The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace

by Tim Pat Coogan

the reality on the ground in the North was that the British Army was the IRA’s best recruiting agent. The saturation was such that at one stage there were 2, 000 soldiers billeted in Paddy Devlin’s Belfast constituency alone, one to every ten voters. On a specimen Saturday night Devlin counted thirty army vehicles in the district. Soldiers moved along in groups of twenty or more, dispersed on both sides of the streets, guns at the ready. There were no police to be seen. He describes the effect of the army methodology with characteristic vigour: I was downright angry at the mindless harassment, degrading obstruction and casual brutality the soldiers meted out to all who came in their path. I spent hours boiling over in anger and frustration, incoherent with rage, complaining to arrogant, overbearing British officers who failed to see the damage they were doing, the way they were walking into the trap the ruthless Provos had laid for them and how they were only acting as recruiting sergeants for the Provos.2 Devlin also singles out a factor which was to be of crucial importance in tipping the Six Counties into anarchy later in 1971: the quality of military intelligence. Devlin terms this ‘appalling’. He says: They failed to understand that many families shared common surnames, but were not related in any way… they arrested fathers when they wanted the sons and the sons when they were after the fathers. Innocent teenage boys and old men thus found themselves held at the point...