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

by Tim Pat Coogan

MacStiofain then read out the IRA proposals. These included. 1. Britain to make a public declaration that it was for the whole people of Ireland acting and voting as a unit to decide the future of Ireland. 2. The British Government to give an immediate declaration of its intent to withdraw from Irish soil, the withdrawal to be completed before 1 January 1975. 3. British troops to be withdrawn immediately from sensitive areas. 4. A general amnesty for all political prisoners in Irish prisons, all internees and detainees and all persons on the wanted list. 5. A suspension of offensive operations by the British Army and an immediate end to internment.

In the event the only substantive, if such a word may be used, agreement to emerge from the discussions was a four-point document which stipulated that: 1. A bilateral suspension of offensive operations would continue until 14 July. 2. In the event of a resumption of hostilities, twenty-four hours’ notice would be given. 3. On 14 July, a further meeting would take place at which the British Government’s submissions and documents in reply to points 1 and 2 of MacStiofain’s submission would be made known. 4. In the event of the documents being unacceptable to the Irish, they would be at liberty to resume offensive operations without notice.

Nineteen seventy-two was the worst year of the Troubles. There were 467 deaths, a total of 10, 628 shootings, and almost 1, 900 bombs were planted.

Army policy, and the ending of the truce, emboldened the Loyalists to declare open season on the Catholics in a fashion which seems to indicate a desire to demoralise the minority into flight by creating an atmosphere of terror. Sadistic torture began to accompany murder as a matter of routine, and it was in this period that the activities of ‘the Shankill Road Butchers’ gang began. This group committed well in excess of a dozen murders in which the victims were tortured to death, before being apprehended (see p. 284). During the fevered season of the ‘Twelfth’, four armed Loyalists raped a Catholic widow in the Oldpark area of Belfast several times before shooting her and her mentally retarded son. The widow survived, the boy did not. The following day, on the 12th itself, one of the last Catholics remaining in the UDR was kidnapped in east Belfast, tortured by being branded with a red-hot iron and stabbed before being eventually shot dead. Some days later a well-known Catholic girl singer and her boyfriend were stopped at a UDA barricade. The girl was forced to sing for the UDA men before she and her boyfriend were shot dead. The following August, another Catholic, Thomas Madden, was horrifically murdered, once again in the Oldpark area. His injuries included 150 stab wounds. Death was eventually caused by strangulation. The Oldpark area was a mixed district, and obviously the deaths, none involving members of the IRA, were aimed at driving Catholics out. By August 1972,...

the authorities continued with a crackdown of sorts on the Loyalists and when UDA elements laid siege to a tiny Catholic enclave in Co. Antrim on 16 September, the RUC opened fire. A prominent UVF man was shot dead. The most significant army–UDA clash occurred a month later, on 16 October, when army vehicles killed two rioting Loyalists. Tommy Herron openly declared war on the British Army. The result was two nights of heavy firing between the army and the UDA in which two civilians were killed. Aghast, local community leaders persuaded Herron to call off his offensive. Even the most obtuse Loyalist politician could see that shooting British uniforms was no way to demonstrate one’s loyalty to the Crown.

Another young paratrooper told Woollacott: Although you moan about Ireland, you know at least you are going to have a chance to shoot some bastard through the head… you are walking around with live rounds, you are there to kill people and see guys get killed, and you are going to get the shit scared out of you. Not all soldiers had ‘the shit’ scared out of them. Armies being armies, some of them seemed to enjoy the experience. Another officer claimed that: ‘Skiing or mountain climbing has got nothing on a cordon and search when you get old Snodgrass out of bed at four in the morning and go through his house like a dose of salts…’ Every time the army tipped a ‘Snodgrass’ out of bed, they also helped to tip the balance back in favour of the Provisionals and away from the horror that the IRA had engendered with atrocities like ‘Bloody Friday’.

The planned border poll was held on 8 March 1973. As internment still stood, the result was a foregone conclusion. The SDLP had no option but to join in a boycott on the referendum called for by both the Provisionals and the People’s Democracy. There was a low poll. Only 6, 463 people voted for unity, whereas 591, 000 voted to remain within the United Kingdom.

Sunningdale did yield results. After four days it was announced to the media that there would be a two-tier Council of Ireland, a fourteen-man council of ministers, and a sixty-member consultative assembly, half of which would be drawn from the Dail and half from the Northern assembly. All decisions would have to be unanimous and the council’s functions were envisaged as lying mainly in the field of economic and social co-operation.

a new executive which took office on 1 January 1974. This consisted of Brian Faulkner (Unionist), chief executive; Gerry Fitt (SDLP), deputy chief executive; Herbert Kirk (Unionist), Minister of Finance; John Hume (SDLP), Minister for Commerce; Basil McIvor (Unionist), Minister for Education; Austin Currie (SDLP), Minister for Housing; Leslie Morrell (Unionist), Minister for Agriculture; Paddy Devlin (SDLP), Minister for Health and Social Services; Roy Bradford (Unionist), Minister for the Environment; Oliver Napier (Alliance), Minister for Law Reform, and John Baxter (Unionist), Minister for Information.

there was a continuous onslaught on troops so that by the end of May, 214 British soldiers had been killed. This was the biggest death toll the army had suffered since the Korean War.

Wilson went on television and radio, late in the evening of 25 May, to make a remarkable speech. He said the strike was a deliberate and calculated attempt to use every undemocratic and unparliamentary means for the purpose of bringing down the whole constitution of Northern Ireland, so as to set up a sectarian and undemocratic state, from which one third of the people would be excluded. The attempt, he said, was being made by ‘thugs and bullies’. He went on to talk about the feelings of the people on the UK mainland who had seen their sons vilified and spat upon and murdered. They have seen the taxes they have poured out almost without regard to cost – over £300 million a year this year with the cost of the army operations on top of that – going into Northern Ireland. They see property destroyed by evil violence and are asked to pick up the bill for rebuilding it. But it was this passage which struck a nerve: Yet people who benefit from this now viciously defy Westminster, purporting to act as though they were an elected government, spend their lives sponging on Westminster and British democracy and then systematically assault democratic methods. Who do these people think they are?8

Apart from the attention of politics, Currie had other personal reasons for leaving the north. Several attacks on his home included one in which a UVF raiding party missed him and vented their spleen by carving the initials UVF on his wife’s breasts.

All the parties in the country, with the exception of the Unionists, who refused to attend, and Sinn Fein, who were excluded, took part in the forum. The result was a report which proposed three options: a confederal Ireland, a united Ireland (unitary state), or joint sovereignty. However, at a celebrated press conference, after an Anglo-Irish summit meeting at Chequers (on 19 November 1984) Mrs Thatcher completely cut the ground from beneath both Garret FitzGerald and Hume by itemising the three findings of the forum and saying after each one, ‘that is out’. The out… out… out… speech, as it was known, produced such a crisis in Anglo-Irish relations that even Mrs Thatcher came to realise the damage she had done. President Reagan had been amongst those who had welcomed the forum’s deliberations. Possibly her dismissive attitude was influenced by the fact that the IRA had made a savage attempt on her life and those of her cabinet during the Conservative Party Conference at Brighton a few weeks earlier (on 12 October). Whatever the reason, whatever her motivation, Thatcher’s standing in some Irish political circles may be gauged from the attitude that a prominent Fianna Fail politician displayed at lunch with me one day in a fashionable Dublin hotel. We were discussing the Brighton bombing. Glancing around at the gorging glitterati, he stunned me by remarking: ‘If it had only gone properly, it would have been greater than 1916 – the whole British Cabinet would have gone up.’

Following a lengthy period of negotiation, the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed on 15 November 1985 at Hillsborough in Co. Down. The agreement was clearly aimed at the rise in Republican support. It provided in Article 1 that there could be no change in the status of the North without the consent of the majority. Articles 2 and 3 went on to state, however, that ‘determined efforts would be made to resolve any differences’ under the framework of the intergovernmental conference. In Article 3 it was stipulated that it was expected that the conference would meet regularly at ministerial or official level with a permanent secretariat. The aims of the agreement were identified as promoting peace, stability and prosperity in Ireland while accommodating both the identities and the rights of both traditions in the North. It stated that British government policy aimed at devolving power on a basis of ‘widespread acceptance’. The agreement also covered matters such as cross-border co-operation and furthered the concept of co-operation by stressing again the question of an interparliamentary link between Dublin and London. But it was Articles 5 to 7 which really indicated the upward trajectory of the graph of Dublin influence. Article 5 stated that the Irish Government could put forward proposals on behalf of the minority and clearly envisaged that these proposals would deal with questions such as human rights and discrimination. Article 6 went on to accept the Irish Government’s rig...

when the contents of the agreement were revealed2 they had an enormous psychological effect on the Unionists. As one prominent Loyalist paramilitary said to me afterwards: ‘I don’t have to read the agreement, I know what is in it.’ The Irish Foreign Minister and the Taoiseach were in Hillsborough Castle as of right. The Irish flag, the tricolour, which a few years earlier had been banned as an illegal emblem, now flew as of right over Hillsborough Castle. Irish accents, Irish civil servants could be heard at the Anglo-Irish secretariat at Maryfield, as of right. To make matters worse, it was a Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Tom King, that had signed this infamous document. Who now could Unionists trust in England? The Unionists erupted in rage, withdrawing from the assembly and staging every form of riot and demonstration known to political protest in a vain attempt to wreck the agreement.

After Sunningdale fell, he decided that the people in the Republic were ‘expressing more and more, and I mention this simply as a matter of record without comment one way or another, the idea that unity or close association with a people so deeply imbued with violence and its effects is not what they want. Violence… is killing the desire for unity.’

After being elected taoiseach in 1981, FitzGerald announced that he favoured ‘a constitutional crusade’ to make the Irish constitution more acceptable to the Unionists. Three years earlier (in 1978) he had revealed that in 1974 (the year of the Loyalist strike) he had told Unionists that they would be ‘bloody fools’ to join the Republic under the existing constitution. One of the few Unionists to take FitzGerald’s crusade seriously was William Craig, the former Vanguard leader. He said he found it ‘very significant’, and had talks with FitzGerald in Dublin in November 1981.

1974, saw some particularly horrific bombings. The Dublin, Monaghan and M62 atrocities have been adverted to. Later in the year the Provisionals carried out no-warning pub bombings at Guildford, on 5 October, and at Birmingham, on 21 November. In the former, five people were killed and fifty-four injured. In the latter nineteen died and 182 were injured. The outrage which followed these terrible deeds, and the pressure on police to obtain convictions, resulted in innocent people being sentenced for all three mainland bombings. Their ‘unthinkable suffering handed down in the name of justice’1 has since passed into the lexicon of British injustice in Ireland. Judith Ward, who was afflicted by psychiatric problems, was freed in 1992 after eighteen years, having been falsely imprisoned for the M62 bombing. The Maguire Seven, jailed in 1976 on trumped-up charges of handling explosives used in the bombings, served sentences of between four and fourteen years. One of the Guildford Four, Giuseppe Cordon, died in jail. His son Gerry served fourteen years, after a file which contained evidence that he had been in London on the night of the Guildford bombing was marked by the prosecuting authorities: ‘NOT to be shown to the defence.’2 Conlon said that he signed a confession after being threatened by a police officer that ‘…an accident would be arranged for my mother and sister. He said that if a soldier shot my mother it would be put down to an accident and British soldiers were neve...

On 8 May, the IRA suffered one of its worst reverses of the entire campaign when an active service unit was wiped out by the SAS at Loughall, Co. Armagh. Some of the IRA’s top operatives, including the unit’s leader, James Lynagh, were killed in this operation, five in combat and three who were ordered to lie on the roadway after arrest and were then executed.

On 21 August twenty-one-year-old Hugh McKibben achieved the melancholy distinction of becoming the 3, 000th victim of the Troubles, a casualty of the internal feuding in the INLA (see Chapter 10). In addition, 113 people were killed in Britain, 110 in the Republic and ten in Europe.

THE STORY OF the IRA from the collapse of the Whitelaw talks is one of evolution from a rather hobbledehoy movement, fuelled by a schoolboy enthusiasm as much as anything else, and unlimited recruitment, into one of the most tightly focused, disciplined and ruthless guerrilla movements the world has seen. This is how the Provisionals’ HQ in Derry’s Bogside no-go area appeared to me in 1972 before Operation Motorman shut it down: …It was more like a youth hostel than a terrorist headquarters. The place was filled with young boys and gjrls, and Martin McGuinness, the blond, six-foot leader of the IRA in the city, at the time was himself only twenty-one. There was laughter and chat in the headquarters as though those who came and went were going on mountaineering excursions instead of setting out to kill someone or blow up something. The house was full of boxes of clothes either for use in disguise or to be passed out to needy people in the area, while other cartons contained fuses, ammunition, and some weapons. In the kitchen chattering girls sat around a fire and made tea for anyone who wanted it…

a cell, or active service unit (ASU), generally, but not inevitably, consisted of four people, of whom only one, the leader, was in contact with higher authority. Thus, operating on the need-to-know principle, security leaks were cut down and effectiveness was increased. The ‘Staff Report’ found on Twomey stated: The three day and seven day detention orders are breaking volunteers and it is the Republican Army’s fault for not indoctrinating volunteers with a psychological strength to resist interrogation. Coupled with this factor which is contributing to our defeat, we are burdened with an inefficient infrastructure of commands, brigades, battalions and companies. This old system with which the Brits and Branch are familiar has to be changed. We recommend reorganisation and remotivation, the building of a new Irish Republican Army. We emphasise a return to secrecy and strict discipline. Army men must be in total command of all sections of the movement… anti-interrogation lectures must be given in conjunction with indoctrination lectures. The ideal outcome should be that no volunteer should be charged unless caught redhanded… we must gear ourselves towards Long-term Armed Struggle based on putting unknown men and new recruits into a new structure. This new structure shall be a cell system. Ideally a cell should consist of four people. Rural areas should be treated as separate cases to that of city and town brigade/command areas. For this reason our proposals will affect mai...

Commitment to the Republican Movement is the firm belief that its struggle both militarily and politically is morally justified. That war is morally justified and that the Army is the direct representative of the 1918 Dail Eireann Parliament, and that as such they are the legal and lawful government of the Irish Republic, which has the moral right to pass laws for, and to claim jurisdiction over the territory, airspace, mineral resources, means of production, distribution and exchange and all of its people regardless of creed and loyalty. Thus, a recruit is informed: All volunteers are and must feel morally justified in carrying out the dictates of the legal government, they as the Army are the legal and lawful Army of the Irish Republic which has been forced underground by overwhelming force. The Army as an organisation claims and expects your total allegiance without reservation. It enters into every aspect of your life. It invades the privacy of your home life, it fragments your family and friends. In other words claims your total allegiance. All potential volunteers must realise that the threat of capture and of long jail sentences are a very real danger and a shadow which hangs over every volunteer. Many in the past joined the Army out of romantic notions, or sheer adventure, but when captured and jailed they had afterthoughts about their allegiance to the Army. They realised at too late a stage that they had no real interest in being volunteers. This caused splits an...

Before we go on the offensive politically or militarily we take the greatest defensive precautions possible to ensure success, e.g. we do not advocate a United Ireland without being able to justify our right to such a state as opposed to partition; we do not employ revolutionary violence as our means without being able to illustrate that we have no recourse to any other means… we do not mount an operation without first having ensured that we have taken the necessary defensive precautions of accurate intelligence, security, that weapons are in proper working order with proper ammunition and that the volunteers know how to handle interrogations in the event of their capture etc…. and of course that the operation itself enhances rather than alienates our supporters.6 The points about resisting interrogation and alienating support merit comment. Taking the last first: the IRA on occasion have enlarged their list of ‘legitimate targets’ at will and sometimes with disastrous effects. They have indulged in kidnappings to raise funds; forced informers to drive proxy bombs to targets, where the bombs blew up killing both bomber and victims; shot contractors who carried out work on barracks for ‘helping the enemy war machine’; and enforced order in ghetto districts by dropping concrete blocks on the limbs of alleged criminals. All this, of course, in addition to judges, policemen, soldiers, members of the UDR, innocent victims caught in crossfire, and so on. Even the IRA would not c...

from my own knowledge I can say that the General was accurate in his assessment of what the IRA was paying its members as of June 1978 – £20 a week. He said: We estimate that some 250 people would draw this and perhaps 60 would get , £40 per week… Apart from arms expenditure the Provisionals have to bear the cost of their prison welfare work including payment to prisoners’ dependants, travel and transport costs and propaganda expenses, especially the Republican newspapers whose sale does not cover their cost. The balance sheet guesstimate was as follows: Theft in Ireland £550, 000 Racketeering £250, 000 Overseas Contributions £120, 000 Green Cross (Prisoners welfare fund) UK & Eire £30, 000 Total £950, 000 Expenditure, under all the headings covered above, pay, prisoners, etc. – was reckoned to be £780, 000, leaving a balance of £170, 000 for arms purchases.

The younger McGuinness was frequently referred to as ‘The Cool Clean Hero’. Red-haired, slim and tall, wearing a tweed jacket, an Aran sweater and a friendly smile, he caught the imagination of the younger Derry Nationalists. A devout Catholic, I have known him to be denounced from the pulpit and applauded by the congregation. His principal relaxations are his family and fishing. He is also an extremely tough, hard-minded military and political thinker. The northern security forces never succeeded in recapturing him following his release after a short sentence from the Curragh. During the period of his leadership the Provisionals managed to bomb, and rebomb, economic targets in Derry without causing any loss of civilian life, though there were numerous casualties amongst the security forces. It was this selectivity that ensured that the women of Derry never marched on the Provisionals as they had done with the Officials, to demand that they call off their campaign.

In return for British acceptance of this idea, and one or two other small matters such as ending internment, abolishing Stormont and leaving the country, the Provisionals were prepared to declare an immediate halt to violence.

Socially they were under more control also than Wilson had bargained for. He apparently had expected them to be hard-drinking, hard-swearing toughs. He accordingly peppered his language with oaths and was considerably taken aback to find that few of his hearers drank and none of them swore. Quite politely they informed him of their demands, which included a withdrawal of British troops to barracks (in preparation for ultimate withdrawal), the abolition of Stormont, and a declaration by Britain that she had no right to interfere in Irish affairs.

In order to make it appear that the IRA was simply a criminal organisation, and to allay Unionist and Tory backbench anger at the prisoner-of-war status enjoyed by Special Category prisoners, the British throughout the 1975–6 period also began developing what became known as the ‘criminalisation policy’. This was paralleled by the ‘Ulsterisation’ and ‘normalisation’ approaches. Under Ulsterisation, security was progressively handed over to the RUC and Ulster Defence Regiment in a Six County version of what the Americans used to refer to during the Vietnam War as ‘Vietnamisation’: in other words, letting the natives do the fighting.

Special Category prisoners were …allowed to wear their own clothes and are not required to work. They receive more frequent visitors than other prisoners and are allowed food parcels and can spend their own money in the prison canteen. They have segregation in compounds according to the paramilitary organisation to which they claim allegiance…

a house in Rosemary Street, in downtown Belfast, was proposed to both the IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries as a sort of HQ for terrorists where they could all meet (and be bugged) under the one roof. At first sight the idea appears ludicrous, but I suppose one must take it in conjunction with the fact that at the time everyone in Belfast appeared to be aware that the British secret service, MI6, was housed in Laneside, a large house overlooking Belfast Lough. The scheme progressed to a point whereby, despite the fact that sectarian assassination was rampant at the time, the four paramilitary organisations entered into an agreement that they would not attack any of their rivals in the vicinity of the Rosemary Street premises.

on 14 September 1976, four days after Mason arrived in the province, Kieran Nugent, a young IRA volunteer who had been sentenced for hijacking a van, proceeded to make history. He informed the prison authorities that if they wanted him to wear the prison uniform, ‘they would have to nail the clothes to my back’. This defiance caused Nugent to become the first of the ‘blanket men’. As a punishment, all furniture was removed from his cell and he remained from 7.30 a.m. until 8.30 p.m. each day on a concrete floor with no mattress, bed or reading material. His diet was also adversely affected, and, as he would not wear the uniform, his only clothing became a blanket. As other prisoners began to follow Nugent’s example, a general ‘no-wash’ protest spread amongst the prisoners. They wore their prison clothes to accept visits only, but at other times had only a towel to cover themselves. When they went to the showers they had to use this towel, so they asked for a second. When this was refused they also refused to wash, on the grounds that they should not be forced into nakedness. The sole item of furniture in their cells was a chamber pot. It was shortly to assume a degree of significance in the situation. The prison routine was ‘food in – slops out’. A trolley would come around with food for the prisoners, followed by another trolley for their slops. The prisoners claimed that the warders only half-emptied the pots and sometimes up-ended them on the floors. From this ‘the Dirt...

Having spent the whole of Sunday in the prison I was shocked by the inhuman conditions prevailing in H Blocks 3, 4 and 5 where over 300 prisoners are incarcerated. One would hardly allow an animal to remain in such conditions let alone a human being. The nearest approach to it that I have seen was the spectacle of hundreds of homeless people living in sewer pipes in the slums of Calcutta. The stench and filth in some of the cells, with the remains of rotten food and human excreta scattered around the walls, was almost unbearable. In two of them I was unable to speak for fear of vomiting. The prisoners’ cells are without beds, chairs or tables. They sleep on mattresses on the floor and in some cases I noticed that these were quite wet. They have no covering except a towel or blanket, no books, newspapers or reading material except the Bible (even religious magazines have been banned since my last visit), no pens or writing materials, no TV or radio, no hobbies or handicrafts, no exercise or recreation. They are locked in their cells for almost the whole of every day and some of them have been in this condition for more than a year and a half.

I was allowed to pick the two cells I wished to visit at random after a tour of the prison led by the Governor. The Governor placed no barriers in my inspection save warning the two occupants of the first cell I came to that there was to be no conversation…. as if to underline this, two enormous warders, either of whom would dwarf me (and I am not a small man), entered the cell and stood behind the cell’s occupants. They were aged 21 and 22, as I afterwards learned, serving ten and twelve years respectively. When the cell door opened they both looked frightened. They looked anxiously at us for a moment. They were pallid and naked except for a blanket draped over their shoulders. They stood silently, fear hardening into defiance, I felt, as we looked at the cell. It was covered in excrement almost to the ceiling and all four walls. In one comer there was a pile of rotting, blue-moulded food and excrement and the two boys had evidently been using bits of their foam rubber mattresses to add to the decor as we entered. There wasn’t much of a smell but the light was dim and the atmosphere profoundly disturbing and depressing. I felt helpless and angry as I stood and looked at these appalling and disgraceful conditions, prevented by bureaucracy and by history from talking to two of my fellow human beings who had brought themselves and been brought to this condition of self-abnegation. I couldn’t speak for a few minutes after visiting the cell and had to compose myself before ent...

The most famous hunger-striker in Irish Republican history, up to the time of the building of the H Blocks was Terence McSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, who died, after seventy-four days, during the Anglo-Irish war of 1919–21. McSwiney became the inspiration for W. B. Yeats’ play, The King’s Threshold, in which Seanchan, a poet, starves himself to death. During World War II, de Valera had allowed IRA men to die on hunger strike rather than concede them the right of political status.

by 1980, two hunger-strikers had gone the full way down the agonisingly slow path that leads to a starvation death. The first hunger-strike fatality of the contemporary troubles was Michael Gaughan, who died in Parkhurst Prison on 3 June 1974, the sixty-fifth day of his strike, and was buried in his native Mayo. His partner on the strike, Frank Stagg, lived and later went on strike again, dying in Wakefield prison on 12 February 1976. Stagg’s death precipitated a bizarre incident involving the Government of the Republic. The IRA had intended to stage a military funeral for Stagg and bury him alongside Gaughan. But the Government had the plane carrying the coffin diverted to Shannon, where Special Branch detectives ensured that the body was buried without Republican ceremony, and under a layer of concrete to prevent re-internment. However, six months after the fuss had died down, Stagg was dug up under cover of darkness and reburied, with the blessing of a priest, alongside his friend.

Sinn Fein announced on 10 October that a strike would commence seventeen days later. It was led by Hughes himself, who went on the protest with six other prisoners. The total of seven was chosen because there had been seven signatories to the proclamation issued by the rebels during Easter 1916. Moreover, the strikers came from all of the Six Counties.

After a particularly vicious spell of rioting and conflict in Portlaoise jail under the Fine Gael–Labour coalition government which fell in 1977, the incoming Fianna Fail administration moved along the compromise route and the situation in Portlaoise returned to normality. Inside the jail the Republican prisoners achieved de facto political status. They wore their own clothes, communicated with the authorities through their own elected officers, and were segregated from other prisoners into their own groupings – Provisionals, Officials, INLA, and ‘mavericks’, who had either never belonged to any of the three or had been expelled from them. But in all other respects the prisoners conformed to prison discipline and served out their sentences in a peaceful atmosphere. During the period of tension there were attempts on the Governor’s life, a number of explosions, escapes, and attempted escapes during which a garda and a prisoner lost their lives. Outside the jail there was continuous and increasingly angry agitation on the prisoners’ behalf. Inside the perimeter walls, the normal army presence was greatly increased, as was the number of warders. I once counted sixteen warders on duty on each landing of the prison. This was in addition to a heavy warder presence at every strategic door, gate or assembly place in the jail.

Sands’ condition was described by Owen Carron, his election agent, who saw him for the last time later that day: He found Sands in no shape to talk. He was lying on the waterbed, his left eye was black and closed, the right eye nearly closed and his mouth twisted as if he had suffered a stroke. He had no feelings in his legs and could only whisper. Every now and then he started dry retching. He managed to ask Carron if there was any change. The Fermanagh man said no, there was no change. Sands said: ‘Well, that’s it.’ He told Carron: ‘Keep my Ma in mind.’ Carron bent over the bed, hugged him and kissed him.

In all, ten hunger-strikers died between May and August 1981, seven Provisionals and three from INLA. The long-drawn-out agony of the ‘Ten Men Dead’, as they became generally known, had something of the same effect on Six County nationalism as did the long-drawn-out executions of the 1916 leaders on the twenty-six counties. The Ten Men Dead were: Bobby Sands, 27, after sixty-six days, on 5 May; Francis Hughes, 25, after fifty-nine days, on 12 May; Raymond McCreesh, 24, after sixty-one days, on 21 May; Patsy O’Hara, 23, the leader of the INLA men, after sixty-one days, also on 21 May; Joe McDonnell, 30, after forty-six days, on 8 July; Martin Hurson, 27, after forty-six days, on 13 July; Kevin Lynch, 25, INLA, after seventy-one days, on 1 August; Kieran Doherty, 25, after seventy-three days, on 2 August; Thomas McElwee, 23, after sixty-five days, on 8 August; Michael Devine, 23, INLA, after sixty-six days, on 30 August.

As the skeletal figures passed away into the pantheon of Irish history, sometimes being followed to their graves by as many as 100, 000 people, the stories of how they had endured, and how they died, spread around not only the Six Counties and Ireland, but throughout the world.

The last hunger-striker to die was Michael Devine, a member of the INLA and a convinced socialist. David Beresford described his final hours as follows: Father Pat Buckley took Mass in the hospital and went in to see Mickey, who had been too ill to make it. There was an awful smell – almost cancerous of the eating away of flesh mainly from his mouth, but so pervasive that his whole body seemed to be breathing it. Mickey confessed that he was scared, afraid to die. Buckley asked him why he was afraid – he was a free agent; if he was not happy he did not have to do it. Mickey said he felt it was the right thing to do but he was still scared. His eyes were wet and Buckley, taking out a handkerchief to mop his cheeks, could feel the tears in his own eyes. Mickey asked if he could take his confession. Buckley put an arm around him and listened. Red Mickey was finding comfort in the ancient faith.

Ironically, the turning point in the strike probably came when Pauline McGeown authorised taking Patrick off the strike after he lapsed into unconsciousness on the day Devine died. McGeown, who had had reservations about the strike, had been fasting for forty-two days.

In the Indian parliament, the opposition party observed a minute’s silence on Bobby Sands’ death. In New York Union Jacks were pulled down and burned. In Le Mans a street was named after Sands. In Cuba Fidel Castro said: ‘The Irish patriots are in the process of writing one of the most heroic pages in human history.’31 In Paris, the French Foreign Minister, Claude Cheysson, spoke publicly of the ‘supreme sacrifice’ which the hunger-strikers had made, going on to state that their courage demanded respect. The French Government also offered the Dublin Government two gestures of solidarity which Dublin declined. One was to boycott the British royal wedding, the other that President Mitterrand attend Bobby Sands’ funeral.

Normally the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6) served abroad, and MI5 at home, but the difficulties about defining whether the Six Counties were part of the ‘UK mainland’ or the ‘UK overseas’ had resulted in MI6 taking over, or rather being given the turf, after the 1971 internment fiasco. Heath overcame the objections of Sir Maurice Oldfield that MI6 should not become involved. Oldfield’s preference was for political-type activity. He favoured the planting of long-term informers and ordered MI6 to desist from the use of assassination as a tool worldwide. It was not until the period described by Wallace that MI5 won the battle, having begun to ‘invade’ the province from the time in 1972 when the IRA started to extend its bombing campaign to the ‘UK mainland’.

in parts of Tyrone, which does not lie along the border, an IRA man on the run would probably be safer than he would in the Republic. Secondly, the area we are talking about is relatively tiny – the entire Six Counties is only the size of Yorkshire, which must say something about the efficiency of the British military effort in Northern Ireland.

I was given the name of a military installation where one notorious UDA figure, reckoned to have notched up some thirty murders, could be seen regularly filling up his car with free petrol.

During the first six months of 1975 thirty-five Roman Catholics were assassinated in Ulster. The majority of these were killed by members of the security forces or loyalist paramilitary groups such as the UVF, UFF, PAF, UDA, etc., working as agents of the security services and supplied with weapons by the security forces.

Loyalist killers were deliberately allowed to go unpunished; that British forces carried out kidnappings, snatching wanted men from the Republic; that sometimes the security forces deliberately allowed operations which they had foreknowledge of to go ahead so as to discredit the IRA, thereby putting civilian lives at risk; that similarly, instead of capturing weaponry and explosives found in IRA dumps, they would sabotage the material so that it would booby-trap its owners;

Holroyd was also telling the truth when he cited as a dirty trick the case of Eugene McQuaid, who was blown up while ‘doing a turn’, ferrying an IRA rocket on his motorbike. The explosion was not accidental. Having learned of the rocket’s existence in a dump south of the border, the British Army, instead of tipping off the Gardai, crossed the border secretly and doctored the explosives so that they became highly volatile. Thus, on the morning of 5 October 1974, as he drove along the busy main road to the bustling, predominantly Catholic town of Newry, McQuaid in fact constituted a serious danger to himself and to the public. The bomb went off, blowing him to pieces, after he had executed a sudden U-tum on spotting an army checkpoint, which he could just as easily have destroyed. By chance I drove past about ten minutes after the explosion. Pieces of McQuaid’s body were being covered with sheets and there were dozens of armed soldiers on the road and in the fields around, all obviously in a high state of alert. Not the place to pull up. But rounding the first corner after the scene, about two hundred yards away, I saw an RUC man and slowed to ask him what had happened. Had there been an explosion? He looked at me hard and then, speaking with a distinctly hostile air, made a response which symbolises the entire official policy towards dirty tricks. ‘Explosion, what explosion? I didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything. I mind my own business…’