Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Few British papers mourned Sands’s passing. In a full-page editorial on the ‘propaganda of death’, the Express argued that the historical figure he most resembled was the Nazi stormtrooper Horst Wessel, whose murder by Communists in 1930 had made him a far-right martyr. ‘Robert Sands’, the paper said, ‘was a fanatic who would have been unnoticed in life but imagined – God help us! – that he would serve Ireland in death. His sad credulity provides his political masters with the propaganda bonanza they have long planned. How Dr Goebbels would have approved.’ An accompanying cartoon showed a memorial to the IRA’s 2,094 victims, marked with the words ‘They Had No Choice’. The Mirror, too, felt little pity. At Sands’s funeral, which drew tens of thousands of republican supporters, the paper’s chief reporter was struck by the presence of so many IRA men in combat jackets and masks, ‘urging the mood of the people to its lowest and angriest levels’. And in the Commons, Mrs Thatcher never wavered. ‘Mr Sands was a convicted criminal,’ she said curtly. ‘He chose to take his own life. It was a choice that his organisation did not allow to many of its victims.’32

  The newspapers shed few tears for Bobby Sands. This is Mac in the Daily Mail, 6 May 1981.

  Among Northern Ireland’s Catholics, Mrs Thatcher’s inflexibility seemed positively monstrous. To tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, the hunger strikers were not the killers and bombers portrayed in the British press. They were, as one IRA activist put it, ‘ordinary men … from the republican community’: young men, generally in their twenties and thirties, with friends, neighbours, wives and mothers, who looked no different from their counterparts anywhere else. Not even Mrs Thatcher questioned their courage: a coward does not go on hunger strike. And here, as so often, the fact that she was a woman came into play. She was not just a politician; she was a mother. How could she allow another mother’s son to starve himself to death? ‘I didn’t believe she’d let them die,’ one Catholic teenager wrote later. ‘Day after day she heard reports; she could have prevented it, but she didn’t.’33

  After Sands’s death, many of Mrs Thatcher’s critics assumed she would now see the error of her ways. But they did not understand her at all. The hunger strikes went on, and nothing changed. And so, just as Sands and his comrades had planned, they became a march of death. The second hunger striker, Francis Hughes, died on 12 May. Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara died on 21 May, but still Mrs Thatcher remained unyielding. ‘Faced with the failure of their discredited cause,’ she said in Belfast a week later, ‘the men of violence have chosen in recent months to play what may well be their last card. They have turned their violence against themselves through the prison hunger strike to death. They seek to work on the most basic of human emotions – pity – as a means of creating tension and stoking the fires of bitterness and hatred.’ But they would never succeed. ‘What they want is special treatment, treatment different from that received by other prisoners. They want their violence justified. It isn’t, and it will not be.’34

  To her critics, Mrs Thatcher’s stern implacability, her refusal to offer pity or sympathy, seemed deliberately incendiary. The Northern Ireland Office’s David Blatherwick reported that her words had ‘gone down in the Catholic community like a lead balloon’, while Humphrey Atkins warned that with an ‘indefinite run of deaths’ now likely, ‘the danger of losing the support of the Catholic community is now very real’. Yet when the cameras were off, she was prepared to compromise. We know now that, in early July, the Prime Minister authorized secret contacts with the IRA leadership about a deal, under which the government would make concessions on clothing, remission and prison work, but without conceding political status.

  For reasons that remain bitterly contested, however, the deal collapsed, possibly because the IRA thought they were being led down the garden path, or perhaps because the leadership did not want to lose such a valuable propaganda weapon. Later, one former IRA prisoner, Richard O’Rawe, claimed that the men in the Maze had been eager to accept Mrs Thatcher’s deal. According to O’Rawe, they considered it a ‘fantastic offer’, but were overruled by their commanders outside the prison, notably Gerry Adams. This certainly sounds plausible. The hunger strikes had generated enormous worldwide publicity for the IRA, and a cold-blooded tactician might well have calculated that it was better to keep them going, whatever the cost. But other IRA veterans dispute this, and there is no hard evidence either way. The truth will probably never be known.35

  In any case, the march of death went on. On 8 July, Joe McDonnell became the fifth republican prisoner to die, and he was followed by Martin Hurson on 13 July, Kevin Lynch on 1 August and Kieran Doherty the following day. For Northern Ireland’s Catholics, each new casualty was proof of Mrs Thatcher’s inhuman cruelty. Yet, far from the momentum steadily mounting, the deaths were becoming normal. Like the bombings that had dominated the headlines for a decade, they were being absorbed into the general narrative of Northern Ireland. People died; these things happened. And although each death was followed by riots and protests, none attracted the same publicity as Sands’s demise back in May. Even attendance at their funerals had fallen dramatically. By late summer, even many Catholics were beginning to wonder if the strikers were throwing their lives away. Given that Mrs Thatcher had not wavered after six or seven deaths, not even the most optimistic republican believed she would crack after eleven or twelve. If she were going to yield, she would have done so already. Even if every single man in the Maze starved himself to death, she would never restore their political status.

  By now the prisoners’ families, supported by the Catholic Church, were beginning to speak up. If Mrs Thatcher was never going to give in, what was the point of their sons killing themselves? On 31 July, Paddy Quinn’s mother requested medical intervention to save his life. Three weeks later, Pat McGeown’s family followed suit. Then Matt Devlin’s family; then Laurence McKeown’s; and now a trickle was becoming a stream. The strike was crumbling. On 26 September, Liam McCloskey became the fifth man to be taken off hunger strike at his family’s request. At last, on 3 October, after seven months and ten deaths, the IRA bowed to reality and called off the strike. They had been ‘robbed of the hunger strike as an effective protest weapon’, they said bitterly, ‘because of the successful campaign waged against our distressed relatives by the Catholic hierarchy, aided and abetted by the Irish establishment’.

  But this was a smokescreen. The fact was that they had expected Mrs Thatcher to crack, and had no answer when she refused to do so. Three days later, the government announced that all prisoners in Northern Ireland could wear their own clothes, would enjoy free association and would get some remission for time lost protesting. In essence, this was much the same package that the IRA leadership had rejected back in July. The same thing was missing: the prisoners’ political status.36

  For Mrs Thatcher, the hunger strike was a defining moment. Ever since becoming Conservative leader, she had boasted of her steadfastness under fire, her refusal to change course and her contempt for those who did so. Now, faced with young men starving themselves to death in a Northern Irish prison, she had lived up to her rhetoric. No matter what the pressure, she would not bend. To the IRA, she was the Oliver Cromwell of the modern age, a woman harder and crueller than any man. To her admirers, she stood alone as the supreme defender of Britain’s interests, the Iron Lady who would never turn. Mrs Thatcher had won a ‘resounding victory’, declared the Sunday Express, noting that it was also a ‘victory for common sense and firm moral purpose, over the confused, tortured mentality of appeasement’. There was a lesson here, the paper said, for her Conservative critics. ‘Mrs Thatcher feels just as passionately about the rightness of her policies against inflation as she did about the hunger strikes. Can anyone be sure now that her determination to stay the course will not serve her and us just as well again?’37

  Yet if the end of the hunger strikes was a personal victory for the Prime Minister, it came at a heavy cost. For the very fact of the hunger s
trikes – and, in particular, the death of Bobby Sands – meant that, in the eyes of the world, the IRA prisoners had won the title of political prisoners, if only unofficially. In the United States the strikes played into the hands of the Irish lobby, confirming the image of the British as bullying oppressors. And in Northern Ireland the identification of the hunger strikers as Christ-like martyrs, sacrificing themselves for their belief in Irish unity, struck a powerful chord even among Catholics who hated violence. Crucially, the IRA had contrived a situation in which they were seen exclusively as the victims of suffering, rather than as the perpetrators. The emaciated figure of the dying hunger striker was a far more sympathetic figure than the cold-blooded bomber.

  All the time, almost overlooked amid the fascination with Sands and his comrades, the IRA’s own march of death had gone on. On 7 April a gunman killed a Londonderry woman, Joanne Mathers, who had taken a part-time job as a census collector. The IRA had ordered Catholic families to boycott the census, which they saw as a front for British intelligence. Later, a Special Branch agent who had infiltrated the local IRA claimed that the future Sinn Fein leader Martin McGuinness had ordered her death personally. She left a husband and 1-year-old son. Even by the standards of the IRA it seemed horrifyingly cruel. Yet it was a reflection of the mood that, although Mrs Mathers’s killing came two days before the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election, it made no difference to the outcome. It was Bobby Sands, a member of the organization that murdered Joanne Mathers, whose death was commemorated in films, poems, biographies and murals. Hers was not. He was a martyr. She was just another victim.38

  In later years, some commentators suggested that Mrs Thatcher should have made more effort to find a deal and blunt the hunger strikers’ appeal to the Catholic community. Perhaps this might have worked, though Protestants would inevitably have seen it as a sign of surrender, and it might have encouraged the hunger strikers to push for more. In any case, the fact is that she did offer the IRA a deal, albeit one that fell short of their demands; but they turned it down. Still, there is no doubt that the events of 1981 played a central role in reviving the republican cause. Even in mid-August a confidential report by the Northern Ireland Office warned that public morale had reached an ‘all-time low’, with a surge of ‘alienation, bitterness and frustration’ in Catholic areas:

  Out of a community of some half-million [Catholics], nearly all know families with members in the Maze. Many protestors are from decent homes, and their neighbours find it hard to accept that they are the criminals described by ‘the Brits’. The Provos and their friends have played cleverly on Irish history and tradition to show that the strike is the latest phase of a noble cause and that at bottom the British are responsible …

  The gap between the communities has widened. Catholics are retreating in upon themselves. Many Protestants were dismayed at Sands’s election, and are angry at Catholic sympathy for the hunger strikers … The prospect of agreement on the political future of Northern Ireland seems further off than ever …

  A new generation of children has been infected with rampant Anglophobia. New heroes and myths have been created and new wounds opened which will take years to heal.

  There was another consequence, too. Sands’s election suggested that, in an embittered political landscape, a radical republican party might poll better than anybody thought. Sinn Fein drew the inevitable lesson. On their return to electoral politics in 1982 they won more than 10 per cent of the vote in the elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly, and a year later they won more than 13 per cent in the Westminster general election. Their new political direction was clear. As one activist put it, their new strategy was to ‘take power in Ireland’ with ‘a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in the other’.39

  In the meantime, the violence continued. Some 114 people were killed in 1981, a further 111 in 1982 and eighty-four the following year. Most of the deaths came in Belfast, but not all of them. In the autumn of 1981, the IRA set off bombs at Chelsea Barracks, the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich and in the basement of a Wimpy burger restaurant on Oxford Street. At the Wimpy restaurant, a bomb disposal officer, Kenneth Howorth, was killed instantly while trying to defuse the device. He had two children. On and on the murders went. The following July, bomb attacks in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park killed eleven soldiers and wounded about fifty, and in December 1983 a car bomb outside Harrods killed six people and wounded almost a hundred. Individually, each story seemed utterly heartbreaking. Cumulatively, they had lost the power to shock. The conflict had become normal, even banal; the news of some atrocity in Belfast or Londonderry, or even a bomb scare in a London department store, was a sad but inevitable part of the soundtrack of everyday life. To put it bluntly, people had long since come to take them for granted.

  So they did not work. Even though the IRA had been bombing Britain for almost a decade, they had completely failed to change the political momentum. In reality, the vast majority of British people knew absolutely nothing about Northern Ireland, cared even less and could not be bombed into caring. Far from feeling an atavistic attachment to the province, most would have been perfectly happy to wave it goodbye. In December 1980 a poll found that 50 per cent of Britons would like to see Northern Ireland leave the United Kingdom, while only 29 per cent wanted to keep it. Indeed, surveys since the early 1970s had consistently shown that about half the electorate would like to see the British Army pull out, not because they thought Britain was in the wrong, but because they were heartily sick of the whole business. During the hunger strike, for instance, one poll found that six out of ten would like to see the troops brought home, while only three out of ten thought they should stay. Even Conservative voters, by a small margin, wanted the army to come home. Extraordinarily, this meant British Conservatives were more likely to want the troops out than Northern Ireland’s Catholics, most of whom feared it would mean civil war. The reality of Northern Ireland, in other words, was much messier than the rhetoric.40

  But although many people would have agreed with the joke that the two most boring words in the English language were ‘Northern Ireland’, some cared very much indeed. A good example was a young Londoner who had no family connections with Ireland but had read about its history in the 1970s and had come to believe that the conflict was a brutal imperialist war between the British Establishment and the Irish working class. Sinn Fein, he thought, were not apologists for terrorism; they were the anti-colonial resistance. The IRA were not murderers; they were freedom fighters. For, as he explained to his biographer, Britain’s ‘appalling record’ was ‘worse than all the Boers have done to the blacks in South Africa’, comparable ‘with the way some of the Middle Eastern races have been liquidated by the Turkish Empire or the Russians’, and ‘as bad in those 800 years as what Hitler did to the Jews in six’. To many people, such remarks were not so much offensive as utterly intolerable. But it was not the last time that Ken Livingstone would find himself in hot water after making remarks about Hitler and the Jews.41

  24

  The Commissar of County Hall

  The harsh realities of life confront Kenneth Livingstone soon after he crawls from under his pink-patterned duvet in the simple bed-sitting room, which shakes every time a train passes on the Bakerloo line below.

  Daily Telegraph, 15 June 1981

  London has endured fire, plague and the blitz. It should not have to endure Mr Livingstone at the head of its affairs for one more day.

  Daily Express, 13 October 1981

  Saturday 10 October 1981: a breezy autumn day in west London, and Nora Field had almost finished her shopping. At the age of 59, Mrs Field, a widowed grandmother, worked as a civil service typist and lived alone in a council flat on Vauxhall Bridge Road. She had just popped out to get some groceries for her bedridden mother, who was in her nineties and lived nearby. At the pedestrian crossing on Ebury Bridge Road, Mrs Field stopped to talk to another local woman, Hazel Cole, who was six months pregnant. Nearby, John Bres
lin, an 18-year-old photographic technician, was sitting on a wall, a few yards from a parked white laundry van.

  The clock ticked towards half-past twelve. In the distance, a bus carrying dozens of Irish Guardsmen back to Chelsea Barracks from the Tower of London turned into the street. Further down the road, with a clear view of the pedestrian crossing, a man from Belfast waited, his finger poised on a detonator. The bus came closer. The bomber pressed the button. From his command device, the signal ran down a wire hidden in scaffolding along the street to a colossal gelignite nail bomb hidden in the laundry van. A split second later, the van exploded.

  Nora Field was killed instantly, her heart pierced by a six-inch nail bent into a U-shape to fit into the bomb. The top of John Breslin’s head was ripped off by the blast, though he did not die until four days later. Hazel Cole survived; she had been shielded by Mrs Field, who had taken the full impact of the blast. The street was littered with nails, bolts, glass and bodies; at least a dozen other passers-by had been injured, among them a 5-year-old boy and his 2-year-old sister. On the bus, horribly damaged by shrapnel, nobody had been killed, though several soldiers were badly injured. In a pub nearby, drinkers had been hurled to the floor, covered with glass from the blown-in windows. ‘It was horrible,’ a local travel agent told the press. ‘There was a middle-aged woman lying on the ground screaming with a nail through her leg. There were people falling all over the place.’

  Later, a spokesman for Westminster Hospital said the injuries were the worst they had ever seen. Some of the victims had arrived with their skulls split open; others had nails embedded in their wounds. It was a miracle that only two people had been killed; but that, of course, was no consolation. Nora Field, said her devastated brother Patrick, had been a ‘dear, sweet innocent woman. She had never done anyone any hurt and never had any strong political views. This is so unfair. So unjust.’ As for John Breslin, the horrible irony was that he came from an Irish family. ‘It’s their own people they are killing,’ said his father Kevin, who had moved to England from County Roscommon. ‘They are Irish. I am Irish and they killed my son.’1