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

by David McKittrick

In 1971 more than 170 people were killed; a further 2,600 were injured and 17,000 homes were searched. Unsurprisingly, there was massive alienation from authority. 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 many thousands of house searches, often carried out as routine rather than as a result of information, similarly generated much bitterness. The authorities said they were a military necessity but the inevitable disruption and indignities generated great resentment among those inconvenienced, many of whom had no republican connections.

All of this meant that many non-republicans and their families became radicalised and often became republicans. But in the wake of internment Catholic alienation was almost complete, stretching well beyond republican districts.

In the wake of internment the problem had become one of battling simply to keep the administration functioning.

December brought an incident with one of the highest civilian death tolls in the troubles: a small Catholic bar in north Belfast, McGurk’s, was blown up with the loss of fifteen lives. A powerful explosion caused the old building to collapse, reducing it to smouldering rubble. Local people, members of the security forces and emergency crews pulled away the debris with their bare hands. The attack was the work of the UVF which, together with the UDA, was growing in strength in areas such as the Shankill as loyalists became more and more anxious about the army’s evident inability to defeat or even contain the IRA. UVF involvement was confirmed years later when a member of the organisation confessed and was jailed for life. At the time, however, both Stormont government and army sources flatly denied that loyalists were responsible, claiming that both forensic and intelligence evidence showed that the IRA was to blame. They alleged the bombing was not an attack on the pub but the premature explosion of a device which was being stored inside it. These false claims, disputed at the time by the IRA and nationalist representatives, fuelled nationalist alienation from the authorities, who had of course argued that no loyalists were dangerous enough to be interned.

The worst year of the troubles was 1972, its death toll of almost five hundred far exceeding that of any other year. Fourteen of those deaths occurred in Londonderry on 30 January, in what was to be remembered as one of the key events of the troubles, Bloody Sunday. What happened on that day was to drive even more men and youths into paramilitary groups. Thirteen people were killed and another thirteen were injured, one fatally, when soldiers of the Parachute Regiment and other units opened fire following a large illegal civil rights march in Londonderry city.

Father Daly said later: ‘A lot of the younger people in Derry who may have been more pacifist became quite militant as a result of it. People who were there on that day and who saw what happened were absolutely enraged by it and just wanted to seek some kind of revenge for it. In later years many young people I visited in prison told me quite explicitly that they would never have become involved in the IRA but for what they witnessed, and heard of happening, on Bloody Sunday.’ In his memoirs Gerry Adams wrote: ‘Money, guns and recruits flooded into the IRA.’

In his memoirs, ambassador Sir John Peck wrote: Bloody Sunday had unleashed a wave of fury and exasperation the like of which I had never encountered in my life, in Egypt or Cyprus or anywhere else. Hatred of the British was intense. Someone had summed it up: ‘We are all IRA now.’ The already shaky position of Jack Lynch, the Irish Taoiseach, was now extremely precarious, and the threat posed by the IRA to democratic institutions in the Republic would now be far more serious.

Early March brought a particularly shocking IRA attack when a bomb went off in a popular Belfast city centre bar, the Abercorn, on a busy Saturday afternoon. Two young women were killed and seventy others were injured.

Two weeks later came another horrendous incident when seven people were killed by a 200lb IRA car bomb left in Donegall Street, close to Belfast city centre, following contradictory telephoned warnings. The explosion injured 150 people, including many who were fleeing from a bomb scare in an adjoining street.

When Faulkner received another summons to go to London on 22 March, it was for a meeting which would spell the end of Unionist government. He appears to have been totally surprised when Heath announced that he wanted to begin phasing out internment, to take over control of security, and to move towards powersharing with Catholics.

Stormont adjourned for the last time at 4.15 p.m. on 28 March, ending an existence of just over half a century.

It is certainly true that violence increased greatly in August 1971, though it is also probably true that it would have gone up in any case, given that both the IRA and loyalist groups were becoming bigger and more organised, as the increase in IRA violence and the bombing of McGurk’s bar testified. Nonetheless, three events taken together – the introduction of internment, Bloody Sunday and the fall of Stormont – served to trigger the worst violence ever seen in Northern Ireland.

The 1972 figure of almost 500 killings stands as a vivid illustration of the lethal depths to which the troubles descended. There were almost 2,000 explosions and over 10,000 shooting incidents, an average of around 30 shootings per day. Almost 5,000 people were injured. Almost 2,000 armed robberies netted £800,000, most of it going into paramilitary coffers. 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. As the year opened, 17,000 soldiers were available for duty; when it ended a series of hasty reinforcements had brought the figure to 29,000.

Direct rule was intended as very much a temporary system while a cross-community successor to the Stormont system was devised. In London, responsibility was transferred from the Home Office to a new department, the Northern Ireland Office (NIO). Its first head, who was known as the Northern Ireland Secretary, or more often in Belfast as the Secretary of State, was William Whitelaw.

Horror piled on horror in July 1972. The restlessness of the mid-1960s had first degenerated into the violent clashes of August 1969 and now descended further into killings at a rate of three a day. That month had many of the features which were to become all too familiar as the troubles went on. Republicans killed Protestants while loyalists claimed Catholic lives, often with particular savagery. On 11 July a number of drunken loyalists broke into the home of a Catholic family, killing a mentally handicapped youth and raping his mother.

Republicans meanwhile set off bombs which killed large numbers of people. Nine died in Belfast on what came to be known as Bloody Friday, as the IRA detonated twenty devices in just over an hour, injuring 130 others and producing widespread confusion and fear in many parts of the city.

Brian Faulkner wrote: ‘Few Ulster people will forget seeing on television young policemen shovelling human remains into plastic bags in Oxford Street.’

Yet still the horror continued. On the last day of the month nine people, including a child and old people, were killed by IRA car bombs left in the previously peaceful County Londonderry village of Claudy. Apart from the human tragedy involved, both Bloody Friday and Claudy were seen at the time as major political setbacks for the IRA. The security forces were able to capitalise by moving into Londonderry, in a massive exercise known as Operation Motorman, to remove the ‘no-go areas’ which had been controlled by the IRA. But although this was a short-term setback for the republicans their campaign of violence went on regardless. At the beginning of 1972 the IRA had predicted imminent victory: by the middle of the year, both they and the authorities were geared up for a conflict that both rightly suspected could be long and bloody.

At the beginning of 1973 the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic became members of the European Economic Community (EEC), a development which over time had a major effect on Anglo-Irish relations.

Security force arguments that loyalist violence was too unplanned to be susceptible to internment became steadily less tenable, and in February the first loyalists were interned.

On the republican side the IRA gradually changed the emphasis from open confrontations and car bombings to more carefully planned sniping attacks, together with bombing attacks in England. Bombs planted in London in March 1973 led to one death and almost two hundred injuries, the first of many sporadic but often spectacular IRA attacks in England which in the course of the troubles would take more than a hundred lives. This figure was low in relation to the overall death toll, but the political impact of attacks in Britain was often great.

Although taken overall the year was a clear improvement on 1972, the continuing violence provided an unhelpful backdrop to attempts to build a new politics based on harmony and partnership. The total figure of 265 killings meant that hardly a newspaper or evening television programme did not bring news of either a killing or a funeral.

The next step was to assemble the three parties which would form the executive, together with the London and Dublin governments. They met at a civil service training centre at Sunningdale in Berkshire in late 1973, the deal which emerged from it becoming known thereafter as the Sunningdale Agreement.

The first day of January 1974 was intended to be a historic day for Northern Ireland as the powersharing executive took office.

Politically it was certainly light years away from the Stormont majority rule system, for instead of the traditional all-Unionist cabinet the executive included prominent nationalists.

But right from the start it was beleaguered, facing as it did opposition both from the IRA and from a majority of the Protestant population. The IRA sought outright victory, while many Unionists simply would not accept the new deal. Some Unionists feared the new arrangements were the start of a slippery slope towards a united Ireland; others simply could not abide the thought of having Catholics in government. All this meant that while the new arrangements had majority support within the assembly, and indeed within Northern Ireland as a whole, they had the support of fewer than half of Unionist voters and politicians.

A further problem for the executive was that the Sunningdale Agreement was in reality an agreement to reach an agreement, with much remaining to be finalised.

The April announcement that there was not to be extradition of IRA suspects from the south to the north handed the UUUC another weapon to use against Faulkner, the common loyalist charge being that the south was soft on the IRA.

One assembly official recalled in his memoirs: ‘Ministers, especially Faulkner, were abused verbally on every occasion and sometimes even physically. Faulkner was spat upon, jostled, reviled and shouted down. It was sad to see him spat upon by lesser men, political pygmies and procedural bullies and wild men of the woods and the bogs.’

Although loyalist one-day strikes had been staged on a number of occasions in 1972 and 1973, the fact that they almost invariably degenerated into violence meant the tactic was generally looked on as discredited. The strike of May 1974 was different in that it had an obvious and vulnerable target to attack in the form of the Sunningdale Agreement and the executive, featuring as it did such Unionist hate-figures as Fitt and Currie.

The army took the straightforward position that their job was to combat terrorism and not to curb street protests, an approach outlined years later in an interview by the late General Sir Frank King, who was then General Officer Commanding of troops in Northern Ireland. He related: When the strike started I remember having a conference and deciding not to get mixed up in it. What amazed us at the time was that we never had any aggro at all with the strikers. They never once stopped an army vehicle – as far as we were concerned it was almost as if the strike was not on at all. Dealing with intimidation was a police job. The fact that the RUC didn’t do too much about it was no concern of ours. We were angry at the time but it wasn’t our job. If Rees had ordered us to move against the barricades we would have said, ‘With great respect, this is a job for the police. We will assist them if you wish, but it’s not terrorism.’ During the strike there was, in fact, a bombing attack which claimed more lives than almost any other single incident in the troubles, but it took place not in the north but south of the border. This was what came to be known as the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, which on the third day of the strike killed twenty-five people in Dublin and a further seven in the border town of Monaghan. Three separate car bombs went off without warning in Dublin, causing carnage during the evening rush hour.

Loyalist sources said the UVF was responsible for the attacks, but some years later it was alleged that British intelligence had played a part, a claim which led to a long-running campaign by relatives for an inquiry into the episode.

Whatever the initial reactions of the Protestant middle class to an exercise so clearly enforced by paramilitaries, many of its members came to endorse the strike. In his memoirs Rees recalled returning late one evening to the Culloden hotel in affluent north Down. Describing walking through the plush lounge largely occupied by Protestant customers, he remembered: ‘The cry of “traitor” came in unison, a spontaneous response of anger. We the Brits were the outsiders.’

A reluctant decision by the Wilson government to use the army to break the loyalist control of petrol and oil supplies, largely at the insistence of executive members, made things worse. In a petulant television broadcast known thereafter as the ‘spongers speech’, 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?’ The description infuriated almost all Unionists, one senior assembly official describing it as ‘catastrophically unhelpful’. In the days that followed many loyalists proudly and defiantly sported pieces of sponge in their lapels.

After two weeks of the strike, and after Rees had refused Faulkner’s call to him to open talks with the strike leaders, Faulkner concluded that there was no help for the executive and resigned. It was the end of a unique constitutional experiment which had taken almost two years of hard work to construct, but which survived for only five months. Following Faulkner’s resignation, Rees announced the winding-up of the executive, and the two governments and the powersharing parties trudged dispiritedly back to square one.

Rees himself would later argue in a television documentary: ‘I didn’t let them win. They were going to win anyway. It could not be done, that’s the short answer. The police were on the brink of not carrying out their duties and the middle class were on the strikers’ side. This wasn’t just an industrial dispute. This was the Protestant people of Northern Ireland rising up against Sunningdale and it could not be shot down.’

Until May 1974 many in the south had airily assumed that northern Protestants would come to see that they had been simply wrongheaded in opposing partnership and eventual Irish unity. But the strike, coupled with the carnage of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, brought home the extent of loyalist determination to oppose what they regarded as dangerous.

A collective nationalist rejection of the old Stormont had eventually brought that institution down; now Unionists had managed to destroy its successor. The analysis that there appeared to be a double veto, with Unionists and nationalists able to deny the other what they wanted, caused a great many to conclude that this was a problem without a solution. That element of Unionism which had been prepared to share power virtually disappeared overnight. Rees went back to the drawing board in search of some new avenue of progress. He found none, since Unionists and loyalists, suffused with the glow of their victory, were in no mood to accept anything other than a return to majority rule.

The IRA’s killing rate had halved, from 280 in 1972 to 280 in the following two years, but it remained the major taker of life. Although Whitelaw had concluded in 1972 that his meeting with the IRA had been useless, Rees again put out feelers towards the republicans. In this he appears to have been encouraged by the NIO’s most senior civil servant, Sir Frank Cooper, who had a reputation for being both forceful and devious. In 1974 Rees legalised both Sinn Féin, the IRA’s political wing, and the UVF, partly to facilitate the business of talking to them. Republicans and loyalists were regularly invited to Laneside, a large government-owned house in a plush area of County Down, for informal chats with officials. The talks which ensued, there and elsewhere, helped lead to IRA ceasefires in 1974 and 1975. There are many conflicting accounts about what was conveyed and why, with allegations that the officials involved in the discussions led republicans to believe that their goal of British withdrawal was a distinct possibility. It was certainly an era of furtive contacts and murmured assurances: many mysteries persist about what was said and what was meant. There is no real evidence however that a British withdrawal was ever intended, whatever was discussed at Laneside.

The contacts did not at first result in a reduction of IRA violence. In the autumn of 1974 the IRA maintained a concerted campaign not just in Northern Ireland but also in England with a number of bombings which were to have lengthy legal sequels. Explosions at bars in Birmingham killed 21 people and injured almost 200 more, while 7 people died in the bombings of pubs in Guildford and Woolwich. While the IRA inflicted much damage on people and property it also suffered numerous casualties. By the beginning of 1974, almost 150 of its members had been killed, and hundreds more were behind bars.

In 1974, as contacts between the IRA and the government developed, there was no shortage of official and unofficial go-betweens. In one unprecedented move a group of senior northern Protestant churchmen travelled south to meet IRA leaders at Feakle in County Clare, reporting back to NIO officials on their talks. IRA demands which included a British declaration of intent to withdraw were conveyed to Rees, the IRA promising a cessation of violence in return. The organisation next delivered a brief ceasefire over the 1974 Christmas period. Rees responded by signing no new internment orders and giving an assurance that security force activity would be scaled down. He also sanctioned official contacts with the republicans to supplement the many unofficial contacts. The IRA ceasefire survived into 1975 and, despite IRA complaints that the British were not responding to their proposals, it was extended and in Februar...

The formal ceasefire lasted for much of 1975 but was often breached. A number of members of the security forces were killed in attacks which the IRA characterised as retaliations for official breaches of the ceasefire. Overall in 1975, 33 security force personnel died, exactly half the toll of the previous year. Loyalist violence remained at a high level with both the UDA and UVF highly active. The IRA responded by becoming embroiled in what were described as sectarian ‘tit-for-tat’ exchanges, with more than forty Protestants killed in 1975 and January 1976. A few of them had loyalist connections but most were chosen at random. The attacks included an attack on an Orange Order meeting in south Armagh in which five were killed, a bombing and shooting attack on a Shankill Road pub which also killed five, and the killings of ten Protestant workmen, again in south Armagh, in retaliation for loyalist killings.

A violent Provisional IRA feud with the Official IRA in the autumn of 1975 added to the death toll.

By early November the ceasefire existed only in name and the incident centres were closed. In December Rees released the final internees and declared internment to be over, but was able to tell the Commons that in 1975 more than 1,100 people had been charged with paramilitary offences, and that the prison population had risen by 40 per cent. Meanwhile, of course, no steps towards British withdrawal had been taken. In fact, during the ceasefire period the authorities had been carefully planning a new security phase.

Northern Ireland, after its first four decades of sullen stability, had gone through the political unrest of the 1960s followed by large-scale violence and constitutional upheavals: nobody was really sure what might come next, and many feared the worst. A common observation in shops and pubs at the time was, ‘It’ll get worse before it gets better.’

The years 1975 and 1976 were a time of major violence which claimed almost six hundred lives. The IRA was as ever the highest single taker of life though loyalist groups were highly active. 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. These included many bombings and shootings which caused multiple deaths. The IRA attacked a number of Protestant bars, while the UVF and UDA targeted many Catholic pubs.

A few incidents stand out. One was the January 1976 IRA attack, at Kingsmills in south Armagh, on a coachload of Protestant workmen, following a wave of anti-Catholic attacks by the UVF. IRA gunmen lined up the workmen at the side of the road and opened fire with at least four weapons, killing ten men. Also well-remembered are the actions of the IRA unit which became known as the Balcombe Street gang in and around London. They carried out up to fifty bombings and shootings in the London area during 1974 and 1975, especially an intense burst of violent activity in late 1975 which included no-warning bomb attacks on pubs and other premises. Fifteen people were killed.

Loyalists were more unabashedly and consistently secta...

In one UVF killing spree on a single day in October 1975 twelve people died in an unprecedented wave of shootings and bombings. Most of those killed were Catholic, though the death toll included four UVF members killed when their own bomb exploded prematurely. Thirteen UVF bombs went off during the day. One of the UVF members involved in the killings was Lenny Murphy, who was later to be killed by the IRA. He was leader of the Shankill Butchers gang, a collection of UVF members responsible for a large number of murders which together make up what are probably the most notorious sequence of killings in Northern Ireland. The deaths, which stretched over many years, included both sectarian killings and many loyalist feud deaths. They included shootings, bombings and in particular killings carried out with knives and by savage beatings. The most infamous were those of seven Catholics who between 1975 and 1977 were picked up at random during the hours of darkness. The victims were selected solely for their religion. They were then killed with implements such as cleavers, axes and the butchers’ knives which earned the gang their nickname. Some had their throats cut and others were tortured.