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

by Tim Pat Coogan

And for a very good reason: there was no IRA. The IRA’s last border campaign had officially concluded in 1962. In fact it had been virtually finished since 1957. It was, as I have described it, largely a border campaign. Groups of young southern Republicans attacked targets along the border. They were motivated by the old tradition of ‘a rising in every generation’ which had inspired the men of 1916.

In fact the IRA had in a sense recognised their lack of support in one vital area, the Republic, as far back as 1954. In that year the organisation introduced Standing Order Number Eight as official IRA policy. It said: Volunteers are strictly forbidden to take any militant action against 26-Co. Forces under any circumstances whatsoever. The importance of this Order in present circumstances, especially in Border areas, cannot be overemphasized… Volunteers arrested during training or in possession of arms will point out that the arms were for use against the British Forces of Occupation only.56 This order had been prompted by a recognition of the fact that the years since the civil war, particularly those of World War II, when de Valera ruthlessly made use of emergency powers to cripple the organisation, had demonstrated that the south would not tolerate a physical force policy against the state.

NICRA’s demands, which were: the ending of the plural voting system in council elections, simplified into a call for ‘one man, one vote’; an end to discrimination and gerrymandering; machinery to deal with complaints against public authorities; the disbandment of the B-Specials; fair play in public housing allocation; and an end to the Special Powers Act,

That was how things were in those revolutionary days. The tide of civil rights was running so strongly that it swept up all sorts of people in one wave, only to drop them off in the next breaker. The original IRA/communist motivators were amongst its earliest casualties. The IRA’s only contribution to the movement was in the stewarding services provided by some of its members. Throughout its short life it remained non-violent, non-sectarian, a genuinely cross-party (and creed) mass movement, aimed not at a united Ireland, but at reform within the system. Its song was ‘We Shall Overcome’, not ‘A Nation Once Again’. In fact, this absence of a Nationalist goal disgusted many old-guard Republicans and was a major contributory factor in the emergence of the Provisional IRA just over a year later.

Nevertheless, before the civil rights movement got going, the package would probably have appeased the Catholics. As the Belfast Telegraph writer Barry White correctly judged: ‘In just forty-eight days since the first Derry march, the Catholic community had obtained more political gains than it had in forty-seven years.’

For a moment it appeared that the broadcast had worked. Craig was one of the few in Cabinet to put his head over the parapet to venture a criticism. Borne up by a tide of goodwill, O’Neill promptly sacked him. The parliamentary Unionist Party supported O’Neill on the issue by a majority of 29–0, with four abstentions. In Belfast, the Belfast Telegraph, then the most influential paper in the province, ran an ‘I’m backing O’Neill’ coupon which was eventually signed by 150, 000 people. This, in percentage terms, would have represented more than five million people in Britain. In Dublin, the Sunday Independent voted O’Neill ‘Man of the Year’. More importantly, the civil rights leadership in both Belfast and Derry agreed to call a halt to marches for the time being. For a moment a pie crust of optimism formed over the bubbling, poisonous northern stew.

Several of the prominent figures in the civil rights movement, including Cooper, Currie and Hume, criticised the PD for being deliberately provocative and indulging in a dangerous coat-trailing exercise by setting out to walk through Loyalist towns. To this day many people feel that the situation would somehow have settled down had the students not marched. It might have done, but would Paisley and company? The PD march has to be regarded as one of the catalytic moments of the tragedy. But had the conditions not existed to generate tragedy the march either would not have taken place, or else would have produced nothing more than blisters and a few head colds.

what Eamonn McCann has described as a ‘…horrific seventy-three-mile trek which dredged to the surface all the accumulated political filth of fifty Unionist years’. There was very little hostility from ordinary people along the way. But there was organised harassment. The students were frequently ambushed by groups of men armed with stones and clubs. The RUC only intervened to prevent the marchers from entering towns they wished to walk through, ‘for their own protection’. Otherwise the police offered no protection and were often observed chatting cordially with the attackers.

One prominent northern personality who had a daughter on the march contacted some former colleagues in the IRA to ask them to keep an eye on the students. The first intimation the marchers had of this unasked-for protection came when a marcher got up to relieve himself outside a barn one night and bumped into a man with a shotgun. The incident gives an accurate insight into the state both of policing and of the IRA’s armament at the time.

The marchers were halted for half an hour or so by the police, less than a mile from the bridge. By now, hundreds of sympathisers had joined the marchers, who were accompanied by around eighty policemen. Farrell, the principal organiser, was given the impression by the police that there would be some stoning ahead, but that ‘…it was only going to be a very minor sort of a skirmish’. He says now: ‘I’ve always wondered since then whether the hold-up… was so that the attackers could get better organised before we arrived because we were definitely led into an ambush by the police.’ Bernadette Devlin has painted a vivid picture of what happened: …from lanes at each side of the road a curtain of bricks and boulders and bottles brought the march to a halt. From the lanes burst hordes of screaming people wielding planks of wood, bottles, laths, iron bars, crowbars, cudgels studded with nails, and they waded into the march beating hell out of everybody…12

When things quietened down Farrell made his way back to the ambush site to see if there were any injured stragglers. This is what he saw: …the ambushers, who were wearing little armbands, and the police were standing around chatting and smoking quite happily. There was no attempt by the police to disperse them, arrest them or anything like that. They were just literally standing around having a chat and a smoke. I sort of observed this for a minute or two until some policeman said to me, ‘For God’s sake get out of here, they’ll kill you.’ I got out of it as fast as I could… the collusion was complete.

in Derry the battered marchers were given a heroes’ welcome at a reception organised by their former critics, Hume and his colleagues. All argument fades before a gallant deed.

When this had died away, and the city had gone to sleep, a crowd of policemen entered the Bogside at about 2 a.m., shouting and singing.13 They smashed windows and demanded that ‘the Fenian bastards’ come out and fight. Even if they did not come out to fight, unwary householders who came to doors or windows were either beaten up or stoned. In one street, St Columb’s Well, John McMenamin owned the only phone. Never very fond of pop music at the best of times, McMenamin was particularly underwhelmed by a version of the Monkees’ hit which the forces of law and order had adopted as their theme song for the occasion: Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees, And we’re going to monkey around Till we see your blood flowing All along the ground. He picked up his phone, dialled 999 and had been put through to the RUC’s Victoria Barracks before he realised the absurdity of his action. The drunken mob, bawling and brawling outside his door, were the police. He hung up. His example, metaphorically speaking, would be followed by many of Northern Ireland’s working-class Catholics before the year was out. The next day the slogan ‘You are now entering Free Derry’ appeared at the entrance to St Columb’s Well. The first barricades of the Troubles went up,

In stark terms she encapsulated the problem facing Northern Ireland, the challenge facing the House and the fate around the corner for many an unfortunate British soldier – service in Northern Ireland. She said: The question before the House, in view of the apathy, neglect and lack of understanding which this House has shown to these people in Ulster whom it claims to represent, is how in the shortest space it can make up for fifty years of neglect, apathy and lack of understanding. Short of producing miracles such as factories overnight in Derry and homes overnight in practically every area of Northern Ireland, what can we do? If British troops are sent in I should not like to be either the mother or sister of an unfortunate soldier stationed there.

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 ...

On 14 August the battle of the Bogside had reached a crucial stage. The exhausted police were being pushed back when suddenly the advancing Bogsiders caught sight of a force of B-Specials moving forward. There was consternation. McCann writes: Undoubtedly they would use guns. The possibility that there was going to be a massacre struck hundreds of people simultaneously. ‘Have we guns?’ people shouted to one another, hoping that someone would know… suddenly fearful of what was about to happen.28 It was at that moment that the troops were first sighted. The initial response of the people was one of delight – the appearance of the troops meant that the Bogsiders had beaten the RUC – but as McCann observed there was confusion too: ‘It was not in our history to make British soldiers welcome.’

In all, the three months of July, August and September 1969 are said to have caused 1, 505 Catholic families and 315 Protestant to flee their homes. The Protestants generally fled to the east of the city; many of the Catholics across the border to the Republic. The Irish Army set up camps to cope with the flood of refugees, catering for some 6, 000 at one camp alone, Gormanstown in Co. Meath, off the main Belfast–Dublin road.

With reports of riot and insurrection coming in from all sides, the Stormont Government authorised a number of steps which had the effect of making a bad situation worse. In Belfast, Shorland armoured personnel carriers mounted with heavy Browning machine guns were deployed by the RUC. The sound of these weapons, magnified in built-up areas, spread panic. The bullets tore through walls as if they were cardboard. A nine-year-old boy, Patrick Rooney, was killed as he lay asleep, leaving his distraught father to scrape his brains off the wall with a spoon and a saucer.

It was felt that direct rule ‘would put the British soldiers under pressure from the Republicans and the Catholics’. Both Healey and Callaghan, the two ministers most affected, argued that the Cabinet’s interest lay in working: …through the Protestant Government. The Protestants are the majority and we can’t afford to alienate them as well as the Catholics and find ourselves ruling Northern Ireland directly as a colony. We have also to be on the side of the Catholic minority and try to help and protect them against their persecutors.

these experiences could provide a seedbed for the emergence of the most ruthlessly efficient guerrilla force to appear in western Europe since the ending of World War II.

the complex of little red-brick terraced ‘kitchen houses’ that earned the Clonard area the nickname ‘little India’. Bombay Street, Cawnpore Street, Kashmir Road, Lucknow Street, are the sort of names one sees on the street signs, ghosts from an imperial past that returned to haunt those London decision-takers, and their satraps, who found themselves dealing with the detritus of empire. For ‘little India’ is also one of the Belfast IRA’s heartlands. There can be few families in the district who have not had one or more relatives involved. A casual check in a pub, or with a family, will generally turn up someone who has been jailed, beaten up, interned, or shot for Republican activity.

…carry on, no matter what odds are against you… carry on no matter what torments are inflicted on you. The road to freedom is paved with suffering, hardship and torture, carry on my gallant and brave comrades until that certain day.

In that year the monastery was a focal point, as it had been since it was built in the 1830s, of a great deal of religious and charitable activity. Prior to August 1969, the early Protestant resentment at having such a bastion of Catholicism erected alongside a Protestant stronghold seemed to have evaporated. During World War II both Protestants and Catholics had huddled together in the monastery cellars to avoid German bombs (Belfast suffered far more, for example, than Coventry from German attacks). Many a food parcel found its way from the monastery discreetly to needy Protestant families, even though the young braves of both Catholicism and Protestantism were prone to periodic outbursts of fisticuffs.

The news of the attack spread like wild fire, the attack on the Clonard area, and men came speeding from their work, to protect their homes, to protect their families, to protect their church. And goodness knows they had very little with which to protect themselves. Comparatively speaking you could say that the men in this district were defenceless. Within the space of one hour I anointed five people, on the road out there. Fearing a real massacre I got on the phone, and I had to go across the roadway to do it because our phone was out of order. I got on to the offices of the GOC of the British forces in Lisburn. The GOC was not available, but the officer who took the call said he would do his best to help. At about seven in the evening the first group of soldiers arrived.

The young lad, Gerard McAuley, to whom the priest referred, was fifteen years old and a member of the IRA’s Na Fianna, or youth wing. He was helping Catholics to evacuate their homes when he was shot by a Protestant sniper. The Provisional IRA regard him as the first martyr of the troubles.

August 1969 saw two crude notions of liberty come into conflict. One side, the Protestant, was admittedly open to the definition of being every bit as supremacist as the South African Boers of the period, the comparison being heightened by similarities in attitude and religion. Nevertheless, there was a sense of defending a heritage of Britishness and of freedom of religion. The other side, the Catholic, from which came the Provisional IRA, could be said to have emerged from the mists of history and the burnings of August, but at base, they too were moved, not by hatred, but by an instinct for freedom. Two sets of Irish Christians, overseen by an arm’s-length British Government, and observed by a reluctant but increasingly involved Irish Government, were about to engage in a war which would prove yet again that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter.

The first killings of the period had been carried out by the UVF through the use of petrol bomb and bullet. The first explosions, which had blown Terence O’Neill from power, had been the work of Protestants. Protestants had shot the first Republican and killed the first policeman.

As soon as the meeting which voted through the National Liberation Front proposal was finished he drove straight to Belfast, where he knew another meeting, of Republican traditionalists, was in progress. This gathering decided to set up a new Provisional IRA Army Council, with MacStiofain as chief of staff. Also on the council were Ruairi O’Bradaigh, Daithi O’Conaill, Patrick Mulcahy, Joe Cahill and Leo Martin. This army council was dominated by southerners. Only Cahill and Martin were from the north. By the end of a year the new IRA had consolidated itself and dropped the word Provisional. (The term had been chosen to make a connection with the 1916 rising leaders, who had declared a provisional government.) However, it stuck, as did the term ‘Sticky’, or ‘Stickies’, to denote a member of Goulding’s organisation, which regarded itself as the ‘Official’ IRA. Both wings wore Easter lily emblems at Easter, to commemorate the 1916 rising. The Provisionals, also known as ‘Provos’, ‘Provies’, and, sometimes, ‘Pinheads’, used to affix their labels to their lapels with pins. The Officials used gum, hence the term ‘Stickies’.

The secret rift in the IRA became a public split in Sinn Fein on 11 January 1970 when the party met in open session at the Intercontinental Hotel in Dublin to ratify the December decisions on abstention and the formation of a National Liberation Front. Ruairi O’Bradaigh, Daithi O’Conaill, Sean MacStiofain and their followers, at that stage numbering less than half the delegates, walked out, and convened another meeting at a hall in Parnell Square named after Kevin Barry, who had been executed by the British in 1920. This meeting set up a provisional caretaker executive of Sinn Fein, which would function from premises in Kevin Street, Dublin, close to Kevin Street Station, one of the Republic’s largest police barracks. The Gouldingites continued to occupy the Official headquarters in Gardiner Place, near Belvedere College, the Jesuit institution where James Joyce went to school. All things considered, the Provisionals’ proximity to the police was probably the more appropriate location.

during the six months after the split the Provos gradually became the stronger of the two factions in both Belfast and Derry. Initially the Provos did not seek confrontation with the security forces. Their first concern was to prepare the organisation for what was regarded as an inevitable recrudescence of Protestant violence and only subsequently, as opportunity offered, to take on the British. Sean MacStiofain has written: …it was agreed that the most urgent priority would be area defence… as soon as it became feasible and practical the IRA would move from a purely defensive position into a phase of combined defence and retaliation. Should British troops ill-treat or kill civilians, counter operations would be undertaken when the Republican troops had the capability. After a sufficient period of preparation… it would go into the third phase, launching an all-out offensive action against the British occupation system. It was also agreed that selective sabotage operations would be carried out…

The Provos did not come into being as a result of a promise to ‘abjure’ operations in the Republic, but because the existing IRA had shown itself unable to conduct them, either in the Republic or in the Six Counties.

the prime aim of Fianna Fail since its foundation in 1962 has been the ending of partition. De Valera laid it down that Fianna Fail’s first priority was: ‘Securing the political independence of a united Ireland as a Republic.’

One can still meet with senior Fianna Fail figures who believed that the British at the time were hanging back to allow the Irish Army, not to in fact stand idly by, but to cross the border. Had this been done, these sources argue, the Troubles would have come to a head and partition would have been over in a matter of weeks.

At this stage there was a cabinet subcommittee dealing with the north, and contingency plans for a cross-border invasion in a doomsday situation had also been drawn up. The impracticality of these led to their being dropped almost as soon as they were proposed. By the time even the border town of Newry had been secured by the Irish Army, the Catholics of Belfast could have been massacred.

the result of the second election was to ensure that circumspection was to be removed from the British Army’s lexicon for a critical period. On 18 June 1970, a British general election toppled Labour and returned a Conservative government under Edward Heath. Instead of the hands-on Callaghan, there was installed the hands-off Reginald Maudling. The Unionist Party vote on housing indicates the difficulties that lay in the path of even the most vigorous London overseer in obtaining reform. Maudling displayed a lack of vigour to the point of indolence. But above all, in place of the considerable restraint to which the army was subjected under Labour, a quite brutal search-and-ransack operation of the Falls Road area was sanctioned within days of the Tories taking over. This action confirmed moderate Nationalist opinion in the belief that the Conservative and Unionist Party was resuming the traditional alliance which had led to the setting-up of the statelet in the first place. Where the Provisional IRA was concerned, a tidal wave of recruitment was released which transformed the movement from a conspiracy to a guerrilla army.

The First Battalion took in Andersonstown, Ballymurphy and the Upper Falls district. The Second, Clonard, the Divis Flats area and the Lower Falls. These two battalion areas were in solidly Catholic districts, in the general vicinity of the Falls Road. The Third, however, took in three Catholic enclaves surrounded by Protestant districts, the Ardoyne, the Bone and the Short Strand.

Despite Britain’s record in the country, the ordinary British soldier was not normally a hate object in Ireland. Loathing was generally reserved for corps raised expressly to provoke that emotion, for example, the Black and Tans. During the Black and Tan war the Tommies were never regarded in the same hostile light as the Tans. That attitude would not have changed in the Catholic ghettos of Belfast in 1970 just because the Provisionals were trying to goad the troops into first reaction and then overreaction. The mere fact of having troops on the streets in such a highly charged atmosphere would have brought the honeymoon period to an end one way or another.

An Orange parade which had unwisely been allowed to march through a Catholic area was set upon by Catholics. A Royal Scots riot squad with batons attacked the Catholics, using snatch squads to rush into the rioters and haul out stone-throwers. Sometimes doors were torn off hinges as the soldiers also rushed into houses, not always the right houses, on the same mission. The fighting was some of the most intense seen in Belfast and the most significant confrontation between Catholics and the army since the arrival of the soldiers. Over the next couple of days some thirty-eight soldiers were injured by brick, bottle, hurling stick, fist or head butt.

in the Catholic Short Strand enclave as Protestant mobs began an incursion on the night of the 27th, a Sunday. Armed with a Thompson gun, Billy McKee, the Provisional leader, and four or five of his men took up a position in the grounds of St Matthew’s Church on the Lower Newtownards Road. Through the night, under heavy rifle and small-arms fire, McKee and his men defended the area. Five Protestants and one member of the group, Henry McIlhone, were killed. But despite the fact that the army never arrived, the mobs were repulsed and St Matthew’s was saved. McKee received a wound that bled so much that a comrade of his, Kevin Hannaway, told me: ‘You’d think he was after washing his overcoat in blood.’ The engagement, which subsequently entered the folklore of Republican Belfast, was the emerging Provisional IRA’s most significant operation to date. No Irish Ran Away this time. Instead, a classic piece of defenderism that saved a church, provided a martyr, McIlhone, and a hero in the neat, slight, unobtrusive figure of McKee, who looked more like a church sacristan than a gunman. Kevin Hannaway said of him: ‘That man would never ask you to do anything he wasn’t prepared to do himself.’

The British Army are now behaving like a conquering army of medieval times. With the restraining hand of Mr James Callaghan gone from the Home Office, General Freeland is reverting to the type of general that Irish people read about in their history books.

THE IRA THAT Chichester-Clark declared war on could be described in two ways, either in terms of statistics and materiel, or in the sense of the Irish phrase uisce fe talamh, literally, ‘water under the ground’. In practice it means secret doings, matters not to be discussed publicly. A consciousness of race and place, formed by history and circumstance, whereby one grows up knowing things without realising where one learnt them. Knowing how to fight, how to kill. Inclining instinctively to guerrilla warfare, because in the Irish physical force tradition the Catholic and Gaelic side of the conflict hid in, and struck from, fog and bog. They might not be able to spell the term ‘status of belligerents’. But they understood what not having it meant. If caught, they were more likely to face a rope than a cell. This tradition, its legacies of infliction and endurance, was probably the IRA’s greatest weapon on the day Chichester-Clark spoke.

Very few examples can be cited of IRA personnel being arrested in hospital, or surgery, after being treated for gunshot or shrapnel wounds. Yet the law stipulates, both north and south of the border, that such injuries must be reported to the authorities.

By local agreement a Protestant band might march through a Catholic district in the morning quite peacefully. The drums would fall silent passing through a flashpoint town or village and no provocation would be offered. But then in the evening, on the way back, after the drink had circulated, the flutes would play and the drums roar out the ‘Protestant Boys’ or some other anthem of defiance and supremacy. The Catholics would attack the marchers and a riot would develop. This was very likely to be followed up a week or so later by a return raid by the Protestants on the offending village, which would be lucky to escape with only having windows smashed and a few heads broken.

The techniques learned in such encounters might have been seen in action had one witnessed a Belfast riot in, say, the Clonard district during the early 1970s. The scene would have been one of swirling confusion, seemingly uncoordinated chaos: stone-throwing youths shouting insults at troops or police; the sight and sound of exploding petrol bombs or the detonation of coffee jars stuffed with explosive; the sound of the army riot squads beating their batons on their shields, or the cries and curses of struggling men and exhorting women. But if one looked more closely one would have become aware of older men standing along the street, or outside the door of a pub, signalling inconspicuously to the younger men. Then one would subsequently notice a bomb hurled here, a sudden surge by the rioters there. Or maybe, if one happened to be in certain houses, the crackle of a walkie-talkie transmitting a message along the lines of: ‘Another patrol coming up Dunville Street. Open up a second front on the Kashmir Road…’ There would be more crackling bursts on the walkie-talkie and suddenly a group of lads, who had quite possibly been at school with Gerard McAuley, would be rampaging down the Kashmir Road, creating a new focus of attention for the army.

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...

‘Of course we can reach accommodation with the Unionists, and we will. Once the Unionist understands that he has to take his foot off the Catholic’s neck.’

What they did not include was a single Loyalist. Although the UVF had begun the killing and bombing, this organisation was left untouched, as were other violent Loyalist satellite organisations such as Tara, the Shankill Defenders Association and the Ulster Protestant Volunteers. It is known that Faulkner was urged by the British to include a few Protestants in the trawl but he refused.

the ranks of the Provisionals were filling up. The stories about the brutality which accompanied the internment process saw to that. These were augmented as the reports of the ‘deep interrogation’ method began to filter out a few days later. Recruits came forward in huge numbers to join both the Provisionals and the Officials, not only in Belfast and Derry, but in many rural areas where hitherto there had been little or no IRA support. McMillen and Sullivan had to abandon their attempts to restrict the Officials to a purely defensive role. The Provisional IRA had received an accession of strength which, though it sometimes ebbed, would never die out again throughout the next twenty-four years, despite an ever-lengthening list of atrocities.

The UDA had its origins in the Protestant equivalent of the conditions which led to the formation of the Catholic Citizens’ Defence Committee. Barricades were going up and Protestants were fleeing, or being driven, from their homes in Catholic districts in the wake of internment. Volunteer vigilante groups were mushrooming amidst a general sense that since the abolition of the B-Specials a vital defensive wall had come down. It was time to look to their own defences. Many of the existing Loyalist paramilitary groups formed links with the new grouping, which at peak may have had a membership of 50, 000. Its activities ranged from public marching, in a uniform which combined dark glasses with masks, bush hats, combat jackets or balaclavas, to welfare, to extortion, thuggery, murder, and, as we shall see, helping to bring down a government.

the army decided that it could not afford to open a second front against Protestant paramilitaries and risk turning to be shot in the back by the IRA as they faced a new foe.