A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  It was not long after this that Martin McGuinness had his first brush with the law, when he was arrested and charged with a breach of the peace during a confrontation with the RUC and British troops near the Bogside. Accused of shouting abuse at soldiers, he was bound over to keep the peace for two years.14 Relations between the soldiers and Catholics in Derry gradually worsened in the following months. After clashes between off-duty troops and Catholic youths, often sparked by rivalry over girls at dances, the army banned city center cinemas from showing movies at nighttime. As an example of taking a sledgehammer to break open a nut, it could hardly be bettered.

  The number of clashes increased as 1970 wore on. In February a rally by the loyalist leader Ian Paisley sparked confrontations between Catholics and British troops, who pursued stone-throwers into the Bogside, just as the RUC used to do. For the first time the military resorted to snatch squads equipped with long, heavy batons to arrest alleged rioters, often beating them severely. At Eastertime there were more riots and incursions by troops into the Bogside after a protest at Strand Road RUC station, where a Union Jack had been hoisted to coincide with the Official Republican Easter parade. Allegations of beatings, indiscriminate arrests, and the use of fabricated court evidence against accused rioters by British troops multiplied. In one of the most notorious of such cases three teenage girls were jailed for rioting on the word of a soldier whose flirtatious advances, one of the girls claimed, had been spurned some days before.

  The worst rioting, three days of it, came in June when the civil rights MP Bernadette Devlin was jailed for her part in the August 1969 violence. When the RUC reneged on an agreement not to take her into custody until after she had addressed a rally in Derry, the frustrated crowd went wild with anger. For the first time since their arrival, British troops used CS gas against the Bogside.

  By mid-1970 support for the new Provisional IRA was growing in Belfast, but in Derry the Officials were still the dominant of the two groups. Despite competition between them, the bitter ideological and personal rivalry that characterized the republican division in Belfast was absent in Derry. As in Tyrone and other rural areas, the two groups often acted as one, and recruits were attracted to one or the other by their sense of which group offered the better chance to hit back at the British troops, rather than by political ideas. As relations between the Catholic population and the British military deteriorated, however, that choice increasingly became the Provisionals.

  In June 1970 the small group that constituted the Provisional IRA in the city was virtually wiped out in one fell swoop when a premature explosion killed Thomas Carlin, Joe Coyle, Tommy McCool, and his two young daughters. The three men were making a bomb when it blew up in their faces, and the fledgling IRA was decimated. After this, Provisional IRA activity was sporadic and infrequent. Shots were fired at the British army in August 1970 and a bomb exploded in September, but that was more or less the sum of IRA operations. The Easter 1971 republican celebrations revealed that support for the Officials was running at around twice the level for the Provos. The journalist and left-wing activist Eamonn McCann was able to write, “In the spring of 1971 the Provisional IRA in Derry for practical purposes did not yet exist.”15 Despite the rioting and the bitterness that flowed from it, the threat from either IRA was considered to be so slight that nationalist Derry was still regarded at this time as safe for off-duty soldiers; only in May 1971 were the Bogside and Creggan declared off-limits by British commanders.16

  The Provisionals’ fortunes began to change on July 8, 1971, when British troops used live rounds against rioters and in the space of twenty-four hours shot dead two young Bogsiders, twenty-eight-year-old Seamus Cusack and nineteen-year-old Desmond Beattie. Allegations by the British that the two men had been armed or were about to throw gelignite bombs when shot infuriated the small nationalist community, which knew both men well enough to know this was untrue. For Martin McGuinness the shooting of Cusack and Beattie was a seminal moment. He had joined the Officials but had left, disgusted at their inactivity, and defected to the Provisionals not long after the McCool group were killed. He, like others in the city, sensed a turning point had been reached that shifted nationalist opinion firmly against the British army and set the stage for the Provisionals to eclipse the Officials. “[O]f all the incidents that happened in Derry, the shooting of Cusack and Beattie were [sic] the most traumatic and the most decisive in turning people against the British Army in this city,” he recalled.17 Within days John Hume had led the SDLP out of Stormont, much to the barely disguised anger of the party leader Gerry Fitt in Belfast. It was a testament to the intensity of feelings in Derry that Hume and his moderate allies had little choice; not to have taken the step would have risked the political leadership of their community.

  The introduction of internment a month later pushed the pendulum even more in the Provisionals’ direction, as Martin McGuinness testified.

  Right up until internment… the Provisional Republican movement in the city was in my opinion very, very weak; there wouldn’t have been more than a dozen or fifteen people involved in it. And then when internment was introduced the majority of those people were arrested, the vast majority were arrested. After their arrest the strength of the movement in this town would have been almost at zero, apart from a few isolated people. And… when [the British] introduced internment the floodgates opened. By the end of the week the Republican movement would have risen from about five to twenty and by the end of the next week would have went to thirty. You were [then] into gun battles at this stage and soldiers being killed and IRA [being killed]. You’re talking about membership being into the hundreds then.18

  The first British soldier killed by the Derry Brigade was shot by a sniper a few days after the August 9 internment operation, and the scale of recruitment to the Provisionals in response to internment can be gauged by the fact that in the following sixteen months twenty-eight more soldiers suffered violent deaths,19 while the commercial center of Derry was subjected to a clinical economic bombing campaign until, as one account described it, the city “looked as if it had been hit from the air.”20 A significant feature of the recruits flooding into the Provisionals was their extreme youth. Martin McGuinness, for example, was only twenty-one when he became the Derry Brigade’s second-in-command, while the adjutant of the Bogside Coy, Eamonn Lafferty, shot dead in August 1971, was only nineteen.21 The abundance of young recruits meant that the IRA would have the resources to wage a prolonged struggle in the years to come.

  THE ROAD to Bloody Sunday five months later was littered with more examples of British army violence driving recruits into the ranks of the Provisionals. In July 1971 a nine-year-old boy was knocked down and killed by an army Saracen speeding through the narrow, confined streets of the Bogside; the vehicle drove on and left the dead boy lying in the street. In September an army sniper shot a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl in the back of the head. The child’s funeral provided an opportunity for a huge outpouring of grief and anger, and the size of the mourning crowd—put at some ten thousand people—was eloquent testimony to the speed with which Derry was being radicalized. Later that week a speeding armored car knocked down and killed a three-year-old boy and drove on. As in the earlier fatal vehicle incident, the authorities ignored the death. British troops were later accused of firing live rounds indiscriminately in the Creggan district of the city; the pockmarked walls of houses appeared to substantiate the complaint. Derry’s influential Catholic schoolteacher coterie protested as one when it became clear that military operations were being timed to coincide with the passage of children to and from local schools. The teachers alleged that this was being done either to give troops protection or to entice the IRA into mounting operations that could endanger young lives.22 Meanwhile the military abandoned even the pretense of consulting with moderate Catholic opinion, further eroding the influence of the church and figures like John Hume.

  On January 30, 1972, the British army’s war against the civi
lian population of Derry reached its zenith, when soldiers of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, specially drafted into the city for the day, opened fire on a crowd attending a march and rally called by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association to protest against the continuation of internment. Within a few minutes thirteen men, mostly young and none of them armed or involved with either IRAs, had been shot dead. A fourteenth man died of his wounds some time later. In the days afterward young men and women literally queued up to join the Provisionals, while the remaining moral qualms about the use of violence against the British vanished. “People made a holiday in their hearts at the news of a dead soldier,” wrote Eamonn McCann of the atmosphere in the Bogside afterward.23

  The story of the growth and development of the Provisional IRA in Derry is the tale not about how ideology triumphed but about how police and military violence created and nourished the need to retaliate. Martin McGuinness himself put it best: “The British developed republicanism. It was nothing we had done to develop resistance to British rule. They brought about resistance to British rule….”24

  IRA support in Derry was disproportionately high because of the events of 1971 and 1972; one authoritative estimate suggests that a staggering 2 percent of the city’s 50,000 Catholic population was imprisoned for IRA activites in the years between 1971 and 1986.25 Many more evaded capture. The Derry Brigade established itself as one of the most active groups in the IRA. Its involvement in sectarian and civilian killings was possibly the lowest of any group in the IRA. At the same time the brigade’s record of attacks against the British army demonstrated vividly that hatred for the military was undoubtedly the strongest force persuading Derry people to join the IRA. Some 17 percent of all British military fatalities during the Troubles in Northern Ireland were caused by the Derry IRA, compared with 30 percent in Belfast, where the pool of potential IRA recruits was perhaps four or five times larger.

  THIS HISTORY and the Derry Brigade’s central role in the development of the Provisionals make all the more remarkable the fact that the IRA’s campaign was scaled down earlier there than anywhere else, albeit secretly and gradually. It was even more significant that the IRA leadership, or at least elements of it, chose Derry as the arena for secretly discussing and implementing mutual de-escalation measures with the British authorities.

  The story of how this happened has its roots in an earlier peace movement, one that, far from securing support from the Provisionals, was actively and at times violently opposed by them. Inspired by the tragic deaths in Belfast of the three young Maguire children, killed when the driver of a Provo getaway car was shot dead by British troops in Andersonstown and careered out of control, the Peace People movement of 1976 captured a popular mood of fatigue with the Troubles. Led by Mairead Corrigan, an aunt of the young victims, and a neighbor, Betty Williams, the Peace People held rallies and marches throughout Ireland, one of the largest of which traversed Belfast’s Shankill and Falls Roads in a bid to unite Catholic and Protestant. Ultimately the Peace People faltered. The group lost its influence in republican areas when it refused to condemn British and loyalist violence, and it was later embroiled in a financial scandal over the distribution of funds donated by sympathizers across the world and the proceeds of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Corrigan and Williams. But enthusiasm for the project in the initial period was intense, and numerous branches were established in both parts of Ireland.

  A support group was set up in Derry, but in 1978 it broke off from the parent body in Belfast in protest against the leadership’s refusal to consult the grassroots membership, and the Derry Peace People became the Peace and Reconciliation Group (PRG). Comprising around a dozen members drawn from both communities in the city, the PRG included former loyalist and republican paramilitary members, some of whom were still in friendly contact with former colleagues even though they had themselves given up violence.

  Quaker influence was strong from the start of the Troubles in much peace work in Northern Ireland. Quakers had run a family center for the relatives of republican and loyalist prisoners at the Maze prison from the early days of internment, and the name they earned for neutrality enabled the Society of Friends to mediate between and within paramilitary groups. The PRG was partly inspired by the work of an English Quaker, Will Warren, who had lived in Derry since the early 1970s. Described as “a very good-hearted and honest man” by those who knew him, Warren built up a network of contacts from church leaders to republican and loyalist paramilitaries and was trusted sufficiently to move freely through the Bogside. Those contacts were to prove invaluable when in the early 1980s two other English Quakers, John and Diana Lampen, decided to make their home in Derry. Financially supported by the Rowntree Trust, a Quaker-oriented charity funded by the famous English confectionery and chocolate company, they joined the group. The role John Lampen and two former paramilitary members of the PRG undertook as mediators between republican leaders and the British security and political authorities was to play a largely unreported but significant part in the IRA’s journey to the 1994 cease-fire. Some in the Northern Ireland Office regarded the Lampens “as Derry’s version of Alec Reid,” as one official recalled.26

  The PRG was involved in conventional community work, organizing Protestant and Catholic sporting events, vacations, and so on. But it was in their work mediating between the security forces and the Catholic community, especially the IRA, that the real impact was made. Their first moves were meant to improve relations between the Catholic community and the RUC. Derry City Council had established a police liaison committee, but none of the nationalist parties would sit on it. The RUC divisional commander in turn declared that there would be no point in his working with the committee unless nationalists participated, so the PRG chairperson, the County Donegal–born nurse Margaret O’Donnell, and a Catholic friend joined. Their purpose was to persuade the RUC to respond more honestly and intelligently to Catholic complaints of police misbehavior. All too often, the PRG realized, the instinct of the authorities was to treat such complaints as republican progaganda and ignore them.

  Slowly the PRG established a reputation among Nationalists as an acceptable and trusted channel of complaints to the RUC about security force misbehavior, often securing results that strengthened the group’s credibility. It had tried to establish the same sort of relationship with the various British army regiments stationed in Derry, but for years met a brick wall of refusal. “Community liaison officers were there to keep the public off the backs of regimental commanders not to liaise with the community,” complained one source.27 In 1989, however, the PRG made a breakthrough when the CO of the Royal Hampshire Regiment, Colonel Paul Davies, asked the group to help his soldiers improve relations with the community. Davies welcomed a suggestion from the PRG that they should talk to rank-and-file soldiers about attitudes, particularly those in the nationalist community, toward the military.

  “They would meet in the NAAFI canteen, ten to fifteen soldiers about to undertake a patrol together, and they would talk about the issues of the day and explain how people in the Bogside felt about the army,” recalled one military source.28 Another explained, “A lot of it was really basic stuff, like how the kids who threw stones at them weren’t being made to do it by the IRA and that most of the general public didn’t hate them.” There would be question-and-answer sessions and every six weeks a refresher seminar with the PRG. The soldiers related well to the Derry-born members of the PRG, regarding their views as an authentic reflection of the people they met on patrol. Officers, on the other hand, responded well to John Lampen, not just because he was English like them but because he had served as an NCO during the days of national service in Britain and knew the military mind well.

  Slowly, under the PRG’s guiding hand, the British army began to soften its profile in Derry in the late 1980s. The system of civilian complaints was overhauled. “Before if soldiers misbehaved on the streets or abused people or property during searches and a com
plaint was made, civilians would never be told what the outcome was,” said a source involved in the changes. “Under the new system the CO would ensure that an officer visited the complainants to inform them.”29 Soldiers were discouraged from using the telescopic sights on their rifles to scan streets, a practice that to civilians looked as if they were being aimed at. The local British commanders successfully argued the case for modifying the military instruction that obliged soldiers to wear combat helmets while on duty in Northern Ireland. Troops were allowed to wear soft berets at checkpoints and then gradually the practice was extended to other situations. “The helmets sent a warlike message, so we decided to make our soldiers look more like human beings,” said one senior military source.30

  The British military at all levels in Derry increasingly went to the PRG for advice about operational matters. Army commanders had, for example, toyed with the notion of patrolling the Bogside and Creggan in open jeeps, but the PRG dissuaded them on the grounds that the sight of soldiers careering through housing estates in this way would be provocative and an invitation to stone-throwers. PRG advice was also sought on how best to police public order situations such as IRA funerals and the annual Bloody Sunday commemoration march.

  The PRG had cultivated excellent contacts with senior Derry republicans, and both the IRA and the British army were aware that the Lampens and their colleagues were in touch with each other. It was due to this relationship that the war in Derry was slowly and gradually brought to an end. “We had agreed ground rules, and these were clear,” explained one senior British officer. “We knew that the Lampens had contact with the IRA, and the IRA presumably knew that they were in contact with us. There was an understanding certainly on our part, and I suspect on theirs too, that the conduit could not be used for intelligence purposes, otherwise it would be undermined and destroyed.”31 Not everyone in the British security apparatus liked the arrangement. The RUC objected “to communication with the enemy,” as one source put it, while some in the military were concerned that the army could leave itself open to IRA manipulation. However, local British commanders approved, and so did the Northern Ireland Office and its security advisers. “Their attitude,” remembered the same officer, “was that this was a sensible way to move forward.”32