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

by David McKittrick

Many of the group were jailed in a large-scale trial in 1979.

One incident which sent shock waves through Anglo-Irish relations was the IRA assassination of the British ambassador to the Republic, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, in Dublin in July 1976. The attack took place just beyond the gates of his County Dublin official residence: his car was blown up by a landmine, killing him and his secretary. He had been ambassador for only twelve days before his death.

No one could know it at the time, but late 1976 and early 1977 were to mark the end of the most violent phase of the troubles.

Roy Mason, who took over as Northern Ireland Secretary in September 1976, was very different from Merlyn Rees in both style and substance.

Almost from the start he made a number of strategic choices. While Rees had maintained contact with republicans with the aim of gaining ceasefires, Mason quickly made it clear that he was in the more straightforward business of defeating the IRA.

Concluding that a search for political agreement among the parties was pointless, Mason instead concentrated on security and the economy in the hope that militant republicanism could be defeated by a mixture of security force activity and job creation.

What is not in question is that the level of violence plummeted so dramatically around this time that 1977 can only be regarded as an important turning point in the troubles.

The 308 deaths of 1976 were followed by only 116 in 1977. 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.

Among important strategic changes to security and political policy were the concepts of ‘criminalisation’ and ‘Ulsterisation’. The first meant that 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’.

Ulsterisation was a play on the word ‘Vietnamisation’, the process by which the US army in Vietnam had recruited and trained locals to take the place of US troops in the front line. In a Belfast context this involved planning a gradual decrease in the number of regular troops and their replacement by an expanded RUC and UDR. It also meant what was known as ‘police primacy’, giving the RUC the lead in security matters and placing the army largely under its direction.

The policy brought about striking changes in casualty patterns. In 1972, 110 regular soldiers and 40 locally recruited personnel were killed. For 1976 the corresponding figures were 14 and 40, with local deaths out-numbering the deaths of regular troops in almost every year of the decade that followed.

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.

Internment had been ended at the end of 1975, and an alternative approach was developed to put paramilitants and especially IRA members behind bars using the criminal courts. Since the early 1970s the trials of defendants charged with troubles-related offences had taken place not before a jury but before a single judge. Juries had been abolished following the 1972 Diplock report which had highlighted the fear of paramilitary intimidation of jurors. For the same reason witnesses were in short supply and very often refused to testify. Forensic evidence was of some use, but the authorities realised that the most effective way of securing convictions was to extract confessions from the accused.

This simple fact became the new central plank of the RUC’s battle with the IRA and loyalist groups. Its detective ranks were reorganised, with specialist collators appointed, in the largely pre-computer age, to amass and analyse every scrap of evidence. Trained teams of interrogators were then put to work in new specially designed interrogation centres, most notably at Castlereagh in east Belfast. IRA and loyalist suspects were rounded up ...

Lengthy remand periods meant that even those eventually acquitted were often taken off the streets for more than a year.

Before long, most cases heard by the non-jury courts consisted of the prosecution producing an incriminating statement or statements which the defendant was said to have made voluntarily while in Castlereagh or one of the other interrogation centres. The classic defence in such cases was for the defendant to say that the statement was not admissible in evidence because it had been extracted through either physical or psychological ill-treatment. The outcome of the trial would then turn on whether the judge ruled that the statement had been extracted by fair and legal means or whether detectives had extracted it through threats or by beatings. Both republicans and loyalists claimed brutality had become routine within Castlereagh and that convictions were being secured ‘through the systematic application of torture techniques’.

Other aspects of security policy also became decidedly tougher, with increased use of the army’s undercover SAS regiment to stage ambushes in which IRA members were shot. During 1978 four members of the IRA were killed in this way, the SAS also accidentally killing three uninvolved civilians in the same year.

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. This enabled the IRA to obtain both money and guns from Irish-Americans.

To cope with the British long haul the IRA would develop what came to be known as the ‘long war’, a war of attrition which it accepted would have to go on for years. The IRA fell back on hoping that political stalemate, continued violence, occasional attacks in Britain, international pressure, the enormous cost and the apparent insolubility of the problem would ultimately sap Britain’s will to stay in Northern Ireland. 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, who in this deeply militaristic movement always thought in conspicuously political terms, was to write: ‘There is now a realisation in republican circles that armed struggle on its own is inadequate and that non-armed forms of political struggle are at least as important.’

The same northern leadership that was urging more emphasis on politics was simultaneously reshaping the IRA into a more effective killing machine. The IRA was partly reorganised into a cell structure in order to guard against the effects of informers and interrogation. It also widened its range of targets, killing a number of senior business figures and explaining in statements that such individuals were attempting to stabilise the economy and were therefore ‘part of the British war machine’.

February 1978 brought another of those events which recurred periodically during the republican campaign, in which the IRA both inflicted great human tragedy and damaged its own interests. This was the bombing of La Mon House, a small hotel on the outskirts of east Belfast. IRA members attached a bomb to a grille on a window, as they had done at several other business premises, and made off. But unlike other occasions the warning given was inadequate and the premises had not been evacuated when the device went off. The result was devastating. The device produced an effect similar to napalm, sending a fireball rushing through the window and through a room containing dozens of people attending the annual dinner-dance of the Irish Collie Club. A waitress said later: ‘People were on fire, actually burning alive. I watched men pulling long curtains off the rails and wrapping people up in them to try to put out the flames. I could smell the burning flesh. I didn’t realise at the time what I was smelling but I realised later what that dreadful stench was.’ The explosion killed twelve people, seven of them women, and injured more than thirty others.

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. In IRA terms this was one of the lowest points of the troubles, giving the authorities great scope to move against them.

It soon became apparent, however, that although the world at large had recoiled from the horror of La Mon the republican core support had remained loyal. But it was clear that the IRA was at a low ebb, the La Mon attack demoralising its members and the Castlereagh system sending a steady stream of them behind bars, either for lengthy periods on remand or for even lengthier sentences following conviction.

The anticipated ceasefire never arrived, and things began to go wrong for the authorities in terms of the Castlereagh system. This was producing results in putting republicans behind bars, but in the process it was attracting more and more criticism.

Interrogation was not a gentle business. Questioning, by rotating teams of detectives, could go on for six to eight hours a day with few breaks, and even long into the night. The courts threw out some cases, but for the most part allowed detectives a great degree of latitude, 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. The assumption was widespread that fists were being freely used in Castlereagh and elsewhere.

A 1978 Amnesty International report concluded that ‘maltreatment of suspected terrorists by the RUC has taken place with sufficient frequency to warrant the establishment of a public inquiry to investigate it’. Under pressure from this and numerous other allegations the government established a judicial committee to investigate.

When it appeared in 1979 the official report judiciously steered away from making direct accusations against the police, but made dozens of recommendations which taken together amounted to a programme for a complete overhaul of interrogation safeguards and complaints procedures. Once these were enacted the level of complaints dropped dramatically.

Hopes for an IRA ceasefire faded as Mason’s assessments were shown up as unrealistic. While he had talked enthusiastically of rolling the IRA up ‘like a tube of toothpaste’, a leaked 1979 army document written by a senior army officer painted a very different picture of the organisation. He wrote: There is a stratum of intelligent, astute and experienced terrorists who provide the backbone of the organization. Our evidence of the calibre of rank-and-file terrorists does not support the view that they are merely mindless hooligans drawn from the unemployed and unemployable. The IRA will probably continue to recruit the men it needs. They will still be able to attract enough people with leadership talent, good education and manual skills to continue to enhance their all-around professionalism. By reorganizing on cellular lines, PIRA has become much less dependent on public support than in the past and is less vulnerable to penetration by informers. The campaign is likely to continue while the British remain in Northern Ireland.

The election of the Thatcher government in May brought a new Northern Ireland Secretary in the shape of Humphrey Atkins, who is remembered as a less forthright and less forceful minister than Mason. The Thatcher government had only been in office a few months when two events on a single day, 27 August, created a major security crisis. These were the assassination of the Queen’s cousin, Lord Mountbatten, and the deaths of eighteen soldiers at Warrenpoint in County Down.

The deaths of the soldiers and Mountbatten had a huge impact, sparking a major Anglo-Irish political crisis and marking out that day as one of the most dramatic of the troubles.

August 1979 cruelly shattered hopes that the troubles might be tailing off, leaving Northern Ireland to face the unpalatable fact that violent conflict looked set to continue indefinitely, and that the long war still had a long way to run.

In 1972 William Whitelaw had granted what was known as ‘special category status’ to prisoners associated with paramilitary groups. He had done so to defuse a hungerstrike by republican prisoners, at a time when he was anxious to open exploratory links to the IRA.

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.

To a large extent they controlled their own compounds. They wore their own clothes, were not forced to work, and were allowed additional visits and parcels. Prisoners and prison officers went their parallel but largely separate ways, with soldiers guarding the perimeter. The prisoners, divided into compounds by organisation, basically ran their own lives. It was this semblance of prisoner-of-war status which Rees had decided should end.

The authorities shied away from the idea of removing special category status from those inmates who already had it, correctly surmising that any such attempt would result in major disturbances. In late 1975 Rees announced that from early 1976 special category status would be phased out, with newly convicted prisoners expected to wear prison uniform, carry out prison work and have only limited association with other prisoners. These prisoners would be held not in the compounds but in newly built cell blocks in another part of the prison. These became known, because of their shape, as the H-blocks. Furthermore, there was to be an end to the segregation of paramilitary and non-paramilitary inmates.

Loyalist prisoners initially objected to the changes and briefly staged protests but reluctantly accepted the new circumstances.

From the autumn of 1976 on, republican prisoners refused to put on prison clothes, and were punished by being kept in their cells wrapped only in a blanket. A refusal to wear prison uniform left prisoners naked, confined almost permanently to cells and regularly punished for non-conforming by three days ‘on the boards’ when all cell furniture was removed. Without uniform there were no family visits and remission was lost, which in practice could double the time spent in prison.

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.

Up to that point they had left their cells to wash, empty their chamber pots, have showers and attend mass. Now they refused to leave the cells at all, leaving prison officers to empty the chamber pots. The clashes this led to meant that excrement and urine literally became weapons in the war between prisoners and prison officers. The no wash protest quickly became the ‘dirty protest’ with the remains of food and the overflowing chamber pots left in cells. Soon the protest was again escalated, prisoners spreading their excrement on the cell walls. As conditions reached dangerous levels with maggot infestations and the threat of disease, the prison authorities forcibly removed prisoners to allow cells to be steam-cleaned with special equipment. The prison authorities also responded with forcible baths, shaves and haircuts of protesting prisoners. The dirty protest succeeded in its aim of winning publicity for the prisoners.

Although a major propaganda war raged between the republicans and the government from then on, there was still only minimal sympathy for the protesters. By 1980 even this extraordinary protest had become part of the prison routine, republican veteran Joe Cahill reluctantly concluding that ‘the main demonstrations on the H-block issue have remained within the nationalist ghetto areas’.

In 1980 the prisoners decided to employ what was seen as their ultimate weapon: a hungerstrike. It was a tactic with a chequered but revered place in republican history, being regarded as close to the ultimate in self-sacrifice and possible martyrdom.

Seven prisoners, who included one member of the INLA, went on hungerstrike in October 1980. Republicans abandoned their other protests, ending the killing of prison officers and winding down the dirty protest. There were five demands: the right to wear their own clothes; no prison-dictated work; free association; weekly letters, visits and parcels, and the restoration of all remission lost as a result of the protests.

Their adversary in chief was Margaret Thatcher, whose reputation as the Iron Lady was partly to stem from her stance during this period.

As the hungerstrike began she stated: ‘I want this to be utterly clear – the government will never concede political status to the hungerstrikers or to any others convicted of criminal offences.’

In December 1980, when one of the hungerstrikers lost his sight and was removed to a Belfast hospital, by all accounts on the point of death, the prisoners called off the hungerstrike amid much confusion. Although Sinn Féin initially claimed victory, it soon emerged that the prisoners had not triumphed. Exactly what concessions had been promised, how they were supposed to be implemented, and whose fault the breakdown was has been the subject of much debate. What was clear, however, was that prisoners had not won their demands, and as this became clear plans were laid for a second hungerstrike.

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, whose name was to become known all over the world. Sands was to be joined on hungerstrike after two weeks by another inmate and then another each week thereafter, with the purpose of creating ever-increasing pressure on the government. In launching the second hungerstrike Sands and the others again rejected the advice of the outside IRA leadership. The IRA felt the hungerstrikes represented a serious diversion of resources of all kinds from their main campaign of violence, and feared another damaging and divisive failure.

The fact that IRA violence continued, including the killing of a young mother in Londonderry, merely hardened the characteristic Thatcher resolve. She observed that ‘if Mr Sands persisted in his wish to commit suicide, that was his choice’.

Five days after Sands began refusing food, independent nationalist MP Frank Maguire died suddenly, creating a by-election in the Fermanagh–South Tyrone Westminster constituency. Maguire’s brother was dissuaded by republicans from going forward, and Sands became the sole nationalist candidate. In the election he beat Harry West, the former Unionist party leader who was attempting a comeback, to win the seat by 30,492 votes to 29,046 on an 87 per cent poll. It was a propaganda victory of huge proportions for the IRA, made possible by the widespread nationalist sense that Thatcher was adopting altogether too rigid a stance. 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. At the time, however, it made no difference to the government’s attitude, and the stalemate continued.

Sands died at 1.17 a.m. on 5 May, instantly becoming one of republicanism’s most revered martyrs. Thatcher coldly informed the Commons that ‘Mr Sands was a convicted criminal. He chose to take his own life. It was a choice his organisation did not allow to many of its victims.’ But although there was little sympathy in Britain, his death generated a huge wave of emotion and anger among republicans and nationalists, an estimated 100,000 people attending his funeral. From the wider world came much international criticism of Britain and of Thatcher, who was widely condemned for inflexibility.