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August 12 - October 22, 2022
Faulkner’s election meant that the Stormont Parliament had become the political equivalent of the Last-Chance Saloon.
Brookeborough had ruled unbrokenly for twenty years, O’Neill for six, Chichester-Clark for two. Faulkner would get a few days short of one.
He and Farrar-Hockley were ad idem on the need for good PR to keep British public opinion onside, and henceforward the army information services at Lisburn Army HQ paid considerable attention to the dissemination of ‘information’ which many Nationalists would dismiss as disinformation.
Two concepts have been associated with him in particular: ‘de-escalation’ and ‘attrition’.6 The former meant removing the water of civilian support in which the IRA swam by using propaganda and spending money on community projects. ‘Attrition’, directed against the IRA, meant what it said.
Kitson was acutely conscious that the sort of methods needed to crush the IRA were not possible under the law as it stood.
Firstly, most of their experience had been in colonial campaigns which generally had one thing in common – they failed. Secondly, and the obvious cannot be overstated, they were not politicians, they were soldiers, schooled to render the other side incapable of continuing warfare. To achieve the objective in the six north-eastern counties of Ireland in the spring and summer of 1971 was not possible, militarily, morally or politically.
They said to the army, in effect: ‘You are in charge of security. You patrol, guard, etc.’ Given the state of demoralisation in the force, it was about the only response which could have been expected. However, at the same time, Unionism being Unionism, the local concept of ‘security’ being what it was – i.e. ‘their’ law and ‘their’ order, etc. – another problem, affecting Catholic disaffection, was manifesting itself.
The new UDR was rapidly becoming the old B-Specials; the same personnel in different uniforms.
the UDR also took on, and trained, members of the Unionist community anxious to emulate the IRA.
British intelligence did not discourage this development.
British intelligence itself also became engaged in faction fights: MI5 did not co-operate with MI6; the Scotland Yard anti-terrorist squad complained bitterly about both.
The basic truth was that for all the assurance of the plummy accents and the officer and gentleman class network, the British were not informed about what was going on in the province.
Insofar as he had any fixed ideas about Northern Ireland, Maudling, from what I have been able to glean, appeared to think that direct rule was a distasteful inevitability. Until it arrived, any political activity was useless and in the interim a military approach was the only one possible.
‘It’s your job to sort out those bloody people.’
Faulkner was keen to repeat his success of the fifties and strongly pressed for internment.
Internment was not the factor which destroyed the 1956–62 IRA campaign. What principally defeated the IRA was the lack of support from the Catholic population of Northern Ireland.
While in the main critical of IRA violence, the Nationalists were no longer prepared to accept a wholescale policy of repression.
Apart from seeking the introduction of internment, he wanted the border sealed off and raids into the Republic to seize known members of the IRA. This suggestion, had it been acted on, would have extended the effects of the Falls Road curfew into the Republic. As a minimum response Dublin would have been forced to break off diplomatic relationships with London.
‘disruptive’ arms searches of Catholic areas and an increase in random personnel searches in the street. In other words, the ‘toothpaste’ policy: squeeze the Catholics until they vomit out the IRA.
Faulkner made history by appointing a non-Unionist to his cabinet, David Bleakley of the NILP, who became Minister for Community Relations. He also made a number of speeches promising fair play to the Catholics.
These were touted as a form of power-sharing, even though they were consultative and review, rather than representative, bodies.
In his memoirs Faulkner said of the Orange Order that it was: Not the Ku Klux Klan, but a reasonable organisation which, by and large, sought to restrain the wilder element of the Protestant Community and taught justice and respect for the beliefs of our neighbours.
It must be recognised that any concept of participation will be hollow which does not recognise the duty to participate in bearing the burdens of the State as well as enjoying its advantages, and that no duty is more important than to mount a sustained opposition to terrorism.
A ‘sustained opposition to terrorism’ was code for internment.
He told the cabinet committee that if he did not get internment he would be forced to resign. In that event either Ian Paisley would become prime minister or the British would have to introduce direct rule.
He also refused to consider rerouteing the Apprentice Boys march in Derry which had caused the original explosion in August 1969. Nor would he agree to a crackdown on the spread of ‘rifle clubs’.
Brian Faulkner was not going to allow Ian Paisley to steal his right-wing clothes while he bathed in the waters of moderation.
The conventional wisdom is that this support for Faulkner’s earlier arguments decided Heath in coming down in favour of internment.
For example, General Tuzo has calculated14 that the IRA had managed to set off some two tons of explosive in a three-week period prior to the introduction of internment. Therefore, he said, ‘There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that something different had to be done… you had to do something a bit more dramatic in order to… lance the boil.’
But there were other plans, plans for the systematic employment of torture against detainees.
This policy had its origins in earlier British experience, in theatres such as Aden, Cyprus, Kenya, and in the brainwashing techniques employed against American and British servicemen in Korea.
The lists were weighted towards the Officials, who, despite being the more pacific of the two IRA wings, were regarded by MI5 as the more dangerous adversaries because of their Marxist orientation.
The lists were so out of date that 104 people had to be released within forty-eight hours.
Internees were beaten with batons, kicked and forced to run the gauntlet between lines of club-wielding soldiers.
The five techniques consisted of hooding, sleep deprivation, white noise, a starvation diet, and standing for hours spreadeagled against a wall, ‘…leaning on their fingertips like the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle. The only sound that filled the room was a high-pitched throb, which the detainees liken to an air compressor. The noise literally drove them out of their minds.’15 These techniques were accompanied by continual harassment, blows, insults, questioning. This treatment usually went on for six or seven days. It produced acute anxiety states, personality changes, depression and,
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and he told me that they were ‘broken men’, most of whom did not survive into their fifties.
The reason he gave me for being able to withstand the treatment he received is instructive for an understanding of an essential component in Republicanism, the will to resist.
When I asked him how he managed to survive he replied: ‘I kept thinking of The Last Words, and I thought of what those men went through and I said to myself, sure what am I getting – nothing. So I stuck it out.’
‘…the security forces and the government feel that internment is working out remarkably well. It has exposed the gunmen.’
We are, quite simply, at war with the terrorists and in a state of war many sacrifices have to be made, and made in a co-operative spirit.’
Suffice it to say that in the eight months prior to internment, thirty-four people had been killed. In the four months following it 140 died, twenty-two of them in the three days after internment was introduced.
Cahill told the world’s media that only some thirty IRA men had been picked up and that the Provisionals’ capacity to wage war had not been affected by the swoop.
direct rule was obviously no longer a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when’.
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 record of events reflects great credit on the security forces… the Committee have found no evidence of physical brutality, still less of torture or brain-washing…
Throughout the period of military escalation, the Provisionals, with the aid of sympathetic advisers, had also been drawing up a political programme.
The central proposal in the document was aimed at calming the Northern Protestants’ fears of being subsumed into the all-Ireland Republic which remained the Provisionals’ prime objective. It envisaged four regional parliaments based on the four provinces of Ireland.
Their fears could be adequately satisfied if they formed a large part, possibly a majority, in an Ulster regional parliament.
Here, in the presence of a crowd which the newspapers estimated to be 20, 000 strong, they called for something Paisley would return to again in his career: a ‘third force’ to defend their ‘Ulster’.
Barricades were going up and Protestants were fleeing, or being driven, from their homes in Catholic districts in the wake of internment.
