There was more. Just hours after Mountbatten’s death, the IRA struck again, detonating a gigantic fertilizer bomb as a British Army convoy was passing Narrow Water Castle near Warrenpoint, County Down. Six men of the Parachute Regiment were killed, but as reinforcements rushed to the scene they were walking into a trap. Half an hour later, another bomb killed twelve more soldiers who had set up a base in a gatehouse across the road, just as the IRA had anticipated. The future General Sir Mike Jackson, then a company commander, recalled seeing the grass verge littered with ‘red flesh … torsos, limbs, heads, hands and ears’. Jackson was asked to identify one friend from the remains of his face, which had been ripped off his skull by the blast and was found by divers in the Newry River. The body of the commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel David Blair, had been completely destroyed. All that was left was one epaulette.17
Coming on the same day, the murder of the Queen’s beloved cousin and the horrific ambush at Warrenpoint were a terrible shock to British pride. The symbolism of Mountbatten’s death, in particular, could hardly have been more powerful: the former master of British India, blown to pieces in an Irish fishing boat. In a statement suffused with ghoulish glee, the IRA claimed to have taken revenge for the British ‘oppression of our people and torture of our comrades’, and boasted that they would ‘tear out their sentimental, imperialist heart’. The next day’s newspapers were apoplectic. The IRA, said the Mirror, were the ‘enemies of man … the enemies of civilisation’. ‘THESE EVIL BASTARDS’, said the front page of the Express, mourning ‘Britain’s blackest day in Ireland for a decade’. Mountbatten, the paper said, had ‘personified the greatest qualities of the British – courage and nobility. He was, above all, a very gallant gentleman … By killing him, the Irish terrorists have struck at the very heart of Britain.’ But the Express, like other papers, remained defiant. ‘They grossly underestimate the British people if they think they will ever attain their wicked purposes by these foul means … Irish unity will never be brought about by bombs and bullets.’18
Mrs Thatcher was deeply shaken by what happened on 27 August. Two days later, she flew to Northern Ireland. After a brief walkabout in Belfast, where Protestant passers-by told her she should bring back hanging, she took an army helicopter to Crossmaglen, South Armagh, in the heart of so-called ‘Bandit Country’. There, in a gesture calculated to show the troops she was on their side, she pointedly put on a flak jacket of the Ulster Defence Regiment. A few minutes later, her host, Brigadier David Thorne, placed the Warrenpoint colonel’s epaulette on the table beside her. ‘This, Prime Minister, is all that is left of Colonel Blair,’ he said. At the end, he said quietly: ‘I would now like briefly to come back to the human factor. David Blair has a son. I have a son’ – and then broke off, unable to continue.
It was the kind of dramatic gesture Mrs Thatcher always appreciated. And even at this stage, only a couple of months into her premiership, she was completely at home with the soldiers, ‘her boys’, as she called them. Years later, one officer remembered her charging in like a ‘blue tornado’, greeting the men with real enthusiasm, offering them ‘very strong words of encouragement’ and telling them ‘how determined she was to defeat terrorism as best she possibly could’. They had heard it all before, of course, but rarely had anyone said it with such conviction. Afterwards, the British commander in Northern Ireland told her that her visit had been a ‘tremendous boost to all my soldiers … As a result of your personal interest, we are all full of hope for the future.’19
Despite the horror of Warrenpoint, the security situation was actually better than it had been for years. Since 1976 the Callaghan government had been pursuing a successful ‘criminalization’ strategy, treating the conflict as a containable campaign against criminal gangs. With the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) taking the lead and the British Army moving back from the firing line, fewer soldiers were dying. By the time Mrs Thatcher took over, people no longer talked of Northern Ireland as Britain’s Vietnam. Meanwhile, Callaghan’s pugnacious Northern Ireland Secretary, the former miner Roy Mason, had been giving the IRA a ferocious beating. In effect, Mason allowed the RUC to be as aggressive as they liked, as long as they got results. Catholics complained that he was turning a blind eye to torture, and an Amnesty report claimed that prison officers were licensed to abuse their republican inmates. But Mason’s methods seemed to work. Arrests were up; bombings and casualties were down. With the authorities taking such a hard line, loyalist recruitment virtually dried up. And Mason made no apology for ‘being as tough as I could be’. ‘Words cannot express the disgust I felt’, he wrote, listing the IRA’s atrocities, ‘when the people responsible for such evils bleated about the alleged erosion of their human rights.’20
To the IRA, who saw themselves as freedom fighters, the Callaghan government’s decision to treat them like common criminals seemed an intolerable affront. In particular, they were outraged that in 1976 the authorities had scrapped ‘political status’ for convicted terrorists. Until then, republicans and loyalists had been treated as prisoners of war, incarcerated in old Nissen huts at the disused Long Kesh air base, where they were free to wear their own clothes and answered to their commanding officers. But under the new regime they were treated as common-or-garden thugs and killers. The barbed wire compounds were replaced by purpose-built ‘H-blocks’,fn1 while Long Kesh was renamed HM Prison Maze. Above all, IRA prisoners were expected to wear prison uniforms and undertake prison work, just like everybody else.21
In September 1976 the first IRA prisoner convicted under the new guidelines, a teenage carjacker called Kieran Nugent, refused to wear a prison uniform and spent three years naked under a blanket instead. Other IRA prisoners followed his example, launching what became known as the ‘blanket protest’. In March 1978 this escalated into a ‘dirty protest’ when prisoners refused to leave their cells to wash and use the toilets, claiming that they were being beaten by the warders. Eventually they ended up using chamber pots and smearing their own excrement on the walls, which inevitably ensured horrified coverage in the media. The Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, Tomás Ó Fiaich, an ardent republican, told the press that with their ‘stench and filth’ the H-blocks reminded him of the ‘sewer pipes in the slums of Calcutta’. Even Mason admitted that ‘the image of prisoners naked in their cells with nothing for company but their own filth’ was hugely embarrassing. But to give in would ‘appal the law-abiding majority in Northern Ireland’ and hand ‘the IRA its biggest victory in years’. ‘Whatever happened,’ Mason wrote, ‘I was determined not to budge. The prisoners were criminals and as far as I was concerned would always be treated as criminals.’22
Having inherited Mason’s policy in 1979, Mrs Thatcher was determined to stick to it. As Humphrey Atkins assured his colleagues, there would be ‘no return to special category status for terrorist prisoners’. But the prisoners’ frustration was growing. In January 1980 they published what they called ‘the Five Demands’: the right not to wear prison uniform, the right not to do prison work, the right to associate freely with other prisoners, the right to a weekly visit and letter, and the restoration of remission lost through the protest. The demands had been designed to look as reasonable as possible, with nothing overtly sectarian. But Atkins, like Mason, refused to budge. So, in October, seven prisoners announced that they were beginning a hunger strike to win back their political status. The government dismissed them as tools of the IRA. In reality, the IRA leadership had strongly opposed a hunger strike, believing it would end in disastrous failure. But the shared experience of prison had given the men in the Maze a close-knit identity of their own. ‘By that stage,’ one told the BBC’s Peter Taylor, ‘the comradeship had built up so much that this had become totally our world … So the IRA had to go along with it.’23
Hunger strikes had a sacred place in Irish history. The figure of the Irish martyr suffering in a British prison had long played a central part in republican iconography. The revolutionary Thomas Ashe
had died on hunger strike in British captivity in 1917; so had the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, in 1920. From the start, however, Mrs Thatcher and her ministers were adamant that they would never abandon the principle that terrorists were criminals, not prisoners of war. At a Cabinet meeting on 23 October, just before the strike was due to start, they agreed that the prisoners could wear approved ‘civilian-type clothing’. But even though Atkins warned that there would be deaths by Christmas, they also agreed that under ‘no circumstances’ would IRA prisoners regain their political status. In this, as so often, the tone was set by the Prime Minister. ‘I want this to be utterly clear,’ Mrs Thatcher told the Commons. ‘The Government will never concede political status to the hunger strikers.’24
At first it seemed that her intransigence had won the day. Although the seven hunger strikers maintained their fast for an agonizing fifty-three days, none of them died. Instead, they settled for a deal, concocted in great secrecy using existing channels between MI5 and the Provisional IRA, under which all prisoners in Northern Ireland would wear the approved ‘civilian-type clothing’ during the day and their own clothes during family visits. If nothing else, the deal, approved by Mrs Thatcher, gives the lie to her claim that she never negotiated with terrorists. She did; though always through secret intermediaries, never directly.
On 18 December the prisoners called off the strike. At the Northern Ireland Office, Atkins’s officials congratulated themselves that victory had been down to the government’s ‘firmness of purpose’, as well as to the fact that ‘the seven hunger strikers just did not have the will to die’. But victory proved short-lived, because within weeks the settlement was breaking down. The problem was that the deal was not quite what the hunger strikers had been led to believe. They had been told that the British had caved in. Yet the government had not accepted any of their Five Demands, and especially not their claim to political status. Even the deal about clothes was not quite what they had originally imagined, since they wanted their own clothes, not clothes approved by their British oppressors.25
Eventually, after weeks of argument, the Maze authorities agreed that the prisoners’ families could bring in their own clothes. But the authorities were not prepared to hand them over until the IRA men agreed to end their dirty protests, move into clean cells and make themselves available for work, like ordinary criminals. And by the end of January 1981 the prisoners’ patience had run out. ‘The Brits’, one said, were ‘intent on humiliating us once again’. On 7 February the Sinn Fein newspaper published a statement from the protesters’ leader in the Maze, Bobby Sands, announcing a new hunger strike to begin on the first day of March. They had ‘had enough’, the statement said, ‘of British deceit and of broken promises’. This time, though, the strike would be staggered, with men joining it every few weeks. The first would be Sands himself. And this time, he told his friend Gerry Adams, he was ‘prepared to die’.26
At first the news that the men in the Maze had resumed their hunger strike provoked surprisingly little comment. As the BBC’s Peter Taylor subsequently wrote, most reporters assumed this latest campaign would end in another deal. But ‘all of us’, he went on, ‘underestimated Mrs Thatcher’. She knew that, this time, Bobby Sands and his comrades were intent on martyrdom. But on a brief visit to Northern Ireland, just four days into his fast, she made her position absolutely clear. ‘We will not compromise on this,’ she told an audience in Belfast. ‘There will be no political status.’ And when an interviewer pressed her the next day, she was even more obdurate. ‘I am deeply sorry there is another hunger strike,’ she said. ‘It is to try to achieve political status for criminals. It will never achieve that status … Murder is criminal. Violence is criminal. It will stay that way. That hunger strike will achieve nothing.’27
In Bobby Sands, however, Mrs Thatcher found an antagonist whose determination more than matched her own. Born into a working-class Catholic family in 1954, Sands had grown up in the violent Rathcoole estate, where his family were harassed by loyalist gangs. After joining the Provisional IRA as a teenager, he was imprisoned in 1973 for armed robbery. In prison he fell under the influence of Gerry Adams and learned Irish; on his release in 1976, he resumed his role in the IRA. That October he joined five other Provos in blowing up a furniture showroom, but was caught and was sent back to prison. By this time, special category status had been abolished, and Sands threw himself into the blanket and dirty protests. He was a keen autodidact, who used his time in prison to read Irish history and write articles for republican newspapers. He also became a great poetry enthusiast, specializing in maudlin verses written on toilet paper and hidden up his rectum. His supporters saw him as a romantic hero, an idealistic outlaw with a heart of gold. But as the historian Richard English remarks, the image of the ‘prisoner-scholar’ may be a bit oversold. In 1979 Sands sent a fan letter to the Irish writer Ethna Carbery, urging her to write a poem in support of their campaign. Unfortunately, she had been dead since 1902.28
Although Sands was a man of immense resolve, his greatest asset was his apparent ordinariness. The only widely circulated photograph of him, taken a few years earlier, showed a grinning young man with long brown hair, who looked ‘more like a drummer in a rock band than a ruthless terrorist’. From the IRA’s perspective, this image, allied to the fact that Sands had never personally killed anyone, made him the ideal front man. And just four days into his hunger strike, fate handed him an extraordinary opportunity. On 5 March the independent republican MP Frank Maguire, who represented Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died of a heart attack. Although the Provisionals had always set their face against participation in British electoral politics, this was too good a coincidence to ignore. With other Catholic candidates encouraged to pull out, the field was clear for Sands to stand under the ‘Anti-H-Block’ banner, even though he had no connection with the constituency, was still on hunger strike in the Maze and had no intention of taking his seat, even if he had been able to do so.
Everybody knew the result would be tight, since the voters of Fermanagh and South Tyrone were split almost fifty-fifty between Catholics and Protestants. Even so, the result on 9 April could hardly have been a more resounding signal of Catholic support for the hunger strikers. With 30,493 votes, Sands had won a majority of 1,147 over the former Ulster Unionist leader, Harry West, and was duly elected as a Member of Parliament. Most Protestants were horrified; even the leader of the liberal Alliance Party, Oliver Napier, called it a ‘black day for Northern Ireland’, marking the triumph of ‘the real evil of naked sectarianism’. In Whitehall, there was talk of expelling Sands from the Commons as a convicted terrorist, but the government wisely judged that this would be far too inflammatory. Even so, the fact that he was now an MP turned the hunger strike into an enormous international story. Almost overnight, said the Guardian, the voters of Fermanagh and South Tyrone had turned Sands’s lonely struggle into a massive ‘political triumph for the IRA’.29
By this point, Sands was forty days into his hunger strike. His weight was falling fast, down by two stone since March, and he was complaining of severe fatigue, dizziness and headaches. In the next few weeks, as the world’s media descended on Belfast and he sank towards oblivion, the pressure mounted. On 13 April, John Hume, leader of the moderate Social and Democratic Labour Party (SDLP), told Mrs Thatcher that the ‘situation in Northern Ireland was the worst he had ever known’. With support for Sands rising every day and the IRA clearly ‘winning the propaganda battle’, she must make concessions before it was too late. No, she said: ‘Any wavering on the issue of political status would be to give a licence to kill.’ Hume, clearly in despair, told her that ‘if this was all [she] had to say, the problems for Northern Ireland would be serious indeed’. But she remained adamant. Hume was ‘asking for total surrender. To give political status would be to act as a recruiting sergeant for the PIRA.’ A week later, talking to the cameras after a trip to the Middle East, she repeated that she would not bend. ‘Crime is
crime is crime: it is not political, it is crime, and there can be no question of granting political status,’ she said firmly. ‘I understand Mr Sands is still on hunger strike, and I regret that he has not decided to come off it. There can be no possible concessions on political status.’30
Early on the morning of Sunday 3 May, Sands lapsed into a coma, from which he never recovered. He died just after one in the morning the following Tuesday, after sixty-six days without food. For the IRA, his death was the greatest propaganda coup in their modern history, a horrifying symbol of their determination to resist the British state. Around the world it was front-page news. In Oslo protesters threw balloons filled with ketchup at the Queen; in Zurich a British car showroom was firebombed; in Toulouse someone threw a petrol bomb at a Dunlop tyre warehouse; even in Florence firebombs were thrown at British-owned businesses. In Britain there were small protests in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Edinburgh, while a crowd picketed outside Downing Street. And in Belfast rioting broke out almost immediately, with petrol bombs thrown at police stations, factories and even a Methodist church. Throughout the day, reported the Northern Ireland Office, came news of ‘petrol and acid bombs, barricades, hijackings, malicious fires and even bolts from a crossbow’. In the most shocking incident, a Protestant milkman, Eric Guiney, and his 14-year-old son Desmond were seriously hurt when their float overturned after being attacked by a mob. Both died a few days later of their injuries. But the world had eyes only for Sands.31
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