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

by Tim Pat Coogan

However, this attempt at constitutional advance, deep-rooted though it would ultimately prove itself, was not paralleled elsewhere in the divided community.

On the Protestant side he and his men were being excoriated for not stopping the riots, taking down barricades in Catholic areas and generally not acting as ‘their’ police force. Worse, some members of the RUC had been known to so forget their role as to break up Protestant riots and arrest the rioters.

The British marked sensitive documents ‘for UK eyes only’, to prevent the Unionist civil servants reading them.31 A more sensitive choice of wording might have been employed in a situation whose intensity derived from the fact that those excluded, and their community, wanted to be considered ‘UK only’.

In sum, a demoralised and understrength police force, riven by Freemasonry, fear, prejudice, outmoded training and briefing, was performing a Canute-like role in attempting to stem a rising tide of violence from both communities.

These were six-inch-long, five-ounce projectiles with a range of fifty yards, lethal if they were fired at the upper body at close range, but intended (it was said) to be aimed at the legs and, if possible, to ricochet off the ground.

On one level, Ireland was being used, as it had been traditionally, as a laboratory for military techniques.

If a genuine and serious grievance arose, such as might result from a significant drop in the standard of living, all those who now dissipate their protest over a wide variety of causes might concentrate their effort and produce a situation which was beyond the power of the police to handle.

In fact, the Provisionals were getting stronger, riots so common that it was said in Belfast that ‘Friday night is gelly night’.

‘We are going to shoot it out with them, it is as simple as that.’ The next night the army shot a young Catholic during a riot in the Ardoyne area.

One bullet killed twenty-year-old Ensign Robert Curtis of the Royal Artillery regiment. He thus became the first British soldier to be killed in Ireland since the 1920s and the treaty that was meant to take Ireland off the British agenda.

The night of the unfortunate Curtis’ death was marked by some of the worst rioting the Six Counties had seen, in both Protestant and Catholic areas of Belfast and in Derry.

‘Northern Ireland is at war with the Irish Republican Army Provisionals.’

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.

Numerically the IRA probably did not have more than 300 active soldiers at the time he made the announcement, although it could have had the services of innumerable recruits had it been able to arm them.

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.

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.

Reform, a new Ireland, would assuredly come if the IRA would exert itself against the spread of violence so as to prevent a loss of sympathy for the Nationalists.

Southern thinking was simply not attuned to what was happening in the north.

Partition had worked, insofar as very few people in the Republic ever thought about the North before the troubles erupted.

The events of the Arms Trial had generated considerable heat and rekindled traditional fervour within the ruling Fianna Fail Party, but had done little to provide light in the way of new policies.

then we are prepared to see what can be done to harmonise our views so that… a new kind of Irish society may be created agreeable to North and South. We wish to extend an olive branch to the North and we wish the North to accept it.

They contained a very large bunch of stinging nettles indeed – an onslaught from the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Charles McQuaid, on any notion of alteration to the Republic’s laws.

One can conceive no worse fate for Ireland than that it should, by the legislation of our elected representatives, be now made to conform to the patterns of sexual conduct in other countries.

it would indeed be a foul basis on which to attempt to conduct the unity of our country… it would be, and would remain, a curse upon our country.1

Meanwhile, the reality on the ground in the North was that the British Army was the IRA’s best recruiting agent.

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.

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.

many people I dealt with then were so alienated by the experience that they joined the Provos and later became notorious terrorists.

After the Officials conducted a raid on 5 March 1971 on troops billeted in the Henry Taggart Memorial Hall, the Provisionals demonstrated their displeasure at this intrusion on their turf by pistol-whipping the local Official leader. This triggered a spate of shootings and hostage-takings.

Another group of Provos then shot up a pub where Billy McMillen, the Officials’ leader, was drinking.

McMillen ordered the killing of a number of Provo leaders in response.

A truce was arranged between the two IRAs through the mediation of the clergy.

Mid-January to mid-February was characterised by a ferocious series of riots in Belfast.

Every family learned to have a basin of vinegar and towels handy to cope with the tear gas.

‘We’re shootin’ the uniform, not the man.’

They were taken on a drinking spree by three members of the Provisional IRA. At a place called Ligoniel, outside Belfast, as they urinated, glasses in hand, they were swiftly shot in the head by their drinking buddies.

The situation on the ground continued to deteriorate. Rioting, killing, more rioting.

Two other deaths were to have profound consequences in propelling the province into its final lurch to disaster that year. Two youths, Seamus Cusack and Desmond Beattie, were shot by the army on 8 July in Derry. The shootings caused violent rioting in the city.

Hume gave a press conference on the 12th at which he explained why he was withdrawing support from the parliament: ‘There comes a point where to continue to do so is to appear to condone the present system. That point, in our view, has now been reached.’ The SDLP then proceeded to set up what it called ‘an Assembly of the Northern People’. The party issued a call for a campaign for civil disobedience which it suggested should include a rent and rates strike and the withdrawal of all Catholics from public bodies.

One of Sir Arthur Young’s last public comments before he left the province was that there was a ‘conspiracy of silence’ amongst the police concerning her husband’s fatal beating.3

‘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.’ Hesitating to argue with Hume, it nevertheless seemed to me that he was underestimating the problem. The raisott d’être of Unionism was to keep its foot on the Catholic’s neck.

For throughout this period, powerful elements within the Unionist family had met the challenge of the situation in two ways. One was to block or delay reform in any way they could. The other was to deal with the growing security problem by calling for internment.

The housing system was also reformed, but the Unionists staged rearguard actions wherever they could.

Brian Faulkner, who was in charge of local government reform, had dismissed SDLP complaints about housing as being ‘all part of a plot to discredit the established local authorities’.

At the time of the publication of the Macrory Report it had thirty-five Unionist councillors, while the Catholic majority was represented by only seventeen.

Last week he said it would be a considerable time before proportional representation would be introduced into council elections, despite earlier government assurances on this point. Hardly a good way of silencing critics within the minority who feel that Stormont is stalling and giving way to right-wing Unionists on reform.

Both wings grew increasingly stentorian on the issue of security and the need for internment as the violence escalated.

By now the IRA were attacking ‘economic targets’, burning and blowing up shops and business premises of all kinds.

After the murder of the three young Scottish soldiers at Ligoniel, four thousand shipyard workers poured on to the streets of Belfast to demand internment. The Catholics wanted reform; the Unionists tougher security, which to some meant anything from the introduction of the death penalty to internment. Others would have settled for an end to the no-go areas in Belfast ...