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

by Tim Pat Coogan

There was heavy rioting in the Shankill Road area on both 10 and 11 October.

One was the fact that the British Army openly and impartially took on Loyalist mobs.

Belfast was treated to the unfamiliar sight of Protestants waving Union Jacks while attacking the forces of the Crown, to the accompaniment of slogans such as ‘Englishmen go home, we...

The second was that a Protestant sniper shot and fatally wounded a policeman, Constable Arbuckle, who thus became the firs...

The first killings of the period had been carried out by the UVF through the use of petrol bomb and bullet.

The August burnings had had the effect of quickening a perennial debate within the ranks of the Irish physical force tradition: force v. constitutional action.

Now the debate within the IRA was to swing the other way; the proponents of force would triumph over the constitutionalists, or, more accurately, the infiltrators.

young vigilantes had taken over my house. They sat around the floors demanding meals, tea and coffee, sleeping, plotting revolution and revenge, until in a temper, when more tried to get in the already overfilled house, she [his wife, Theresa] chased them all…

Criminal elements were gradually emerging, charging ‘royalties’ to tradesmen for using the roadways and robbing vans of their contents if they did not pay…

But, like NICRA, the CCDC, although Republican-inspired, was not a Republican organisation.

The bulk of its activists were ordinary citizens. Apart from welfare and defence, the CCDC patrolled the ghetto areas at night, as much to curtail the activities of Catholic drunks as those of Protestant assassins, and published a newsletter; and Sullivan organised broadcasts over an illicit radio station, Radio Belfast.

With the exception of Adams, the youngest, all had been prominent in the IRA in the forties or fifties. They decided to get rid of the Belfast leadership of McMillen and Sullivan at the earliest possible opportunity and then move on to topple Goulding and his associates in Dublin. Their strategy was to force the British to remove Stormont and introduce direct rule, which, they reasoned, would inevitably lead to a united Ireland.

For a time the Catholics proved to be dismayingly appreciative of the British Army’s presence.

Pictures of Tommies accepting cups of tea and playing football with street kids appeared in the newspapers. Even more remarkable photo-opportunities went unnoticed: for example, soldiers’ rifles lying untouched in a pub patronised by Republicans while the squaddies answered a call of nature.

faction. But the tide of Callaghan reform was running too strongly for any IRA opposition to be mounted against it. Fears of Protestant incursion remained high but military police patrolled the Falls and the Bogside with impunity.

On 24 November the Electoral Law Act (NI) foreshadowed the removal of the ratepayer qualification and the introduction of one man, one vote in local government elections.

Nevertheless, underground, the split within the IRA deepened.

One proposed to establish a National Liberation Front between Sinn Fein, the Irish Communist Party and other left-wing groups. The other to drop the traditional Republican policy of abstention so that Sinn Fein representatives, if elected, could take their seats in either the Dail, Stormont or Westminster.

Both decisions ran counter to traditionalist Republican thinking, which was anti-socialist and anti the ‘usurping’ parliaments legitimised by the 1921 treaty which had partitioned Ireland.

By August 1969 he was responsible for IRA intelligence and noted for being an uncompromising Republican of the old school to whom all constitutional activity was anathema.

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 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 bulk of the IRA’s grass-roots membership was unaware of the changes at the top, but during the six months after the split the Provos gradually became the stronger of the two factions in both Belfast and Derry.

…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…19

The trial, which involved former members of Jack Lynch’s government, came about as the end result of the frantic scurryings between Belfast and Dublin that followed the Falls Road burnings.

The Goulding IRA faction seeks to maximise its own pre-1969 importance by suggesting that the Fianna Fail Government was so worried about its progress that it sought to split the movement by supporting the formation of the Provisionals.

argue that Fianna Fail elements set up the Provisionals so as to secure a guarantee from the Republicans that henceforth they would confine their attentions solely to the Six Counties.

certain members of the Lynch government approached those leading members of the IRA who were known to be disgusted with the Marxist leadership, on both nationalist and Catholic grounds, and also on operational grounds.

if they would abjure operations against the Republic, and concentrate on operations inside Northern Ireland.

But as I have already explained (see p. 55), General Order No. 8 pre-dates the birth of the Provisionals by more than fifteen years. It owed its creation not to conditions in Northern Ireland, but to the fact that the south was so hostile to the IRA that it was necessary to reassure the Republic that the IRA meant it no harm.

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.

Firstly, it has to be borne in mind that 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.’21

And there were in addition many men in mohair suits who had no national aspirations and had merely joined Fianna Fail, as the ruling party, in pursuit of power, commercial or professional advancement.

Donegal, in the Republic, is the most northerly of the nine Ulster counties and the one whose economy and infrastructure is most badly affected by partition.

consulted him on matters such as how northern professional qualifications, or business enterprises, would be likely to fare in the event of a united Ireland.

Several different members of the Government contributed to the speech, in which Lynch announced the sending of ‘field hospitals’ to the border, and said that the Irish Government could not stand by in the face of what was happening.

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.

What is certain is that after the Bogside and Belfast eruptions Blaney was descended upon by representatives of all shades of Nationalist opinion seeking assistance.

We asked for guns and no one from Taoiseach Lynch down refused that request or told us that this was contrary to Government policy.

When a priest and a lawyer from Belfast visited Haughey in the wake of the burnings, seeking help for families afflicted by the Troubles, he immediately wrote a cheque for £20, 000.

Haughey, whose eye on the leadership of Fianna Fail never faltered, even in the most unpromising of circumstances, certainly would not have wished it to appear that Blaney was the only member of the Cabinet who had an interest in Northern Ireland.

There was only one item on the diners’ agenda: the provision of guns. Captain Kelly was satisfied that the guns were needed for defensive purposes only to protect the Catholics when, as was generally expected they would, the Protestants returned to the fray.

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.

Lynch was moving steadily away from the tone and import of the ‘standing idly by’ speech forced on him by his colleagues.

Both the hawk and the dove wings of Fianna Fail had a shared interest in trying to assess what was going to happen in the Six Counties. Were the IRA in a position to defend the Catholics? Who in the IRA could be trusted? Were the Catholics really in such great danger? To what degree could or should the Republic become involved?

The purpose of the meeting was said to be to put a proposal to the Derry IRA man to organise a more militant branch of the IRA in the Six Counties.

However, I am told that, arising out of the welter of contacts with decision-taking people in Dublin, one shipment of arms did pass through Dublin Airport and into the hands of the IRA in October 1969. That was the last time anything of that nature came the way of the Gouldingites.

However, British intelligence intervened to abort this shipment. All that arrived were some bulletproof vests.

Lynch managed to remain oblivious to what was happening.