A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  Two controversial parades were scheduled for June 27. One was due to march past the Ardoyne district of North Belfast, where some of the worst loyalist violence of August 1969 had happened. Another would go through Ballymurphy, as the Easter march of that year had done with such disastrous consequences. Predictably both marches degenerated into violence. In Ballymurphy fierce rioting broke out, again between British troops and local Catholics, but in Ardoyne things took a more serious turn. The Ardoyne parade was attacked with stones and gasoline bombs, and the guns quickly came out on both sides. In August 1969 the loyalists and RUC had given local nationalists a bloody nose, but this time it was the Provisionals who meted out the punishment. Three loyalist snipers were shot dead by gunmen from the IRA’s Third Battalion and several more were wounded.

  As news of the killing spread, angry loyalist mobs gathered in East Belfast and began moving in on the small Catholic ghetto of Short Strand, situated on the banks of the river Lagan. Inexplicably the British army made no effort to stop them, although it was clear that the loyalists were intent on death and destruction. It was a heaven-sent chance for the Provisionals to demonstrate they could defend their community, and a small group of IRA Volunteers took up position in the grounds of the local Catholic church, St. Matthew’s, and opened up on the Protestant crowds. Loyalist snipers returned fire, and soon a full-scale gun battle was raging. The IRA squad was led by the Belfast commander, Billy McKee, his presence testimony not just to his devotion to the Catholic church but to his determination to expunge the shame of August 1969. Although McKee was badly wounded in the five-hour-long exchange, his mission succeeded. The loyalist mobs retreated, carrying two of their number home dead. One local Catholic, who IRA leaders claimed was a member of the Auxiliaries, was also killed, but there was no doubt that the events in Ardoyne and the Short Strand— “the siege of St. Matthew’s” in Provisional folklore—had established the Provisionals as the Catholics’ only reliable defenders. The British army was discredited. The importance of the gun battles did not escape the IRA, as one of those involved in the Short Strand battle recalled: “It was very significant. On our way over to the [Short] Strand that night there was a lot of Brits and peelers [police] just sitting outside the area. Did they allow that battle to develop to sicken the Protestants and Catholics? A lot of people joined the Republican Movement after St Matthew’s. It finished the business of IRA equals ‘I Ran Away.’ If that trouble had not broken out the IRA was dead.”24

  The IRA’s success cleared the way to implement the offensive stage of MacStiofain’s battle plan. In the past small Catholic areas like Ardoyne and the Short Strand had been held hostage by unionism for the good behavior of republicans elsewhere. This was one of the reasons the IRA had confined its 1956–62 campaign to rural Border areas. But now that the loyalists had been repulsed in East Belfast, the most vulnerable Catholic district in the city, the IRA could contemplate taking the war to the British, knowing areas like it could be adequately defended.

  There then followed one of those events that historians may never be able to properly explain but whose consequences were plain for all to see even at the time. On Friday, July 3, British troops descended on a small, four-room house in the Lower Falls Road district and began tearing it apart in a search for arms. These they soon discovered, and it was obvious they had been tipped off. The puzzling question, though, was why the military had acted on the intelligence. The arms dump belonged to the Official IRA, the Provisionals’ rivals, and the area was at the time largely sympathetic to the Goulding faction. Although forced by events to adopt a more militant pose, the Official IRA’s leadership was not spoiling for a fight with British troops. The arms raid risked forcing the Officials into retaliation but did the Provisionals no harm at all. If the British were unable to distinguish between the two IRAs, as some observers have suggested, then they made a monumental blunder, for it was the Provisionals who gained most from the ensuing events.

  As the troops prepared to leave the Falls Road, they came under heavy stone-throwing from a large and angry crowd. Some soldiers were trapped in the maze of narrow unfamiliar streets, and reinforcements were sent for. Soon three thousand troops were deployed in the area that was now cloaked in CS gas and littered with rubble and exploding gasoline bombs. Freeland ordered a curfew, and troops began house-to-house searches, in many cases wrecking homes, bars, and businesses. The soldiers looted virtually every public house in the area. Gun battles broke out between the Official IRA and the British, and then the Provisionals’ D Coy joined in. The curfew lasted until Sunday afternoon, when it was broken by over one thousand women, many with babies in carriages, who marched from Andersonstown with milk and bread to feed the besieged inhabitants. Four men, all civilians, were killed by the British army that weekend, three by bullets and one crushed by an armored car in circumstances that made the Provisionals’ violent strategy seem unavoidable, appealing, and even necessary to many West Belfast Catholics. The Falls curfew, as the events of that weekend became known, marked a victory for the tactic of armed struggle.

  Provisional IRA gunmen had opened up in the Falls Road, Ardoyne, and East Belfast; in Ballymurphy, however, Gerry Adams’s constraining order on the local unit still applied. As the Protestants of New Barnsley evacuated their homes, the riots that had started on June 27 continued almost nightly and lasted for the next six months. Ballymurphy republicans were in the thick of the fighting, but not once did they break open their arms dumps. The Belfast Brigade was unhappy at the rioting and wanted to see some armed action, but Adams persisted, determined to radicalize his own people.

  The strategy was effective, but it was also ruthless. During the six months of riots that followed, hundreds of people were injured or arrested and imprisoned; others, old and young alike, suffered from the effects of CS gas. Dozens of young people joined the IRA to seek revenge against the soldiers; some were to end up in jail, others in early graves. But the effect of the rioting was profound, as Adams later boasted: “Every man, woman and child was involved. They didn’t fire a shot but for months, the British army had the hell beaten out of them. The women were humiliating and demoralising them. The kids were hammering them. You had the whole community organised right down into street committees, so that you had a sort of spider’s web of regular coordination.”25

  The result was that Ballymurphy became the most militant republican district in the city, and its IRA units made the Second Battalion area the most active and ferocious in the Belfast Brigade. One crucial consequence of this was that, as the IRA’s war intensified, the brigade leadership in Belfast relied heavily on figures drawn from the Second Battalion area. This was Gerry Adams’s route to the top of the IRA.

  BY CHRISTMAS 1970 the Provisional IRA was just a year old, but it was a vigorous and rapidly growing infant. A unique combination of events had come together to create the Provos, and during its first year of existence another series of extraordinary, unpredictable incidents—the siege of St. Matthew’s, the Falls Road curfew, and the Ballymurphy riots prime among them—had given the organization an undreamed-of boost. It would be tempting to conclude that fate was playing an awful trick on the people of Northern Ireland by arranging matters in such a disastrous fashion, but there was a common factor in all these happenings that explained why events were spiraling out of control. Just as unionist obduracy had played the role of midwife to the new IRA, so the same need to placate Protestant extremism and prop up the Stormont government led Britain to take an increasingly tough line against the communities from which the IRA sprang. As that conflict worsened, the notion that as long as unionists held power and were supported by Britain, nationalists could expect no fair dealing gained more support and sympathy. The events of 1970 nourished the view that Northern Ireland was incapable of being reformed and that only its destruction could end the nationalists’ nightmare. For the first time in the history of the state the extreme republican agenda and the IRA’s violent methods were winning the allegian
ce of a sizable section of the Catholic community. Unionists had created the Provos, and now they were sustaining them. Only in Ballymurphy had republicans manipulated events; everywhere else there was no need to.

  THREE

  “The Big Lad”

  The year 1970 was without doubt a seminal one for the IRA, as an early Volunteer recalled in vivid terms: “At the start of it I remember picketing outside British Army dances with placards and being spat at by local [Catholics] who attended those dances. We were nothing at that point. By the end of the year we had an organisation capable of taking on the British Army.”1 A few months later the war between Britain and the Provisional IRA was raging, and the most violent conflict in the tangled and tragic history of Britain and Ireland was under way.

  As 1970 drew to a close, the IRA’s leaders could be confident that their fortunes were improving and that 1971 would almost certainly see that trend continue, although not even the wildest-eyed IRA man could have foreseen just how sharply the curve would rise. In Gerry Adams’s home estate in Ballymurphy, as elsewhere in Belfast, the realization that a new plateau had been reached forced a change in tactics.

  The riots in Ballymurphy faded around Christmas 1970, but in the middle of January 1971 they flared again with greater ferocity. Now, however, Adams and the Ballymurphy republicans were ready to bring them to an end, to patch up their differences with the Belfast Brigade leadership, and to unleash the gunmen. The local historian Ciaran de Baroid explained why: “The Ballymurphy republicans felt that [the riots] had served their purpose; the people were cemented together; the British army was humiliated and demoralised; alienation between the people and the state was complete and irreversible; and self-confidence and an efficient infrastructure of organisation had been developed within the area.”2 Ballymurphy IRA members moved to quell the rioting, and British army commanders were not slow to notice the change in tactics.

  Discreet negotiations were opened up between them and a policing deal was struck in which, according to the IRA version, the Army agreed that the RUC would stay out of the area, and policing in the Second Battalion area would be left to the IRA. The British would also evacuate the area. Almost immediately the deal, if such it was, fell apart, and seven hundred troops invaded the estate and began searching for arms. Fierce rioting once more engulfed Ballymurphy. Then the Reverend Ian Paisley announced that he had found out about the secret talks, while an increasingly beleaguered Chichester-Clark extracted a pledge from the Tory home secretary, Reginald Maudling, that British troops could now take “the offensive” against the IRA.

  On February 2, 1971, in response to pressure from unionists and ministers in London, British soldiers cordoned off the Clonard area of West Belfast, the scene of the burning of Bombay Street in August 1969, and began a punitive series of house searches. These sparked vicious riots, in which loyalist workers from a nearby engineering factory joined. Clonard was in the Second Battalion area and was supposed to be covered by the secret policing deal. IRA commanders saw this as evidence of British army bad faith and responded accordingly. The Clonard riots spread to other Catholic districts, and soon the IRA went into action. British troops came under gun and bomb attacks in North Belfast, and then on the night of February 6 an IRA unit under the command of Billy Reid from the New Lodge Road area ambushed a British patrol, killing one soldier, Gunner Robert Curtis, and wounding four of his colleagues. He was the first of 503 British military personnel to die in the Troubles.3

  By the end of 1970 support for the Provisionals in Belfast was increasing in direct proportion to the weight of the British military presence in nationalist areas. The unionist government’s answer to every downward twist in the cycle of violence was to ask Britain to send more troops to police nationalist districts. Invariably the British refused the more outrageous demands, but unionists still got a good deal of what they wanted. Chichester-Clark was in a strong position. Without him the British would have been forced to intervene directly in Northern Ireland’s affairs and might well have had to abolish the local parliament and government and rule directly from London, a leap in the dark that no British leader yet wanted to take. That might have had to happen at some stage, but in the meantime, the British calculated, the only viable policy was to give the unionist leader what he needed to stay in office.

  Sending more troops into nationalist areas was, however, a bit like throwing gasoline on a fire. The troops were trained battle soldiers, not policemen; their instinct was to hit every problem on the head with a club, and, with some exceptions, few of their officers showed much understanding of the political cauldron in which they had landed. Some, like the Parachute regiments and the Marines, were particularly ill suited to the delicate task of keeping peace and quickly developed a name for casual, horrific brutality. For some incomprehensible reason the British insisted on sending into some of the worst troublespots, like Ballymurphy, Scottish regiments, many of whose recruits came from Orange backgrounds in Glasgow and elsewhere and were every bit as staunch as their Belfast brethren. If the riots in Ballymurphy were particularly bitter and bloody, it was due in no small measure to this ingredient.

  The troops were also operating in a political environment that became more and more warlike, not least because the views of their commanders were hardening. During 1970 British commanders had given their troops permission to open fire and shoot dead any gasoline bombers who ignored warnings, and after the death of Gunner Curtis, Chichester-Clark declared that his government was at war with the Provisional IRA. As the rhetoric grew more bellicose, the troops on the ground became more aggressive, and increasingly the operational distinction between ordinary Catholics and IRA activists became blurred. Belfast Catholics repaid the soldiers’ hostility and anger with interest, and a self-perpetuating, self-nourishing cycle began that no one seemed able to break. It was all a boon to the fledgling IRA, as MacStiofain recognized: “The fact was that… the British soldiers caused friction, resentment and problems that had not been there before.”4

  By 1971 there were unmistakable signs that the Provisional IRA was getting bigger and more dangerous than Goulding’s Officials. In June 1970 some five thousand people had attended the Provisionals’ Bodenstown ceremonies; within twelve months the crowd had nearly tripled, to fourteen thousand. This was reflected in growing IRA recruitment figures. The IRA Convention of September 1970, which regularized the makeup of the Army Council and Executive, was, in MacStiofain’s opinion, the largest he had ever attended, as was the following month’s Sinn Fein Ard Fheis.5 In Belfast the Provisionals had scored two moral victories over their rivals in the Officials, both in Adams’s Second Battalion area, and these resulted in a shift of support to them in a key district of the city.

  It was Adams’s old colleagues in D Coy in the Lower Falls Road area who swung matters the Provisionals’ way. The members of D Coy had performed well against the British army, better than the Officials, some believed, during the Falls curfew, even though the fighting had taken place in an Official IRA stronghold. Then, in March 1971, D Coy’s commander, Charlie Hughes, was killed by the Officials in circumstances that strongly suggested duplicitous dealing by the Goulding supporters. A feud had broken out between the two groups, and each side had kidnapped hostages. Negotiators intervened and patched together a settlement, but just as rival leaders endorsed it, Hughes was shot dead. Hughes was widely respected in the area; he had fought off a loyalist mob with a Thompson machine gun during the August 1969 riots, and it looked as if the Officials had killed him out of resentment at his local standing. The Officials claimed that the responsible gunman had not been told of the mediation in time, but few in the Lower Falls believed them and local sentiment shifted to the Provisionals.

  With the political and military circumstances shifting in their favor the Provisional leaders decided to intensify the campaign, to move from defensive mode into retaliation and attack. The way the IRA signaled the change was also a harbinger of the depths to which the violence could a
nd would descend in the years to come. On the evening of March 8 three young members of the Royal Highland Fusiliers, two of them brothers aged seventeen and eighteen from the Scottish town of Ayr, were lured from a bar in central Belfast and taken to a lonely mountain road overlooking the northern suburbs of the city; there they were each shot in the head, apparently as they were relieving themselves after the night’s hard drinking. The extreme youth of the victims, the fact that the killers would likely have known that two were brothers, and the supposition that girls may have played a part in enticing them to their deaths made it an operation that the IRA was not keen to boast about. The IRA issued a statement actually denying responsibility, and the episode was written out of the organization’s annals. The killings, for instance, did not feature in MacStiofain’s own account of this period or in the IRA’s official history of its early years,6 but the truth was that the operation had been authorized by the Belfast Brigade and was carried out by personnel from the city’s Third Battalion.7