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August 12 - October 22, 2022
The guns never arrived, but the sands were running out for the hawks.
The real source of the information in both documents is thought to have been the same: British intelligence.
Such, in essence, was the ‘Arms Trial’ affair. The sackings, and subsequent arrests, of figures like Blaney and Haughey needless to say sent shock waves through Irish society during most of 1970. Between sackings, resignations, and reshuffles, the Fianna Fail parliamentary party underwent the greatest upheaval in its history.
But neither the amount of money nor the arms involved were of continuing significance. The first British soldier to be killed (in February 1971) was not shot until over a year after the solitary consignment was smuggled through Dublin as a result of Fianna Fail/IRA contact. And those guns went to the Officials, not the Provisionals.
One of these had the added importance of returning Ian Paisley to Parliament for the first time. He won Terence O’Neill’s old seat, Bannside, in a by-election held on 16 April, standing as a Protestant Unionist.
The month before the election (on 26 March), the Police Act came into effect. This set up a civilianised, unarmed force and established a police authority. These were highly unwelcome intrusions into traditional Unionist concepts of ‘their’ law and ‘their’ order.
Later, through no fault of Macrory’s, these democratic reforms unintentionally became part of the north’s democratic deficit. In the absence of a local parliament, the introduction of direct rule meant that such appointments were removed from local representatives altogether and placed in the hands of London politicians.
From now on, whenever moderation showed its hideous fangs in the camps of either Unionism or Protestantism, the presence of Paisley in the mainstream, coupled with the ‘conditional loyalty’ principle, meant that there was a politico-evangelical shelter for the traditionalists to flee to.
The vote was 281 to 216 against the changes in housing policy.
Unfortunately, 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.
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.
Where the Provisional IRA was concerned, a tidal wave of recruitment was released which transformed the movement from a conspiracy to a guerrilla army.
In all of these working-class streets, there of course existed a strong sense of ‘them and us’ and a concomitant fear that the ‘them’ would be returning to stage a Clonard-style repeat performance. But there was no widespread hostility to the British Army.
The soldiers had saved them from the Protestants. The IRA were the Irish Ran Away.
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.
The nature of the state which the British Army had underpinned meant that their initial favourable reception was going to be fretted away, even in the absence of Provisionals, if reform did not come quickly.
The use of Scottish regiments also made for an inevitable and specific type of culture clash. Traditionally the Orange bands from Scotland were the most unpopular, because in demeanour and gesture they were provocative to Catholics during the traditional Orange marches on the Twelfth of July.
The average young soldier got a very strange picture of the sort of society he was being sent to from the manual dealing with Ireland which the army gave him. It contained the bogus Sinn Fein Oath which I have quoted.
Fighting broke out around Ballymurphy on 31 March after what the army said was Provisional-inspired rioting and what some locals still claim was insulting behaviour on the part of soldiers of the Royal Scots Regiment towards Catholic girls.
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.
But CS gas was used, plentifully, for the first time in Belfast, alienating the majority of the inhabitants.
On 3 April, he announced a new ‘get tough’ policy by the army. He said that anyone caught making or using a petrol bomb was liable to be ‘shot dead in the street’ if after a warning they persisted. The penalty in lieu of shooting was to be ten years in jail.
An ugly follow-up to the riots was the fact that Protestant families were intimidated out of their homes in the New Barnsley estate nearby.
The news of her arrest in these circumstances sparked off a riot in Derry which had appalling collateral casualties. The riot took the usual form of stones and petrol bombs being hurled at troops, who replied with CS gas. But in a house in the Creggan, what was in effect the local Provisional unit attempted to provide the Catholic side with something more lethal, a home-made bomb. It went off prematurely, killing three men, Joseph Coyle, Thomas Carlin and Thomas McCool – and two of McCool’s daughters.
However, there were no British troops in evidence in the Catholic Short Strand enclave as Protestant mobs began an incursion on the night of the 27th, a Sunday.
But despite the fact that the army never arrived, the mobs were repulsed and St Matthew’s was saved.
The engagement, which subsequently entered the folklore of Republican Belfast, was the emerging Provisional IRA’s most significant operation to date.
The Protestants riposted next day by expelling the 500 Catholics (less than a tenth of the Protestant workforce) known to be working in Harland and Wolff’s shipyard. General Freeland responded with an announcement that anyone carrying a gun was liable to be shot.
There was a crumbling administration at Stormont vainly trying to introduce reform against the wishes of a majority of the party which had placed it in government.
The RUC was in a state which Sir Frank Cooper, a former head of the Northern Ireland civil service, had described as ‘…total collapse.
Thus, in a real sense, the force of law and order was the army.
Moreover, it was an army which had come to Ireland against an operational background that included Aden, Cyprus, Kenya, Malaya, all ‘foreign’, post-colonial, counterinsurgency theatres.
A strain of frankly racist condescension, influenced by colonial experience elsewhere, was encapsulated in a term frequently used in military circles to describe the Irish: bog-wog.
Also, the culture of the British Army was different from anything in Irish Nationalist experience.
The Army is a kind of sacred thing in British society. If the Army says something is an operational necessity, then that’s it.
It obviously leaves out the difference in the size and background of the two armies, and the substantive point which weighed with the ‘officer and gentleman’ class, the exigencies of the arms industry.
One can imagine the bafflement of Nationalist politicians working on the ground in Northern Ireland, trying to maintain a constitutionalist stance against the growing popularity of the IRA and yet finding themselves undercut time and again during the conflict by army actions which seemed divorced from any form of political rationale.
‘Our Boys – right or wrong’.
Although the British initially shrank from direct rule, from the moment the army arrived, Stormont, in fact, did not have a law and order capability. That responsibility passed to Britain, whose hand it was in the puppet’s glove which Stormont became.
but the ability and practice to discharge them was extremely limited, so I would certainly describe that as an extremely uncomfortable and difficult integration.
the Falls Road curfew, or ‘The Rape of the Lower Falls’, as Republicans prefer to call it.
Rioting had broken out after the army had discovered an arms cache belonging to the Officials in Balkan Street on the Lower Falls. Freeland decided to crack down hard and sent in approximately 3, 000 troops, supported by helicopters which hovered overhead using loudspeakers to warn the inmates of an area of approximately fifty small streets to stay indoors.
Above and beyond all this, there was some of the most savage fighting of the period to date. The army used their rifles and CS gas. The two IRAs fought back with guns, petrol bombs and nail bombs. Civilians used stones or their bare hands. In all, five civilians were killed, one through being run over by an army vehicle. Forty-five were injured, as were fifteen soldiers.
but it was as nothing compared with the scale of recoil from the army by the Catholic working-class community of Belfast. For the foregoing bald account does not, and cannot, recapture the sense of alienation engendered by commands, in an English accent, pouring from the sky, ordering people to remain in homes which were shortly to be burst in upon and wrecked by their official protectors.
The overwhelming majority of men present were Provisionals and they all gave the Falls Road curfew as their reason for joining.
In it he said that the Dublin Government was the ‘second guarantor’, after London, in securing the Catholics’ rights. This annoyed the Unionists still further.
His departure was used to instal as Minister of State at Home Affairs John Taylor, a trenchant critic of the reform programme, in an effort to placate the right wing of Unionism.
The month ended with fierce rioting in Belfast, during which a Catholic youth was shot by the army.
The army are deliberately provoking trouble in certain selected areas where Catholics live to justify saturation of these areas by troops. The British Army are now behaving like a conquering army of medieval times.
The party had a radical programme of wealth distribution, civil rights, friendship between Catholic and Protestant and cross-border co-operation, leading to eventual unity. It effectively took over from all the existing Nationalist groupings, became a member of the Socialist International and made inroads into the NILP.
