Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict

by David McKittrick

The events were an unwelcome reminder that for all the talk of modernisation, old enmities continued to simmer not far below the surface.

During the 1960s a number of Catholic voices emerged that not only criticised Unionism, as was traditional, but also argued for greater Catholic participation in the state.

It was against this background that Catholics and nationalists chanced upon a powerful new political instrument in the form of the civil rights movement.

In 1967 a committee emerged styling itself the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), but from the start activists in many districts organised themselves with little or no reference to the supposed leadership. While NICRA was never more than the notional directing force, the theme of civil rights was to catch the imagination of the very many Catholics who were not members of any organised body. In 1968 it was to galvanise the Catholic community politically.

NICRA had a shopping list of demands which included one man – one vote, the redrawing of electoral boundaries, anti-discrimination legislation, a points system for housing allocation, the repeal of the Special Powers Act, and the disbanding of the B Specials.

The civil rights movement encompassed supporters of the Nationalist party, members and supporters of the IRA, communists, liberals, trade unionists, assorted left-wingers and radicals, exuberant students, middle-class professionals and many more, united in a fluid coalition which was not to last for long before splitting back into its constituent components.

The movement’s principal activity was the staging of marches designed to generate media coverage and publicise the cause. The movement was much influenced by the model of Martin Luther King and the black civil rights movement in America, though it was also to draw inspiration from the street activities of students and others in Paris, Prague and elsewhere.

The movement’s first manifestation, in terms of generating publicity and highlighting an issue, came in 1968 when Austin Currie, a young Nationalist MP, staged a protest by squatting in a house in the County Tyrone village of Caledon near Dungannon. The episode has come to be regarded as a seminal moment in Northern Ireland’s history, some even regarding it as the start of the troubles, or at least as the spark which ignited the bonfire.

The house at the centre of the controversy was allocated, by a local Unionist party councillor, to a nineteen-year-old unmarried Protestant girl. She was secretary to the councillor’s solicitor, who was also a Unionist parliamentary candidate. The girl was given the house in preference to two Catholic families, who had squatted for a time in the district, and who had complained that the same councillor had opposed the building of houses for Catholic tenants in the Dungannon area. A few days after the girl moved in, Catholic squatters in the house next door were evicted by police, with full television coverage. Currie, an energetic MP who was to have a long political career, raised the matter unsuccessfully both with the local council and at Stormont. Following a heated debate he was ordered to leave the Commons chamber. He then symbolically occupied the girl’s house, remaining in it for some hours before being evicted by the RUC.

Thousands attended a public rally addressed by Currie a few days after the squatting incident, and in August the civil rights movement staged its first protest march, from the village of Coalisland to the town of Dungannon.

It is no exaggeration to say that the next civil rights march made history, for the violence which accompanied it transformed Northern Ireland politics. The march, in the city of Londonderry on 5 October 1968, was organised by a left-wing group which was hopeful of provoking the authorities into confrontation. That strategy worked. First William Craig, O’Neill’s particularly hardline Minister for Home Affairs, banned the march, a move which swelled the numbers attending it. Then the RUC spectacularly overreacted, using water cannon and batons on an obviously peaceful group of marchers.

Crucially, a Dublin television cameraman was on hand to capture the RUC actions on film. In particular he recorded the scene as a senior RUC officer uninhibitedly used a long blackthorn stick, the official symbol of his authority, to rain heavy blows indiscriminately on a number of marchers. The pictures of the officer fiercely laying about the demonstrators, then turning towards the camera, wild-eyed and almost out of control, were shown repeatedly at the time. In the years that followed the film clip was broadcast on television hundreds and perhaps thousands of times, making an appearance in almost all accounts of how the troubles broke out.

The events in Londonderry on 5 October caused an explosion of anger within the wider Catholic community. It guaranteed the civil rights movement a level of support in Northern Ireland and far beyond that was to prove irresistible. In the days and weeks afterwards, marches, sit-ins, demonstrations, protests and court appearances became almost daily occurrences.

to some Unionists the civil rights movement was simply the IRA and other anti-partitionists in a different guise, ostensibly asking for civil rights but actually intent on attacking the British connection. This analysis led many Unionists to oppose any concessions to the movement.

that the IRA was intimately involved in the civil rights movement,

The civil rights banner gave the new-style IRA the chance to operate on another front and it enthusiastically backed the new phenomenon.

‘While there is evidence that members of the IRA are active in the civil rights organisation, there is no sign that they are in any sense dominant or in a position to control or direct policy.’

Ken Bloomfield summed up in his memoirs the pattern of events of the next four years as one of ‘pressure for reform constantly increasing, agonising debate about further concession, and the announcement too late of compromises no longer acceptable to anyone. In a rising market, Unionism constantly tried, unsuccessfully, to buy reform at last year’s prices.’

known as ‘the crossroads speech’. Declaring that Northern Ireland was at a crossroads, O’Neill called for restraint from all citizens, saying a minority of agitators was responsible for starting the trouble in Londonderry ‘but the tinder for that fire in the form of grievances, real or imaginary, had been building up for years’. To civil rights campaigners and the Catholic community he said, ‘Your voice has been heard.’ To Unionists he said: ‘Unionism armed with justice will be a stronger cause than Unionism armed merely with strength.’ Addressing both sides, he asked, ‘What kind of Ulster do you want? A happy and respected province, in good standing with the rest of the UK, or a place continually torn apart by riots and demonstrations, and regarded as a political outcast?’

The weeks which followed brought more and more demonstrations, with the RUC struggling to cope with so much unrest and street activity. The force, which had just over 3,000 members, was unused to dealing with so many marches and so much appalling publicity.

In a final irony, just before he left office O’Neill managed to push one man – one vote through the cabinet, but the divisions in his party were too deep to allow him to continue.

The Unionist machine was beginning to splinter into its constituent parts: O’Neill had not put the machine together, and did not know how to fix it.

The crunch came in August 1969, the crisis sparked off by controversy over a parade. The Apprentice Boys of Derry, an organisation similar to the Orange Order, wished to stage its traditional march in Londonderry. Both Stormont and the Wilson government debated for some time on whether the march should be allowed, concerned that there could be a major flare-up in the tinderbox atmosphere of the time. In the end permission was given and the feared eruption duly took place, as early skirmishes between Catholics and Protestants escalated into what came to be known as the Battle of the Bogside. This amounted to something close to a full-scale uprising on the part of residents of the Bogside, a Catholic enclave close to Londonderry city centre.

The running street battles meant that the police eventually became exhausted. Instead of abating, however, the trouble spread to other places including Belfast. This took place after a number of civil rights leaders called for diversionary activities outside Londonderry to ‘take the heat’ off the Bogsiders. Although most of those who made the call did not mean to stir up violence it broke out on a large scale, in particular in north and west Belfast.

The result was violence involving large numbers of Protestants and Catholics, centring on the Falls and in the Ardoyne–Crumlin Road area of north Belfast. Ancient guns came out of their attic hiding places, sending rifle and pistol shots ringing down the backstreets. Hundreds of houses were set on fire. Thousands of stones and other missiles were thrown, and barricades were erected across streets. The RUC staged baton charges, crowds surging back and forward between Protestant and Catholic areas.

Amid all the chaos and destruction eight people lay dead, four of them killed by the RUC and another by B Specials. The police force, which was then only 3,000-strong, had reached its limits and with its men exhausted and in many cases injured Chichester-Clark asked London to send in troops to restore order. He did so with the greatest reluctance, since Wilson and Callaghan had already made it clear that they did not wish to deploy the military. They had also made it clear that if troops did go in, the political balance between Belfast and London would change fundamentally, since they would not place the army under Stormont control. When the first troops marched nervously on to the streets of Londonderry and Belfast, therefore, they did so with many political strings attached.

The arrival of the soldiers was welcomed by Catholics and brought a temporary respite from the violence, but as the smoke cleared the extent of the damage became all too clear. In addition to the eight deaths at least 750 people were injured, 150 of them having suffered gunshot wounds. 180 homes and other buildings were demolished, and 90 required major repair. Compensation was estimated to cost at least £2.25 million. Around 1,800 families had fled their homes in the disturbances: the sight of their pathetic belongings being heaped on to lorries provided one of the abiding images of the troubles.

The damage caused by the violence of August 1969 was not confined to the strictly physical. It deepened community divisions and increased bitterness, and it wrecked whatever relationship existed between a large proportion of the Catholic community and the RUC. Part of the Bogside became a ‘no-go area’, sealed off by barricades which remained in position until 1972.

There were many stories of B Specials and on occasion RUC officers acting in concert with loyalist rioters during battles with Catholics. These reports sealed the fate of the B Specials, who were to be disbanded within months, and represented another grievous blow to the credibility of the RUC.

Within a short time London had pushed through a reform package which included the end of the B Specials, an overhaul of policing and other measures. Less than two months after the mid-August violence the committee investigating policing, headed by Lord Hunt, recommended a thorough-going reform of the RUC, including its disarming, together with the abolition of the B Specials. A few months later an English policeman, Sir Arthur Young, was appointed head of the RUC with a brief to modernise the force.

Publication of the Hunt report was the occasion not just for political controversy but serious violence. Loyalists rioted on the Shankill Road in protest against the reforms, the irony being that when the Protestant guns came out they killed a member of the RUC. Constable Victor Arbuckle, the first member of the force to die in the troubles, was shot by loyalists protesting in defence of the RUC.

Whether those in power in London, Belfast or Dublin liked it or not, and most did not, the violence of August 1969 brought the southern state into the northern political equation. In the years that followed, Dublin never again extricated itself from the Northern Ireland issue, though the south’s private position was very different from its public position that Irish unity was the only solution.

The northern violence also brought about hugely important changes within republicanism. Of the 1,800 families who fled their homes, the Catholic community had very much come off worst. 1,500 of those who moved were Catholic, which meant that more than 5 per cent of all Catholic households in Belfast were displaced. More than 80 per cent of the premises damaged were occupied by Catholics, and six of the eight people killed in mid-August were Catholics. Since one of the roles of the IRA was supposed to be the defence of such areas against incursions by the security forces or loyalists, much criticism was directed against the organisation for its evident ineffectiveness. The bitter phrase ‘IRA – I ran away’ is famously said to have appeared on a wall in the Falls Road area, reflecting the feelings of working-class nationalists in west and north Belfast that the IRA had failed them. The first great hero of republicanism was Wolfe Tone, who was associated with the 1798 rebellion and the aspiration of bringing together Catholics and Protestants in the common name of Irishman. Although that was the high mythic theory of republicanism, the practical reality was that the majority of Catholics did not support the IRA, and looked to them only in times of high tension. In such times, and August 1969 was one of them, the IRA was supposed to protect areas such as the Falls and Ardoyne against attack. The death toll, the pattern of destruction of property and the high number of Catholic ...

By 1969 the IRA was guided by left-wing theory and essentially led from the south of Ireland. It was so strongly wedded to the theory of forging working-class unity between Protestants and Catholics that even the August 1969 spasm of sectarian violence was not enough to shift its leadership from this quixotic notion. It was against this background that the fateful split occurred, late in 1969, which brought into being the Official and Provisional wings of the IRA. Broadly speaking the Officials were Marxists while the Provisionals were republican traditionalists, many of whom had been unhappy for some time with the IRA’s direction. (They took their name from the proclamation used in the 1916 rising, which referred to a provisional government for a new Republic. The Officials technically retained leadership of the organisation, but the Provisionals were quickly to become the more numerous.)

On the surface, calm had been restored by the arrival of troops, but in the backstreets both republicans and loyalists were readying themselves for future bouts of confrontation.

In June three Protestant men were shot dead by the IRA in north Belfast during large-scale rioting following an Orange march.

1970

In early July came the Falls Road curfew, which can be seen as a final poisoning of the initially good relationship between Catholics and British troops. Following a confrontation between soldiers and locals, a large area of the Lower Falls district was sealed off by the army for several days while soldiers were sent in to conduct rigorous house-to-house searches. The exercise entailed ordering perhaps 20,000 people not to leave their homes. The searches uncovered more than one hundred weapons but in the process considerable damage was done to hundreds of households as soldiers prised up floorboards and ransacked rooms. In addition to such personal indignities there were four deaths, all caused by the army: three men were shot dead by troops while a fourth was crushed by a military vehicle. None of those killed had any IRA or other extreme connections. The sense that the army was being deployed against the general Catholic population was compounded when troops brought in two Unionist ministers to tour the area in armoured cars.

A moderate local councillor wrote: ‘Overnight the population turned from neutral or even sympathetic support for the military to outright hatred of everything related to the security forces. I witnessed voters and workers turn against us to join the Provisionals. Even some of our most dedicated workers and supporters turned against us.’

in August the first two RUC officers to be killed by the IRA died in south Armagh.

Important developments took place within nationalism, north and south, in the second half of 1970. The civil rights movement faded in importance, to be superseded by a new grouping, the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP), as the principal voice of nationalism in the north. The party consisted principally of anti-Unionist Stormont MPs, some from the labour tradition and some who had come to prominence in the civil rights movement. With Gerry Fitt as leader and John Hume as its chief strategist, the party would remain the largest northern nationalist grouping for most of the troubles.

In Belfast the sense of crisis grew with an escalation of violence in early 1971. In February the deaths took place, on the same night in north Belfast, of the first soldier to be shot by the IRA, and the first IRA member to be shot by the army. Three days later an IRA bomb placed on a County Tyrone mountain for members of the security forces instead killed five civilians on their way to service a BBC transmitter. Later in the same month two policemen were shot dead, again in north Belfast.

In March came an incident which was regarded as a new low point. Three Scottish soldiers who had been drinking off-duty in a Belfast bar were lured to a lonely road on the outskirts of the city and shot dead by the IRA. The huge impact of their killings is still remembered by many as one of the key points in Northern Ireland’s descent into full-scale violence. Three soldiers had already died in the troubles, but the Scottish soldiers were the first to be killed off-duty; two of them were brothers who were aged only seventeen and eighteen.

Internment meant stepping outside the rule of law and abandoning legal procedures in favour of simply rounding up suspects and putting them behind bars without benefit of trial.

The steadily rising graph of shootings and bombings, as well as the street rioting in republican districts, contributed to the sense that something had to be done.

So it was that in the early hours of 9 August 1971 a large-scale arrest operation, codenamed Operation Demetrius, was launched, with thousands of troops and police despatched to round up the IRA. The first swoops resulted in around 340 arrests, but almost immediately it became clear that little was going according to plan. It quickly emerged that the RUC Special Branch had not kept pace with the rapidly expanding Provisional IRA and that its files were out of date and inaccurate. In any event many IRA men, suspecting that internment was on the way, had already gone on the run.

Many of those held were released within hours or days, often traumatised, radicalised and infuriated by the experience. It later emerged that more than a dozen suspects had been given special experimental interrogation treatment. They were subjected to sensory deprivation techniques which included the denial of sleep and food and being forced to stand spreadeagled against a wall for long periods. Taped electronic ‘white noise’ sounds were continuously played to complete the disorientation. Years later the European Court of Human Rights characterised this episode as ‘inhuman and degrading’ treatment.

In the immediate aftermath of the first arrests widespread violence broke out in many areas, with major gun battles between the army and the IRA sometimes lasting for hours.

Far from halting the violence, internment increased it tremendously. In 1971, before 9 August 31 people were killed; in the rest of August 35 died. Between 9 August and the end of the year around 150 people were killed. The dead included soldiers, members of the IRA and many civilians.

The use of internment was to continue for another four years, during which time it attracted much condemnation of Britain and never looked like defeating the IRA.

Sir John Peck, then British ambassador to Dublin, wrote later: ‘Internment attacked the Catholic community as a whole. What was worse, it was directed solely against the Catholics, although there were many Protestants who provided just as strong grounds for internment.’