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

by Tim Pat Coogan

Incredibly, no guns were used by anyone during the fighting. The young Martin McGuinness, who later emerged as the IRA chieftain of Derry, and subsequently vice-chairman of Sinn Fein, is remembered only for being an active stone-thrower throughout. During the rioting prompted by Burntollet a radio transmitter had found its way to the Bogside, apparently ‘borrowed’ from Athlone army barracks in the Republic. This came into the hands of McCann and those working with him in Derry, who used it to broadcast rebel songs and exhortations such as ‘Keep the murderers out. Don’t weaken now. Make every stone and petrol bomb count.’ They made appeals to ‘every able-bodied man in Ireland, who believes in freedom’ to come to Derry. How able-bodied all those who arrived were is a matter of conjecture, but it is a matter of record that a high percentage of the practising revolutionaries and anarchists of Europe did descend on Derry like moths drawn to a light. In order to draw off police strength from Derry, phone calls went out from the DCD to other centres in the north. The result was an outburst of ferocious rioting across the Six Counties, in Coalisland, Armagh, Dungannon and Belfast. In Belfast, as we shall see shortly, the upheavals were far more serious than in Derry. But it was Dublin that really put up the temperature. Mild-mannered Jack Lynch, the Republic’s prime minister, went on television and announced that the Irish Government was sending army field hospitals to the border ...