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October 3 - October 14, 2019
Faulkner was heavily criticised for the fact that not a single loyalist had been detained, leading to charges of blatant partiality.
To the outside world internment might be seen as a response to IRA violence, but many Catholics in areas such as west Belfast regarded IRA activity as a response to violence from the authorities.
The official rhetoric had it that the time had come for ordinary Catholics to choose between terrorists and the men of peace, the security forces. The flaw in this projection was that, at ghetto street level, the security forces looked not so much like men of peace as agents of a state intent on attacking their neighbourhoods.
The government had imperfect control over the squaddies on the street, who could often look on all Catholics as the enemy.
in the second half of 1971. Of the 150 people who died in that period, almost half were Catholic civilians; and of these around 29 were killed by soldiers.
The party gave its support to a rent and rates strike which was so widely supported that the authorities estimated that 20 per cent of the entire population had joined it. In some areas more than 90 per cent of tenants were involved.
No soldiers were either killed or injured by gunfire or nail-bombs, and no weapons were recovered by the army.
He associated with some loyalist paramilitary organisations such as the UDA. Advocating a semi-independent Northern Ireland he staged a series of Oswald Mosley-style ‘monster rallies’, arriving complete with motorcycle outriders to inspect thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, of men drawn up in military-style formation.
Internment, as well as being disastrously counterproductive on the streets, had also destroyed all hope of early political advance.
The pressure came not just from IRA violence, but from rejection of Stormont by the entire Catholic community.
In the worst month of the entire troubles, July 1972, almost a hundred people died as both republican and loyalist groups went on an uninhibited rampage.
Although there was deep resentment at the removal of Stormont, there were no serious signs of mutiny among the Protestants who predominated in the civil service and the RUC.
Whitelaw moved quickly to improve his relations with nationalists and republicans by releasing a number of internees and making other conciliatory moves. One of the most important of these, which was to have significant long-term consequences, was to defuse a republican hungerstrike by conceding ‘special category status’ to prisoners associated with paramilitary groups.
The very fact that the meeting took place, however, was of great psychological importance in both political and paramilitary circles, being regularly cited in support of the argument that Britain might someday not rule out doing a deal with violent groupings.
Addressing a meeting of the Monday Club group of far-right Conservatives in London he said, ‘I am prepared to come out and shoot and kill.
Disparity in the wealth of the two countries had added to the historical distance between coloniser and colonised, with Irish dependence on British trade reinforcing this. Their simultaneous entry to the EEC, however, helped alter some of the fundamentals of the relationship and increased the south’s international standing.
in February the first loyalists were interned. The move was followed by a one-day strike, backed by a range of loyalist paramilitary and political groupings, which was marked by considerable loyalist violence and five deaths.
a group styling itself the Ulster Workers Council (UWC), consisting of trade unionists and others, some based in key industries with predominantly Protestant workforces. These included shipbuilding, heavy engineering and, above all, electric power generation.
Tyrie and the UDA took the initiative and by the middle of the day UDA members were, as Tyrie put it, ‘persuading’ workers that they should not be working.
within a short time electricity output was reduced to 60 per cent and power cuts forced workplaces to close.
Loyalist sources said the UVF was responsible for the attacks, but some years later it was alleged that British intelligence had played a part,
Wilson referred to loyalists as ‘people who spend their lives sponging on Westminster and British democracy and then systematically assault democratic methods’. He asked contemptuously: ‘Who do they think they are?’
During the strike senior politicians, who would later express horror at any idea of contacts with ‘IRA terrorists’, routinely sat in meetings with representatives of paramilitary groups which had many members serving prison sentences for murder.
Northern republicans such as Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness would later take control of the republican movement, arguing that the mid-1970s leaders had been duped.
The army suffered far fewer casualties in 1975–76, losing 30 men compared to 250 killed during the previous four years. Killings attributed to the army were also well down: 20 people died at the hands of troops in these two years compared to 170 in the years from 1971 to 1974. But the civilian casualty rate remained high as the IRA and loyalists, particularly the UVF, carried out many attacks that resulted in civilian casualties.
Republicans often denied the IRA was involved in sectarian killings and sometimes used a cover name to claim responsibility for attacks. The UVF and UDA, by contrast, made little secret of the fact that they regarded the Catholic population in general as legitimate targets, and made no bones about attacking Catholic bars and other targets with the aim of killing as many as possible.
Many of the group were jailed in a large-scale trial in 1979. Eleven gang members were sentenced on more than a hundred charges which included nineteen murders, receiving a total of 42 life sentences, along with sentences of imprisonment amounting to almost 2,000 years.
IRA assassination of the British ambassador to the Republic, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, in Dublin in July 1976.
a member of the IRA was shot dead by troops at the wheel of a car during a car chase in west Belfast. The vehicle careered out of control and mounted the pavement at a school where a Catholic woman, Anne Maguire, was walking with her three children. The car crushed them all against railings.
Of the more than 3,700 troubles deaths, almost exactly half took place in the period of five years and four months which began when internment was introduced in August 1971.
the Unionist electorate did not punish those representatives whom it felt had protested too much. Those such as Brian Faulkner who were considered too accommodating could be heavily penalised at the polls, but those whose line was thought too hard were not.
The troubles would drag on for a further quarter of a century, but the early months of 1977 mark the halfway point in terms of lives lost.
Mason’s approach caused many loyalists to conclude that it was simply no longer necessary for them to involve themselves in paramilitarism. Mason’s political line, which he pursued with ever-greater confidence following the strike, was to go after the IRA and loyalist paramilitants
the IRA and other paramilitary groups were to be denied any acknowledgement of political motivation, and were to be treated in exactly the same way as those the authorities sarcastically called ‘ordinary decent criminals’.
a desire to change perceptions of the conflict from the colonial war of republican propaganda to that of a campaign against criminal gangs.
Ulsterisation also made broad political sense in that the drop in regular army casualties helped prevent any build-up of sentiment in Britain for a withdrawal from Northern Ireland.
Juries had been abolished following the 1972 Diplock report which had highlighted the fear of paramilitary intimidation of jurors.
Both republicans and loyalists claimed brutality had become routine within Castlereagh and that convictions were being secured ‘through the systematic application of torture techniques’.
During 1978 four members of the IRA were killed in this way, the SAS also accidentally killing three uninvolved civilians in the same year.
with West, Paisley and Baird in control of Unionism there was no prospect of accommodation.
many Irish-Americans simplistically viewed the conflict in Northern Ireland as a classic colonial struggle between British occupying forces and the gallant freedom-fighters of the IRA. In this romantic version of events many complicating factors, including the very existence of the Unionist population, simply did not exist when viewed from across the Atlantic.
To the republican mind, Unionists were not a major problem, being merely puppets of British imperialism. In republican theory the real enemy was Britain; and once Britain had been defeated Unionist resistance would simply collapse.
Adams in particular argued the need for the IRA campaign to be augmented by political action,
Prison staff also became what the IRA termed ‘legitimate targets’, with many killings of off-duty officers.
For the IRA the almost unimaginable horror of the La Mon attack was a disastrous setback, since although it regarded itself as an army, almost the entire world regarded La Mon as sheer terrorism, indefensible on any basis.
The government issued blanket denials of any wrongdoing, Mason describing criticisms as ‘wild allegations’. In his autobiography he listed a series of killings and summed up: ‘Words cannot express the disgust I felt when the people responsible for such evils bleated about the alleged erosion of their human rights.’
one senior judge ruling that a blow to the face which left the nose ‘swollen and caused it to bleed’ did not necessarily mean a subsequent confession was inadmissible as evidence.
a leading police doctor caused a major stir when he said he had seen a large number of people who had been physically ill-treated while in custody.
the much smaller Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) claimed an increasing number of lives from the late 1970s on.
He was among those who challenged the traditional nationalist assertion that the root of the problem was the British presence in Northern Ireland. He argued that the heart of the Irish question was not the British but the Protestants, that the problem was the divisions between Unionist and nationalist, and that partition was not the cause of division but a symptom of it.
