The INLA combined high-flown left-wing rhetoric with crude gangsterism. Their operatives were mostly poor and ill-educated, drawn from the Catholic ghettoes of Belfast and Londonderry and the small rural communities of the border counties. However, the group also attracted men and women who saw themselves as socialist intellectuals. The contradictions were encapsulated in the figure of Ronnie Bunting, who taught history after graduating from Queen’s University, Belfast. He was the son of Major Ronald Bunting, a former British army officer and an erratic figure who had at different times been political agent for the SDLP politician Gerry Fitt and a lieutenant of the rabble-rousing loyalist leader Ian Paisley. Ronnie Bunting saw himself as an Irish patriot in the tradition of Theobald Wolfe Tone and Henry Joy McCracken, two eighteenth-century Protestants who, like himself, had risen above sectarianism to embrace the cause of a united Ireland free from British dominance and had died in the effort.
He could be charming but was also manipulative and careless of the damage to those around him that resulted from his actions. According to a childhood friend and distant relation, Walter Ellis, ‘the aura of barely contained violence around him was overwhelming.’44 He identified as an international revolutionary, and looked the part with his bushy sideburns and Zapata moustache. A ‘whole hog man, he had no time for … compromises.’45 What he sought was ‘the creation of a 32-county terrorist Republic ruled by commissars like himself’. He first joined the Officials but was expelled after opposing the ceasefire and became part of a group of enthusiasts for action that coalesced around Seamus Costello, which eventually morphed into the IRSP and INLA. Marriage to a long-suffering girl from a Protestant background, Suzanne Murphy, and the arrival of a daughter did nothing to calm a wild streak that often seemed to border on insanity.46 The feuds that followed the splits meant he had as much to fear from his former comrades as he did from the security forces. In March 1975, he escaped being killed by an OIRA hit squad who shot at him as he was driving near his home in Turf Lodge, Belfast. It was the third attempt on his life and he fled with the family to Wales, before moving to Dublin in July 1975.
When, after their spectacular escape, Harry Flynn and Eddy McNichol arrived in the city, they moved in next to the Buntings, squatting in an apartment in a small block of flats in Pembroke Lane, just south of Dublin city centre. ‘Basher’ (as Flynn was known) and Bunting were Belfast comrades with a shared thirst for action and loyalty to Costello. They had been involved in a number of ‘jobs’ together. The group’s activities had been hampered by a lack of weapons and they had been denied access to the Officials’ armouries. Costello then mounted a series of robberies to finance arms purchases, starting in early 1974 with the ambush of a post office van near Dublin airport. In May, a more ambitious project to rob a mail train near Mallow in Cork was aborted when the inhabitants of a house that the gang tried to take over alerted the police. Bunting’s companions fled, leaving him in a field by the railway line. It was Harry Flynn who went back to rescue him.47
Life in Pembroke Lane was squalid. The flats served as a dosshouse for itinerant INLA men. There was no money and the landlord was too frightened to press for the rent. There were frequent drunken fights and Costello’s visits to check on his men were sometimes greeted with showers of empty cans and bottles.48 This was their way of expressing their displeasure at their leader’s failure to come up with weapons or a concerted plan of action against the ‘Brits’. Frustration with Costello was widespread. By the end of the summer he had lost the support of the Belfast men. He was ousted from his position as the INLA ‘chief of staff’ and replaced by Eddy McNichol. A year later Costello was dead, shot by a gunman from the Official IRA.
By then Bunting was back in Belfast. He had returned in late 1976, to take over as the INLA ‘OC’ in the city, which he would remain until his death. Flynn too returned after the Irish police began seeking him in connection with a bank robbery.49 He was one of the North’s ‘ten most wanted’ men but had managed to stay at liberty for two years, constantly moving from house to house, until returning to Dublin.
For all its revolutionary rhetoric, the INLA had so far failed to make much impact on its enemies. Shortages of material and personnel – in late 1976 the IRSP had only forty members50 – meant that its violent activities were limited to the odd attack on the security forces, carried out primarily to maintain morale and advertise the group’s continued existence. Costello and Bunting agreed that whatever resources they mustered would be better used against high-profile political targets. Their capacity to mount such operations was boosted by a robbery carried out in June 1977. After meticulous preparations, a twelve-man team ambushed a Brinks-Mat security van at Barna Gap, County Limerick, which was stuffed with money after doing the rounds of local banks. The gang included Ronnie Bunting and a young INLA member from Londonderry, Patsy O’Hara, who had fled to the South and will feature later in the story. The operation netted £460,000. They now had the money they needed to buy weaponry and mount a spectacular operation.
The INLA already had friends in the right places. Three years before, the IRSP had been adopted by the ‘West German Ireland Solidarity Committee’, one of whose members belonged to a violent group called the Revolutionary Cells. They in turn were connected to the Fatah wing of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and they put INLA in touch with its intelligence section. The connection had already borne fruit. In 1977, using the £25,000 ransom money extorted by the kidnapping of the son of a Belfast bank official, they bought a small consignment of rifles and grenades, supplied by the PLO and smuggled in by a German sympathiser in his father’s Mercedes saloon.51 Armed with the Brinks-Mat funds, two INLA men, Seamus Ruddy, a 25-year-old language teacher from Newry, and Phelim Lally, a Dubliner, made two trips to Beirut in the summer of 1978. They returned by van with a batch of Kalashnikov rifles, and most importantly in view of what was to come, a cargo of plastic explosive, which they packed into the vehicle’s door panels. It was of Soviet manufacture, a mixture of penthrite and TNT, grey-pink in colour and undetectable by security scanners.
The material was too valuable to be used in conventional operations. The September 1978 issue of the IRSP newspaper, the Starry Plough, gave some indication of the INLA’s plans for it. It reported a speech by Miriam Daly, a left-wing academic and the party’s chairperson, in which she pointed out the discrepancy between the fortunes of ‘Airey Neave [who] built his career on his escape from Colditz Prisoner of War Camp’ and one of the participants in the May 1976 escape from the Maze, Jake McManus, who after recapture had been sentenced to two more years’ imprisonment.
By now Neave was established in the minds, not only of violent Republicans, but of the Nationalists of Northern Ireland and the politicians of the Republic as a friend of Unionism and an implacable opponent of compromise. He approached his task with zeal, disrupting the bipartisan consensus in Westminster and causing irritation and alarm in Whitehall and Downing Street. Almost painfully polite in private, he could be rough in public with politicians, officials and journalists whose views or attitudes he opposed. He came to loathe the BBC. He regarded their studied even-handedness as little short of treasonable. When, in January 1979, TV crews filmed the IRA showing off recently acquired M60 machine guns and setting up checkpoints in a propaganda stunt staged in Londonderry, he claimed they had ‘nurtured the recovery of the terrorist element in Northern Ireland’.52
Before his arrival on the Ulster scene, Conservative and Labour governments alike had trod carefully around the sensibilities of the Northern Nationalists and the Southern government. They received no special consideration from Neave. He saw no significant place for the Republic in the affairs of the North and regarded even theoretical talk of unification of the island of Ireland as provocative and inflammatory. The responses from Dublin were equally robust. Richie Ryan, foreign affairs spokesman of the opposition Fine Gael party, described remarks in one of his speeches as ‘ill-informed, anti-Irish and rabble-rousing’. Neave, h
e said, belonged to a small group of English politicians ‘who knew little about Ireland and understood even less’.53
Was there any truth in this? The bipartisan approach to Ulster’s problems seems unusually delicate in retrospect, and Neave was surely justified in challenging government policy where he saw fit without worrying about established protocol. His own main political proposal for a regional council never looked viable, however. Politics in Northern Ireland were governed by the mutual fears and suspicions of the two communities. No Nationalist party was likely to enter into new governmental arrangements unless they felt their interests had been constitutionally copper-fastened. Neave’s plan, with its vague talk of an ‘appropriate committee system’, came nowhere near providing such reassurance, and when the Thatcher government arrived in power the proposal was soon dropped.
With his aggressive approach to security he was on more solid ground. The policies of Roy Mason – with whom he got on very well, meeting with him regularly – proved effective, and there was no doubt that Neave would have continued the same approach with perhaps even greater vigour. It is now accepted that by the end of 1978, the IRA and INLA were on the defensive and suffering badly, demoralised by arrests, arms seizures and the knowledge that their ranks were riddled with security-forces informers.
As 1979 dawned, it seemed increasingly likely that Neave would soon be in charge of the continuing anti-terrorist campaign. The Callaghan government had been badly damaged by months of public-worker strikes which challenged the notion that only Labour could manage the unions. The party’s three-seat majority had disappeared within a year of the October 1974 election and it relied on minority parties to survive.
On 28 March, Margaret Thatcher tabled a motion of no confidence in the government, which was passed by one vote. A general election was now inevitable. Ulster had played a part in Labour’s downfall. It was claimed later that Neave’s regional council scheme had emboldened the Official Unionists to abandon their support for the government.54 Neave’s death meant that the extent to which this played a part in the drama was never resolved, though Diana revealed that he spent some time on Tuesday 27 March, ‘busy in the House of Commons talking to Ulster Unionists’.55
He had given his first and last big political job his all, bringing to it the thought, dedication and energy that he applied to all the work of his life. To some of the younger Tory aides in the Thatcher team, that energy seemed to be failing and Neave was a peripheral figure who belonged to the past. Matthew Parris, the leader’s correspondence secretary and to whom Neave had been kind, finding him a job with Central Office when he decided to leave the diplomatic service, did not regard him as ‘part of the central driving machine’.56 His political adviser, Alistair Cooke, felt him to be ‘far from robust. [He] walked slowly, talked slowly. Everything about him was slow.’57 Yet as was often the case with Neave, this impression was deceptive. There was work to be done and he was eager to do it.
Just after the government fell, he met Michael Dobbs, then a young adviser to Mrs Thatcher, in her office under Big Ben. He recalled, ‘I sat with him on the sofa in her office for two hours and we just talked … It was the plans for the future, what was going to happen, how we were going to … transform the country.’58 After all the setbacks, snubs and disappointments, his career was going to end on a high note. He had one last job to do.
To Richard Ryder he confided how much he was ‘looking forward to becoming Secretary of State for Northern Ireland … after that he was going to retire.’59
* Ian Gow (1937–90), educated Winchester; served in 15th and 19th Lancers, Malaya and Northern Ireland; Conservative MP for Eastbourne, 1974–90; killed by the IRA, 30 July 1990.
† Following the 1975 Gardiner Committee recommendations, the government announced in March 1976 the phasing out of SCS. Henceforth anyone convicted of a terrorist offence would be treated as an ordinary criminal.
‡ John Biggs-Davison (1918–88), educated Clifton and Magdalen College, Oxford (where he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain); Conservative MP for Chigwell, 1955–74, for Epping Forest, 1974–88; knighted in 1981.
§ The Social Democratic and Labour Party, founded in 1970 by six Stormont MPs and a senator to fight for Catholic civil rights and regarded as the voice of constitutional Nationalism in Ulster.
13
‘The Perfect Target’
The bomb went off two minutes before Big Ben struck 3 p.m. The blast sounded in the Commons chamber, where a handful of members were debating the Credit Union Bill, but with a sangfroid of which the victim would have approved, they carried on business regardless. Richard Ryder had spent half an hour with Airey a few hours previously, ‘just chatting’ in his Commons ‘cell’, 202 Star Chamber Court. He heard ‘this massive explosion … a mammoth explosion’ and ran to the window of Mrs Thatcher’s office, which overlooked New Palace Yard. Directly below, on the exit ramp of the underground car park, he saw ‘this car – just blown to smithereens … I knew this car. I’d been in it. But I didn’t put the two together.’1
The bomb removed Neave’s right leg, two inches below the knee, and shattered the bones in the other. According to the medical report to the coroner, there were ‘lacerations on the back of the left elbow and multiple small punctuate lacerations with scorching under the chin and on the face under the nose and over the left eye and cheek. The hair was singed …’
It took time for ambulancemen, medics and firefighters to free him. A policeman, PC Peter Dickens, retrieved a wallet which contained ‘correspondence in the name of Airey Neave MP’. There was another delay while the wreckage was checked for further bombs before an ambulance took him, alive but unconscious, to the resuscitation room at Westminster Hospital. There, at 3.45 p.m., on Friday, 30 March 1979, ‘life was pronounced extinct.’ The pathologist’s report found death to be due to ‘shock following bomb blast injuries of the legs’.2
That morning, John Chilcot, principal private secretary to the Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, had dictated a memo concerning security arrangements for politicians in the coming general election. It stated that he had ‘specifically asked the Commissioner [of the Metropolitan Police] to consider questions of personal protection, including not only the coverage of those ministers who already enjoy it (including the Leader of the Opposition and two ex-Prime Ministers) but also extended coverage to other political personalities who might be especially vulnerable during an election campaign (with special reference to Mr Whitelaw and Mr Airey Neave).’3
The Commissioner, Sir David McNee, had ‘taken delivery of this’, while reminding Chilcot of the ‘manpower implications of any significant extension of coverage’. He went on to tell him that ‘there is no present reason to foresee assassination threats of political personalities during the campaign.’ However, the Metropolitan Police had ‘the matter very much in mind’.
McNee’s assurance appears odd in the light of the murder of the British ambassador to the Netherlands eight days before. Sir Richard Sykes had been shot dead, along with his manservant, as they left the residence in The Hague to go to the embassy on the morning of 22 March, apparently by the IRA.
Given Neave’s history of hostility to Republican paramilitaries, it now seems extraordinary that he did not already have a police bodyguard. McNee later said that he had pressed him to accept ‘a personal protection officer because of the known threat to his life’.4 The offer had been rejected: ‘He made it clear that if as an Englishman he could not walk the streets of London freely, life for him was truly not worth living.’ McNee ‘understood and respected his view’, which was not unique to Neave. The Home Office files reveal that the former Prime Minister Lord Home (Alec Douglas-Home) had also turned down police protection. Official documents confirm McNee’s story. One Home Office report states that ‘Special Branch had been in touch with [Neave] for some years, in fact since 1975, and that he did not want tight personal protection but had been in regular consultation over his weekly programme.�
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Airey Neave was a soft target for the gunmen, who had observed his progress towards power with alarm and mounting hatred. In town, his way of life broke every rule of basic security. His London address was listed in Who’s Who. Patrick Neave remembered that ‘in those days, Westminster Gardens was a community of quite a few people who you knew, and that was your protection. They had very old porters who knew you, but apart from that, nothing.’6 His father’s daily routine was fairly predictable. Each morning he usually set off for the Commons or to the Bloomsbury offices of Northern Engineering Industries (as Clarke Chapman had been renamed), where he was a non-executive director. The company provided him with a light-blue Vauxhall Cavalier, which he drove everywhere. Residents of Westminster Gardens used a service road at the side of the block as a car park. There was no gate and no CCTV cameras.
Joy Robilliard’s statement to the coroner’s inquest held in October that year said that the car park at Tavistock House (East), Woburn Walk, WC1, where NEI had its offices, was ‘not a secure one and open-air. I know that Mr Neave on one occasion left his car open there and I understand it is customary to leave keys in the front-rank cars so that they can be moved by an attendant.’7 Her boss on occasion left ‘identifying correspondence in his vehicle’. In her statement to the police, Diana said that her husband was a creature of habit and, on returning at night to Westminster Gardens, he was ‘likely to park in his usual place in the service road’.
Neave was perfectly aware of the dangers. According to William, ‘My father knew he was taking some immense risks.’8 Why such insouciance? ‘He wasn’t a healthy man,’ reflects William. ‘He must have being saying to himself, “What is my life span here? I can afford to take these risks.” I think that must have been the thought that went through his mind.’
The Man Who Was Saturday Page 28