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October 3 - October 14, 2019
Whitelaw would in later years admit that he had made a mistake in introducing special category status, or ‘political status’ as it was called by republicans, and subsequent Labour administrations worked on ways of bringing it to an end.
Prisoners complained of beatings by groups of warders, while outside the prison the IRA went on a systematic offensive against prison officers. Nineteen were killed between 1976 and 1980, with ten dying in 1979, one of whom was deputy governor of the Maze with particular responsibility for the H-blocks.
A frequent Unionist, and sometimes government, misconception throughout the years of protest was that these prisoners were unfortunate victims who were being sacrificed by a ruthless IRA leadership. In fact all the evidence points to an IRA leadership opposed to and frustrated by the tactics of the prisoners.
at any given time there were probably more IRA members in prison than outside: in 1980 for example there were over 800 republican prisoners.
Adams recording that he wrote to the prisoners: ‘We are tactically, strategically, physically and morally opposed to a hungerstrike.’
Seven prisoners, who included one member of the INLA, went on hungerstrike in October 1980.
The second hungerstrike began on 1 March 1981: this was to be a phased exercise, with the first republican to go on hungerstrike being joined at intervals by other inmates from both the IRA and INLA. The first to refuse food was the IRA OC in the Maze, Bobby Sands,
Since Sands’s victory was one of the key events in the development of Sinn Féin as an electoral force, some observers regard it as the genesis of what would eventually become the peace process.
Deaths caused by the security forces increased as troops and police used large numbers of plastic bullets in response to street disturbances. As a result seven Catholics were killed, two of them young girls.
The unyielding attitude of both sides resulted, between May and August 1981, in the deaths of a total of ten hungerstrikers, seven from the IRA and three from the INLA.
The hungerstrike had not technically achieved special category status but in effect it had achieved something much more potent: political status. There could have been no more definitive display of political motivation than the spectacle of ten men giving their lives in an awesome display of self-sacrifice and dedication.
it was not possible to claim that these were indistinguishable from ordinary criminals.
In Britain an extra dimension of condemnation arose from the fact that a number of horses were also killed in the Hyde Park explosion.
In the case of the three IRA men, three policemen were charged with murder. In acquitting them a senior judge generated further controversy when in congratulating them he added: ‘I regard each of the accused as absolutely blameless in this matter. That finding should be put in their record along with my own commendation for their courage and determination in bringing the three deceased men to justice, in this case the final court of justice.’
in 1988 it was announced in the Commons that although evidence had been found of attempts by police officers to pervert the course of justice, there would be no prosecutions on the grounds of national security.
even those who were eventually acquitted generally spent many months behind bars while awaiting trial. The remand record was held by an INLA member who was held on the evidence of five separate supergrasses. All the cases against him eventually collapsed, but in the meantime he spent four years and four months on remand.
In one case a judge described aspects of a supergrass’s testimony as ‘unreliable, false, bizarre and incredible’ but then went on to convict defendants on the basis of other parts of his evidence.
their difficulty lay in converting intelligence into evidence which would stand up in a court of law.
James Prior whom she had despatched to Belfast as a form of exile after he proved too moderate and too ‘wet’ in handling industrial relations
In four elections between 1982 and 1985 Sinn Féin averaged around 12 per cent of the total vote and 40 per cent of the nationalist vote, establishing itself as the fourth largest party
Ireland could become ‘a Cuba off our western coast’. If that happened, he said, one could foresee the whole of Ireland being taken over by the Marxists of Sinn Féin.
Thatcher, and with such brusqueness that she caused a crisis in Anglo-Irish relations. A unitary state, she told the media, was out; a federal Ireland was out; and joint authority was out.
Among the many ideas considered and rejected were joint authority, the placing of an Irish minister in Belfast, and a joint north–south policing zone on the border.
A chilling IRA statement addressed to Thatcher said: ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember, we have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no war.’
the traditional nationalist assumption that the heart of the problem was the British presence. The previous nationalist recipe for solving the problem had therefore been to persuade the British to leave – or, in the view of the IRA, to force them to do so.
The new nationalist theory, as evolved by Hume, FitzGerald and others, rejected many of the old assumptions. In this revised view the key to the problem was not Britain but the Protestant community. The import was that the British presence was not imperialist but neutral,
In the immediate aftermath of the signing of the agreement most attention was focused on Protestant attempts to bring it down.
Loyalist paramilitants launched a systematic campaign of intimidation against RUC personnel, petrol-bombing the homes of police officers: more than 500 police homes were attacked,
Peter Robinson joined a gang of loyalists who staged a late-night incursion into County Monaghan to demonstrate, they claimed, inadequate border security. Security was however sufficient to effect the MP’s arrest, a second humiliation coming when he pleaded guilty in a southern court and paid a £15,000 fine for unlawful assembly.
the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four and Maguire family. In these three cases Irish people had been jailed for lengthy terms, sometimes for life, in connection with bombings in England during the 1970s. In each case Britain resisted Dublin’s arguments that miscarriages of justice had taken place. It was not until the 1990s that all the sentences were quashed, proving Dublin’s point.
Republicans meanwhile pursued a double strategy, attempting to penetrate the political system while at the same time rearming themselves with an arsenal so large that it converted them into one of the world’s best-equipped underground organisations. They did so with the help of the Libyan ruler, Colonel Gaddafi, who gave the IRA an unprecedented amount of weaponry.
The republicans coldly set out to kill more British troops, calculating that this was the way to increase the impact of their violence.
Dublin government was particularly alarmed by the revelation, realising that the IRA now possessed weapons which might even match those available to the Irish army itself.
both the UDA and UVF increased their activity in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Their victims were mainly civilians, 40 of them Catholics and 8 Protestants.
republican violence attracted more attention than did loyalist killings.
A high-level review led to a series of measures which included banning Sinn Féin voices from the airwaves, a loss of remission for paramilitary prisoners, and a partial withdrawal of the right to silence of paramilitary suspects.
the organisation’s members were also killing substantial numbers of civilians, generally by accident. So many were being killed that Adams as Sinn Féin president publicly appealed to IRA volunteers in 1989 to avoid such incidents,
high-level campaigns of violence made civilian deaths an inevitability. The pattern was different on the republican and loyalist sides, in that the latter’s main target grouping was Catholic men.
Republicans would say they deliberately killed only those involved with the security forces, but many Protestants pointed out that most of the victims, deliberate or accidental, were Protestants, and alleged that all or part of the motivation was sectarian.
Pat Finucane, a Belfast solicitor who had represented republican clients in a series of high-profile cases, was shot dead in his home by loyalist gunmen.
The accusation was that he had been such a thorn in the side of the authorities that they had urged loyalists to attack him, and had probably helped them to do so.
the statement by a junior government minister, three weeks before the shooting, that a number of solicitors were ‘unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA’.
A judge and senior police officer both concluded there had been collusion in the attack,
a number of mortar bombs rained down in the vicinity of 10 Downing Street. Major described hearing ‘a tremendous explosion’ but no one was killed or injured even though damage was caused in the back garden of Number 10. The IRA had succeeded in exploding a substantial mortar bomb within yards of the prime minister,
An off-duty RUC constable, Allen Moore, arrived in plain clothes at the Sinn Féin press office on the Falls Road in Belfast, posing as a journalist. Once admitted to the building he produced a pump-action shotgun and turned it on three men in a ground-floor office, killing them all. Constable Moore then drove out of Belfast to a secluded spot and shot himself dead.
Two bombs set off in the City of London, Britain’s financial heartland, actually inflicted more financial damage than all the 10,000 bombs which had ever gone off in Northern Ireland.
setting off a large bomb at Bishopsgate in the heart of the financial district. Again the damage was extraordinary, with estimates of the cost ranging as high as a billion pounds.
the agreement had redefined the whole Irish question: the IRA had traditionally regarded itself as being engaged in an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist freedom struggle, but suddenly the supposed imperialist power had made an important move which was difficult to portray in an imperialist light.
Hume appeared to have breached the general rule that mainstream politicians should not speak to those associated with violence.
The meetings did not inhibit Hume from publicly attacking the IRA. In one scathing denunciation he declared: They are more Irish than the rest of us, they believe. They are the pure master race of Irish. They are the keepers of the holy grail of the nation. That deep-seated attitude, married to their method, has all the hallmarks of undiluted fascism. They have all the other hallmarks of the fascist – the scapegoat – the Brits are to blame for everything, even their own atrocities! They know better than the rest of us.
