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

by Tim Pat Coogan

Many of the existing Loyalist paramilitary groups formed links with the new grouping, which at peak may have had a membership of 50, 000. Its activities ranged from public marching, in a uniform which combined dark glasses with masks, bush hats, combat jackets or balaclavas, to welfare, to extortion, thuggery, murder, and, as we shall see, helping to bring down a government.

As the UDA emerged in the turbulent later part of 1971, Paisley and Desmond Boal also formed a new Protestant grouping, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

‘On the right on constitutional issues and on the left ...

The DUP was based on evangelicalism and social radicalism. A combination of Paisley’s Bible-thumping, fulminations against ‘dry closets’ and the ‘enemies of Ulster’, his charisma, and the DUP’s close links with the Free Presbyterian Church, gave the party a distinctive appea...

Moreover, there were those in the Unionist camp who were disposed to argue that internment would work only if the Republic would introduce it also.

As direct rule began to loom over the horizon, the Provos sought to hasten its approach with a series of detestable actions to which the Loyalist paramilitaries responded in kind.

Hatred of the army in Catholic ghettos reached such a pitch that girls who ‘fraternised’ with soldiers had their heads shorn and were tied to railings or lampposts, covered in ink, and adorned with placards proclaiming their crime.

In the madness and hatred of the hour, the UVF replied to the IRA’s Shankill bombing with the worst slaughter of the period. A no-warning bomb in a Catholic bar, McGurk’s of North Queen Street, Belfast, claimed sixteen lives on 4 December.

at the end of 1970 there had been twenty-five deaths; by the

end of 1971 there were 174. In 1970 there were 213 bombs planted; in 1971 the number had reached 1, 756.

That ‘active intervention’ could very easily have kept the genie of the IRA in the bottle by seeing to it that civil rights were introduced and followed through.

Then, unveiling his fifteen-point plan, on the grounds that internment had so changed the situation that a radical new response was called for he proposed that the settlement envisaged at the time of the treaty – i.e. a united Ireland – be brought forward, saying: ‘If men of moderation have nothing to hope for, men of violence will have something to shoot for.’

indeed attempting a settlement without the IRA would be like America ending the Vietnam War without reference to the Vietcong.

Two days later the IRA gave evidence of their capacity for horror by letting off a bomb in Callender Street, Belfast, which injured over sixty people, mostly women and children.

On 22 January 1972, a march took place to Magilligan Prison Camp in Derry in protest against internment. It was a peaceful march supported by the sort of people who had come out in favour of civil rights, and by relatives of those interned.

‘Our boys would not do anything like that’ – i.e. anything brutal or untoward, as in the case of internment.

Then, from behind sand dunes emerged a squad from the First Paratroop Regiment armed with batons and rubber bullet guns. They began shooting these at the marchers, driving many of them into the sea, the temperature of which, in January, off the northern coast of Ireland, can well be imagined.

Eventually it also appalled their NCOs, who tried unavailingly to call off the Dogs of War. The paratroopers’ initial reaction was to ignore their superiors and continue their onslaught.

The Magilligan march, for example, was technically illegal because of a general prohibition on marching in operation at the time. And a few days after it, there was an open gun battle between the army and the IRA, who fired from the Republican side of the border at the town of Forkhill in Co. Armagh on the army, who responded with some 1, 000 rounds of ammunition.

Initially the protest passed off in a peaceful fashion, but, as it concluded, the inevitable ‘Derry Fusiliers’ began throwing stones.

These men began firing on the crowd and killed a total of fourteen people (thirteen died on the spot, one later). Seventeen others were wounded to a greater or lesser degree.

However, when Wade met him, Thompson was in ebullient form, sporting a wall-to-wall grin. His greeting to his junior colleague was: ‘They shot well, didn’t they?’

Ford in fact claimed that ‘the dead may not have been killed by our soldiers’

Most of them seemed to regard the Bogsiders and people who took part in the parade as legitimate targets.

In all a total of well over 200 rounds was fired indiscriminately in the general direction of the soldiers. Fire continued to be returned only at identified targets.

It was being suggested that it was perfectly legal for the army to shoot somebody whether or not they thought they were being shot at because anybody who obstructed or got in the way of the armed forces of the Queen was, by that very act, the Queen’s enemy, and this was being put forward by a legal luminary in the Cabinet.

the fact remains that six months after Bloody Sunday, an atmosphere still prevailed in the higher echelons of British decision-taking which makes what happened on Bloody Sunday entirely explicable.

It was these men, perhaps 20 in all, who opened the fire with their rifles.

Then people could be seen moving forward in Fahan St, their hands above their heads. One man was carrying a white handkerchief. Gunfire was directed even at them and they fled or fell to the ground.

In Dublin reaction to this sort of report, which was borne out by the dispatches of Irish journalists, was so intense that,

after two days of siege, crowds finally succeeded in burning down...

The Gardai scarcely made a token effort to resist. Had they attempted to intervene, the violence of Derry could easily have erupted on the streets o...

‘Many people down there [the Bogside] feel now that it is a united Ireland or nothing.’

‘The Minister has stood up and lied to the House. Nobody shot at the Paratroopers but somebody will shortly… I have a right as the only representative in this House who is an eyewitness to ask a question of that murdering hypocrite.’

In New York, Patrick Hillery, the Irish Foreign Minister, expressed Nationalist outrage in a more temperate fashion: ‘From now on my aim is to get Britain out of Ireland.’5 Of course Hillery’s gesture was purely for the optics.

There was never the slightest possibility of any UN action on the Irish situation.

Violence continued at such a pace that it became clear to Heath that the Last-Chance Saloon had to be closed down rapidly. He moved to limit the damage by setting up an inquiry under Lord Chief Justice Widgery.

However, right-wing Unionists, ever eager to ignore the writing on the wall, pressed ahead as though Bloody Sunday had not occurred. Just over a week after the killings William Craig founded the Ulster Vanguard movement. The object of the movement was to unite the rightist elements of Unionism in a programme of general discontent at the lack of progress on two fronts: the security front and what was seen as the erosion of the constitutional position.

One rally held on 18 March is estimated to have been attended by a crowd of approximately 60, 000.

By way of retribution, the Official IRA had planned a bomb attack on the 16th Parachute Regiment’s headquarters at Aldershot. Bungling or cowardice resulted in the bomb not being placed near a military target but outside a kitchen, where it blew up killing five women, a gardener and a Catholic chaplain. The Officials issued a statement claiming the attack and saying it was in response to Bloody Sunday.

The Aldershot attack marked a downward spiral in the Officials’ campaign, in terms of both brutality and effectiveness.

He was known to have taken part in stone-throwing incidents earlier in his life when out with the Derry Fusiliers attacking the troops.

Nevertheless, after an order issued on Bloody Sunday that every British soldier was to be regarded as a legitimate target, he was ‘arrested’ and then ‘tried’ and shot.

The man responsible for his death told Eamonn McCann: ‘Our military orders after Bloody Sunday were to kill every British soldier we could. They di...

The day after Best’s shooting, some 400 mothers marched on the Officials’ Derry headquarters and told those present in no uncertain terms what they thought of them. The incident forced the Officials to call a halt, and a ceasefire was declared by one wing of the Republican movement.

However, the Officials’ ceasefire, brought about as much by a desire on the part of the leadership to get back to the policy of uniting Protestant and Catholic worker on a class basis,

On 4 March, the Provisionals equalled the Officials in horror with a bomb explosion in the Abercorn Restaurant in Belfast which injured 130

The Provisionals also caused an appalling catalogue of destruction and death on 20 March when six people were killed and more than 100 injured in a no-warning car bomb in Donegal Street in Belfast.

Immediately after it, delegations from Northern Ireland had begun descending on London to question the entire basis of the state.

Napier recommended that London take over security. This of course ran entirely counter to British policy.