Neave had initially supported the process but was soon questioning Rees about the wisdom of releasing ‘potentially dangerous people’ and ‘hard-core terrorists’ when the ceasefire was so precarious. He maintained that ‘we should be deluding ourselves and the people of this country if we were to pretend that there is yet convincing evidence of a plan for a permanent end to the Provisional campaign.’18 On 10 July 1975, after three bombs exploded in Londonderry, he asked Rees to agree that ‘Provisional IRA violence is being resumed’ and told him he should ‘think again about continuing his policy of release of terrorists from detention’. Neave’s sniping created friction between the two and brought the first charges that he was seeking to undermine bipartisanship. Rees felt Neave had become ‘increasingly sceptical and was sometimes outright hostile to our policies’.19 The antipathy was mutual. After Rees’s departure, in 1976, Neave would claim that his ‘approach to terrorism was that of a distraught curate’.20
On 24 November 1975, Stan Orme, the Northern Ireland minister of state, spoke to the House about the killing of three fusiliers who were manning an observation post near Crossmaglen in South Armagh, close to the Irish border. Neave replied aggressively with an attack on Rees.
Is the right hon. Gentleman … aware that much of what he said about the state of affairs in South Armagh will not be received very well on this side of the House … his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland said yesterday that it is bandit country where there has never been a cease-fire? If that is so, why is not the Army being given clear orders to counter-attack and clean it up?
Is the right hon. Gentleman aware of our astonishment at the Secretary of State’s comment that his release of committed and dangerous terrorists has nothing to do with South Armagh when a great many of those detained came from that area?
Finally, when will the Government give evidence of leadership and decision in fighting terrorism, which is the least they owe to the security forces and the people of the United Kingdom?21
This was strong stuff and it produced a rebuke from Orme, who told him he was ‘playing politics with the situation … playing politics with the British Army’. Neave had always been sensitive to personal criticism and careful of parliamentary etiquette. Late in life his concern for correct form seems to have faded, to be replaced by a new boldness and disregard for niceties.
In a way, the new job had taken him back to where he began: doing battle with what he saw as the forces of evil. He seemed to Alistair Cooke, his political adviser, ‘an elderly man … It was hard to resist the impression that … the prominence he had secured had come too late.’22 But Neave still had fire in his belly. He had been given the chance to be a soldier again, a warrior in a dark blue suit. For him, the lines in the conflict were clearly drawn. His sympathies were with the Unionists and their Protestant culture. He respected their identification with Britain and their history of sacrifice in its interests. His views were reinforced by John Biggs-Davison, who was his deputy from 1976.‡ Biggs-Davison, a Catholic, believed that the historical alliance between Conservatives and Unionists had been betrayed by the Heath government’s abolition of the Protestant-dominated Stormont parliament, which had governed Northern Ireland from 1921 until 1973. There would be no dissenting voice from Ian Gow, who joined the team in 1978. A former soldier, he had developed strong Unionist sympathies while serving in Ulster during the IRA’s border campaign of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Neave showed little obvious interest in or empathy with the Nationalist aspect of the conflict. Despite his belief that Britain was engaged in a war with violent Republicanism, he was never prepared to ascribe any honourable motives to the enemy or grant them the status of soldiers. He had no understanding of how men from the council estates of Belfast and Londonderry might regard the British and the Loyalists as oppressors and see themselves as patriots in the mould of the French resisters who had fought the Germans. For Neave, the roles were reversed. It was the gunmen who were the fascists and the security forces who were the freedom fighters. He wrote about them in the same way he had described Germans in the Second World War. On a trip with the army to Armagh in December 1977, he was ‘shocked by the photographs of wanted young people in operations rooms and police stations. The girls look the hardest. There is a fixed look of hatred and malevolence in their eyes.’23
It followed that there should be no negotiations for ceasefires or amnesties, and it was ‘fundamentally wrong’ to hold talks with Provisional Sinn Fein, the political face of the IRA.24 Peter Lilley recalled hearing a story of how Neave was asked whether he would be prepared to talk to the IRA. ‘He said, “Yes. I’d say, ‘Come out with your hands up.”’25 This attitude might have endeared him to the Unionists but it raised the hackles of Northern Ireland’s Nationalists who, however much they disliked the IRA, still felt a tribal sympathy towards them. It invited the enmity of the politicians of the Republic, who saw his remarks as evidence of innate anti-Irishness. Taken together with his advocacy of capital punishment for terrorist crimes, it made him a prime target for Republican gunmen.
Neave’s reputation as a hardliner on security has distracted attention from his attitudes to political policy in Northern Ireland. The impression has formed that he took little interest in moves to end direct rule and reintroduce some measure of democracy and that he shared Biggs-Davison’s view that Ulster should be as fully integrated into the United Kingdom as Yorkshire or Cornwall. Dr Stephen Kelly, an expert on Conservative policy in Northern Ireland during the period, asserts that ‘Neave remained committed to finding a workable solution amongst the political parties in Northern Ireland in the hope of ending direct rule.’26 However, again his interventions created controversy both at home and across the Irish Sea.
Initially, he endorsed the government’s continued commitment to establishing devolution in Northern Ireland, telling the House of Commons in October 1976 that ‘Our policy is for a devolved Government within the province.’27 However, Neave maintained that the violent opposition shown to Sunningdale by the Unionist majority had demonstrated that ‘power sharing on the 1974 model is not practical politics.’28 He began floating his own proposal for the restoration of some substantial local powers to Ulster through an elected regional council or councils in which all parties could get involved. When he laid it out formally in a speech to a Conservative women’s group in Surbiton on 1 February 1978, it generated indignation and alarm in the Northern Ireland Office.
Neave had not given its chief, Roy Mason, any advance warning that it was coming. The speech had provided no details of how sectarian differences were to be managed. An official noted that the plan ‘has no built-in safeguards for the minority community … it would be resolutely opposed by the [mainly Catholic] SDLP§ and by the Irish Government. It would be seen as a reversal of all those steps taken since 1969 to prevent discrimination and unfair local government.’29 A few weeks later, as Neave further publicised the plan, an NIO briefing document judged that he had ‘moved perceptibly nearer OUP [Official Unionist Party] policy and stretched bipartisanship further … [he] says virtually nothing about the crux problem of acceptability, participation and partnership.’30
Neave always denied the charge that he was breaking ranks, maintaining that his plan differed little from the government’s own proposals. He continued to promote the regional council initiative with vigour. In June 1978, Margaret Thatcher told the Ulster Unionist Council that she backed the policy and it was included in the Conservative manifesto for the 1979 election. In the eyes of the NIO civil servants, there was no doubt about where Neave’s sympathies lay. One noted ‘an unusually strong Unionist tinge to Mr Neave which he would be wise to correct’.31
Nonetheless, security remained his prime concern. The ‘first priority’ was ‘the defeat of the fairly small, but utterly ruthless, groups of terrorists who are mainly responsible for the present troubles’.32 He believed that when he took over his new role, official military strategy
was wrong. ‘One of the great mysteries is why no one at the Ministry of Defence discovered for so long that this was a guerrilla war,’ he wrote at the end of 1977. As late as 1976, he had been ‘tartly informed at the highest level that it was an “ordinary infantry operation”.’33 He was soon urging the greater use of unorthodox special forces and the intensification of counter-insurgency intelligence-gathering. According to Alistair Cooke, ‘Neave wanted to employ undercover methods in defence of democracy, just as he had during the war.’ He ‘brought a vital new ingredient to the quest for victory, an insistence on the full deployment of the intelligence services with which he always had close connections. He spent much time with generals, senior policemen and spooks.’34
Early in 1976, government policy had hardened, moving in a direction that was much more to Neave’s liking. In January the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, announced that the SAS were to be officially deployed in Northern Ireland (they had in fact been present in small numbers on surveillance operations since 1973). The Minister of Defence responsible for directing them was Roy Mason, a former miner who in September replaced Rees as Northern Ireland Secretary (Rees was moved to the Home Office). Mason’s arrival brought a marked change in the Ulster atmospherics. The province, he declared, ‘had had enough of [political] initiatives’, and ‘Republican terrorism [would be] treated as a security problem and nothing else.’35
Neave admired the new man, judging that ‘on security at least Mr Mason is a Tory.’36 SAS units took the fight to the IRA in the ‘bandit country’ of South Armagh, forcing them onto the defensive and, according to one member of the regiment, inducing paranoia in the gunmen, so they came to believe ‘there was an SAS man behind every bush.’37 The policy seemed to work. Casualty figures began to fall. In 1976, the death toll was 308. In 1977, it was 116 and in 1978, 88. On a visit to South Armagh in December 1977, Neave ‘felt for the first time that the terrorists were in trouble’. He took backhanded credit for the development, saying that the special counter-terrorist training and covert role for soldiers had ‘brought quick results since Roy Mason took over the office of Secretary of State … and the Security policy of the Conservative Party’.38
The formulation of that policy was largely left to Neave. Margaret Thatcher had little interest in Northern Ireland and let him get on with it. When in 1978 he accompanied her on a fact-finding visit, she did not impress the military with her grasp of the situation. She started by calling at Army HQ for a briefing with the GOC, General Tim Creasey, a burly, shrewd Second World War veteran whose nickname was ‘the Bull’. Michael Rose, then serving as the general’s military assistant and soon to take command of 22 SAS, remembered Thatcher and Neave turning up fifteen minutes early, while his boss was ‘in the loo’. He ‘banged on the door, telling him they were coming up the stairs. She arrived to see the general running down the passage doing up his trousers.’
She greeted him with the words ‘General, I thought the army were never late.’ Creasey was ‘livid’. He replied, ‘The army is never late, but you have had the discourtesy to arrive fifteen minutes early.’ Things did not improve. At the ‘icy and unproductive meeting’ Mrs Thatcher asked ‘some pretty odd questions’, wondering what use the security forces were making of satellites to track terrorists. It was pointed out that there was quite a lot of cloud cover in Northern Ireland and that there was some difficulty identifying from the exosphere who was a terrorist and who an innocent farmer. Although Creasey was still fuming when they left, the general and Mrs Thatcher later became ‘inseparable friends’.39
Neave’s outspoken hostility to the IRA and his advocacy of fighting fire with fire put him, with Mason, at the top of their death list. The first hard evidence of a plot to kill him came only ten months after he took on the Northern Ireland role. In December 1975, the police cornered four members of an IRA ‘Active Service Unit’ in a flat in Balcombe Street, Marylebone. They had taken hostage the couple who lived there and a siege ensued which ended after four days, when the gunmen gave themselves up. Among documents found on them was a sketch map of the Old Vicarage, Ashbury.
There had been security fears a few years before, following a spate of burglaries in the area, and Diana did not like staying there alone. Patrick Neave remembered the security arrangements after his father took the Northern Ireland job as consisting of ‘a policeman coming round in the evening, turning up at the front entrance, turning round and going off again’.40 With Airey’s new duties, his absences would be frequent. Leaving Ashbury would be an enormous emotional wrench. Diana had turned it into a haven, where despite periodic worries about the maintenance costs, they had planned to see out their days. In the end, they decided they had no choice. Even so, they did not depart until November 1976.41 From then on, their constituency base was Old Rectory Cottage, attached to a larger house at Hinton Waldrist, ten miles south-west of Oxford, which they rented from friends.
A few months after the Balcombe Street siege, Republican prisoners pulled off a feat that in other circumstances might have attracted his admiration. On the night of 3–4 May 1976, nine members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) broke out of the Maze prison, south of Belfast. This was formerly the Long Kesh detention centre, which had been set up on a disused RAF airfield to hold paramilitary members; first as detainees, then, as internment was phased out, from 1976 as convicted prisoners. With its wire fences and huts, it looked like a German Stalag and, as in wartime POW camps, the prisoners to a large extent organised themselves. The operation had a strong wartime flavour and the methods used by the INLA men would have been familiar to any Colditz old boy. It began in Compound 5 in November 1975, directed by an ‘escape committee’.42 The plan was to dig a tunnel under the floor that would stretch beyond the surrounding fifteen-feet-high fence. On the other side lay a zone of open ground twenty yards wide that was overlooked by watchtowers and floodlit by night. The last obstacle was a breeze-block wall twenty feet high.
By mid-April 1976, everything was in place and digging began. For three weeks the escapers worked day and night in teams of two, using tools from the camp workshop or smuggled in by visitors, excavating the sandy soil and dumping the spoil between the corrugated steel walls of the hut. The entrance was covered by a trap door made of floor tiles fixed to a thick block of wood. The tunnel was only eighteen inches wide and ventilation was supplied by a pipeline fashioned from bean cans, attached to a blow-heater acquired from the prison authorities. On 3 May, a prisoner noticed a crack in the ground above the path of the tunnel. To hide the evidence, a mattress was thrown on top of the fissure, with the explanation that it had been put there to dry in the sun. But discovery or collapse could come at any time and it was decided that the breakout would take place that night. Ten prisoners were chosen, organised in pairs. First down the tunnel were Harry Flynn and John ‘Eddy’ McNichol. Flynn was from Belfast and had been charged the previous year with robbing a bank in the city and possession of firearms. While awaiting an appearance in the Crumlin Road courthouse, he and some accomplices had escaped through a skylight.43 He made his way to Dublin but, frustrated, penniless and disillusioned, he had returned to the North, where he was arrested at his mother’s house in Belfast. He arrived in the compound some time in February or March 1976, along with a batch of INLA prisoners who included McNichol, a country boy from South Derry.
The premature departure meant that, on breaking ground, the escapers found they were still short of the fence. That contingency had been foreseen and they were able to cut through it with a pair of wire-cutters fashioned from smuggled-in blades and sections from tubular steel chairs. They darted across the floodlit zone without the alarm being raised. Their grappling hook failed to get a purchase on the breeze-block wall, but Flynn made use of a plank lying handily nearby to scramble up and attach it. One man turned back after hurting his leg, but with three hours to go before morning roll-call, nine prisoners were free. Two were quickly recaptured, but the rest got away, with Flynn and McNichol maki
ng it safely to Dublin. This was powerful propaganda for the INLA, and their political wing, the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), presented the feat as their own ‘Great Escape’.
The INLA had emerged from the successive schisms that fragmented the Republican movement once the Troubles broke out again in 1969. The riots that followed the peaceful agitation for civil rights for the Catholic minority in the North demanded a response from the IRA. The Dublin-based leadership was focused on a radical socialist agenda and had turned its back on ‘physical force’ Republicanism, regarding violence as an obstacle to building the alliance of Catholic and Protestant workers needed to achieve their goals. What remained of the IRA in Belfast saw their principal role as defending Catholics from Protestant mobs and a prejudiced police force and had no time for the Southerners’ theorising. In 1969 they split into the ‘Officials’ (OIRA) and ‘Provisionals’ (PIRA).
Five years later the Officials split again. In mid-1972, the leadership had called a ceasefire in response to popular pressure following the shooting of a Catholic British Army soldier while he was home on leave in Londonderry. The policy was resented by a hard core led by Seamus Costello, an articulate, good-looking and charismatic veteran of the IRA campaign along the border in the late 1950s. In December 1974, they broke away to form the IRSP. Initially, they denied having any paramilitary wing, and it was not until January 1976 that responsibility for violent actions was claimed in the name of the INLA. In the meantime, though, its members had been active, largely engaged in robberies, sectarian killings and a murderous feud with their former comrades in the OIRA.
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