on intelligence from their Special Branch colleagues, MI5 and military intelligence agents, these new undercover police units working alongside the ‘Det’ and the SAS were designed to be the cutting edge in the covert response of the ‘Brits’ to the IRA’s renewed offensive in the wake of the hunger strike.
As ‘Paul’ recognized, the clear lessons of the mistakes of 1978 – epitomized by the SAS killing of young John Boyle in the graveyard – had been learned. In future such complex anti-terrorist operations had to be carefully co-ordinated to avoid the fatal errors of the past. ‘The problems that had developed showed that the police had to play a controlling part in the decision-making process, in the planning and execution of the operations right to the end,’ he said. The result was the establishment of Tasking and Co-ordinating Groups (TCGs), under the control of the RUC, and based on the three ‘Det’ areas that covered the whole of the province, TCG Belfast, TCG South and TCG North. Co-ordination was the key. During the critical stage of any operation, the TCG office would be packed with the representatives from Special Branch, E4A, the HMSU, ‘Det’, military intelligence, SAS and MI5 – with all eyes fixed on huge blow-up maps on the wall around which players (the ‘Brits’ and the IRA or their loyalist equivalents) were moved around like pieces in a giant, real-time game.
In the autumn of 1982, the TCG and its operational arm on the ground, the HMSU, were involved in three shooting incidents that were to become amongst the most controversial in the conflict. Six men died at the hands of the HMSU in confrontations that would previously have been the preserve of the SAS, and provoked republican and nationalist allegations of ‘RUC death squads’. In one incident at Mullacreevie Park in Armagh, two members of the INLA, Seamus Grew (31) and Roddie Carroll (22), were shot dead. Neither was armed. In another at Tullygally Road East outside Lurgan, three IRA men, Eugene Toman (21), Sean Burns (21) and Gervaise McKerr (31), were killed. Again, none of them was armed. In the third incident at Ballynerry Road North, again near Lurgan, a seventeen-year-old youth, Michael Tighe, was shot dead in a hayshed where some old rifles were found without ammunition. Tighe was not involved in the IRA. The ‘hayshed’ shooting became the most controversial of the three incidents and its repercussions echoed through the decade. All were subsequently investigated by the Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, John Stalker, and gave rise to what became widely known as the Stalker ‘Shoot to Kill’ inquiry.1
As Chief Constable Hermon noted, compared with the bloody years that preceded it, 1982 had been ‘relatively peaceful’ in Northern Ireland.2 It was otherwise in England where the IRA had learned from the experience of its intermittent mainland campaign that, in terms of impact, one bomb in London was worth a dozen in Belfast. In the summer of1982, it planted two in the nation’s capital. On 20 July, the IRA almost replicated its ‘success’ at Warrenpoint with remote-control bombs that killed four Guardsmen of the Household Cavalry in Hyde Park en route to ceremonial duties in Whitehall and seven Royal Green Jackets bandsmen who were giving a lunchtime concert in Regent’s Park. Whereas the names of the victims tend to be forgotten except by their families and loved ones, the name of Sefton, the horse that fought to survive the terrible carnage, lived on in the public mind, the recipient of thousands of messages and gifts, almost as a symbol of defiance against the IRA.3
However, as Hermon went on to record, by the autumn of 1982, the IRA and the INLA were ‘hell-bent on stepping up their activities’ in the province in intense ‘terrorist competition’.4 Between September and the beginning of December, the IRA killed six RUC officers, one former policeman, three soldiers, one former UDR man, one civilian and Lenny Murphy, the leader of the UVF’s notorious ‘Shankill Butchers’. In the sa
me period, the INLA out-killed its IRA rival by accounting for the deaths of thirteen soldiers, two policemen and ten civilians. The INLA’s greater death toll was the result of one incident on 7 December when eleven soldiers, most of them from The Cheshire Regiment, and six civilians were killed in a bomb attack on the Droppin Well Bar, a pub in Ballykelly near Derry used by many off-duty army personnel. The INLA had strategically placed a small 5-lb bomb under a support pillar which brought the ceiling of the function room crashing down on the crowded dance floor during a disco. With seventeen people dead, the Droppin Well bomb caused one of the highest death tolls in the conflict.5
As the killings escalated during those bloody autumn months, demands for the ‘Brits’ to make a decisive military response mounted. The prime target for the intelligence services and their operational arms was the INLA gunman Dominic ‘Mad Dog’ McGlinchey, who since his days with Francis Hughes in South Derry had been expelled from the Provisionals for ‘indiscipline’ and defected to the INLA. He later admitted to having killed thirty people. ‘I like to get in close to minimize the risk for myself,’ he said.6 McGlinchey was alleged to have ordered the Droppin Well bombing and became the most wanted man in Ireland, as his former Provisional associate Francis Hughes had once been. Because McGlinchey was based across the border and only came North for a ‘hit’, it was difficult to keep him under surveillance, so the ‘Det’ did the next best thing and latched on to an INLA associate, Seamus Grew, who was already being watched.