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

by Tim Pat Coogan

the UVF were able to make off unhindered with its entire stock of weaponry.

However, the authorities continued with a crackdown of sorts on the Loyalists and when UDA elements laid siege to a tiny Catholic enclave in Co. Antrim on 16 September, the RUC opened fire.

Even the most obtuse Loyalist politician could see that shooting British uniforms was no way to demonstrate one’s loyalty to the Crown.

Following a spate of killings which claimed the lives of five Catholics in January, the unprecedented occurred. On 3 February 1973, two Loyalists were arrested and interned, the first Loyalist internees for fifty years. There was a ferocious Loyalist reaction: prolonged gunfights with the army, the assassination of at least seven Catholics and a one-day protest strike called by combined forces of the UDA, LAW and Vanguard.

which alienated a good deal of middle-class Protestant support.

The UDA had become a huge ramshackle organisation heavily infiltrated with gangsters and petty criminals, and involved in protection rackets and extortion, backed by intimidation on a grand scale.

The fall of Stormont created a new situation for both the Dublin Government and the Provisional IRA. They were to interact

with each other, abrasively, as a result.

It is therefore clearly desirable that any new arrangements for Northern Ireland should, whilst meeting the wishes of Northern Ireland and Great Britain, be, so far as possible, acceptable to and accepted by the Republic of Ireland.

The British policy of carrot and stick, a carrot for Dublin and the SDLP, and the stick for the IRA, began to divide the Provisionals from earlier sources of sympathy.

The Provos’ scorning of the abolition of Stormont with a declaration that the IRA would fight on was not well received in Dublin. Nor were aspects of its economic campaign,

and the gestation of ever-present fear that this would spread over to the Republic,

chasing away investment from the Republic

A certain symmetry between the northern and southern approaches to the IRA was beginning to make itself noticeable.

Nationalist sentiment in Northern Ireland was breaking down along class lines at this stage: while the middle-class business and professional people were prepared to go along with the SDLP’s cautious gradualism, the situation on the ground in Catholic working-class districts militated against such acceptance.

Every time the army tipped a ‘Snodgrass’ out of bed, they also helped to tip the balance back in favour of the Provisionals and away from the horror that the IRA had engendered with atrocities like ‘Bloody Friday’.

The Dail was debating an amendment to the Offences Against the State Act whereby the word of a chief superintendent became sufficient evidence to convict a suspect of IRA membership.

Suddenly, two bombs went off in Dublin, killing two and injuring 127. As the echoes of the explosions reverberated through the city, Fine Gael withdrew its opposition to the measure, which passed by 69 votes to 22 with Fine Gael abstaining.

Earlier in the summer of 1972, on 9 July, the Libyan leader Colonel Mumar Gaddafi announced publicly at a rally in Tripoli that he had been supplying arms to the ‘Irish

revolutionaries who are fighting Britain’.

In the interim between June and Cahill’s arrest the Provisional IRA had stripped itself down into a leaner, and certainly meaner, force than had existed in the early days of mass sympathy and wholesale recruitment. The Provos also became more selective in their operations.

Nevertheless, throughout all this catalogue of destruction and death, the Provisionals maintained General Order No. 8 in place and ensured that no actions were deliberately undertaken against the Republic’s security forces. Action was confined solely to the security forces in Northern Ireland.

Thus, by the end of 1973, although Dublin, London and a wide swathe of constitutional political opinion in Northern Ireland attempted to arrive at a political solution which would marginalise the Provos and, if possible, the UDA, both organisations continued to show that though they might be curbed, they could not be crushed.

changes of government in both Dublin and London; the politicking within both the Unionist parties and the SDLP; to say nothing of the activities of paramilitary groups.

It was also announced that a referendum would be held on the border issue in 1973; this was to be followed by local elections under proportional representation and a strict exercise of the principle of one man, one vote.

The Republic liked the document. The general vague benignity towards Nationalist aspirations met the unstated Jack Lynch policy concerning Northern Ireland of: ‘Oh Lord, make me good, but not yet.’

The SDLP had no option but to join in a boycott on the referendum called for by both the Provisionals and the People’s Democracy.

There was a low poll. Only 6, 463 people voted for unity, whereas 591, 000 voted to remain within the United Kingdom.

A central aim of the White Paper was the provision of a firm basis for concerted governmental and community action against terrorist organisations. As a result, special courts and internment were to continue.

Although this was to be pledged to the securing of ‘acceptance of the present status of Northern Ireland’, the psychological impact of the Dublin link was to prove fatal to the entire White Paper vision.

In other words, power-sharing was to be imposed on the Six County statelet for the first time in its history.

Again the Provos and the People’s Democracy tried and failed to organise a boycott, but the SDLP emerged triumphantly as the dominant anti-Unionist party.

the Unionists found little difficulty in papering over their fissures to combine in order to defeat the SDLP.

The party was unquestionably the recognised vehicle for constitutional Nationalists in Northern Ireland.

No such homogeneity existed on the Unionist side.

Thus the anti-Faulknerite Unionists garnered a total of 235, 873 votes and twenty-seven seats. The Faulknerites got 211, 362 votes and only twenty-two seats.

Thus the forces opposed to the proposals within Unionism to the White Paper were greater than those in favour of power-sharing.

Those outside the simply pro– or anti–White Paper arena, the Alliance Party and the NILP, did so poorly as to be ...

the results were somewhere between a disappointment and a disaster for those optimists still remaining in Whitehall.

by pledging themselves not to ‘share power with anyone whose primary objective is to break the Union with Great Britain’.

The Loyalists shouted and misbehaved themselves so that finally Faulkner’s followers and the SDLP had to withdraw, leaving the Paisleyite anti-Unionists in possession of the chamber.

In addition, a hundred other short-term prisoners were set free and the Criminal Justice Act, which carried a mandatory six-month jail sentence, was abolished. Despite these conditions the anniversary of internment provoked huge demonstrations and the feelings elicited by Bloody Sunday continued to fester.

Nevertheless, what might be termed the pro–White Paper or pro-assembly parties were agreeing on very narrow ground only.

Anti-executive Unionists marked the date by breaking up an assembly session and physically attacking the Faulknerites in a pattern which had become almost the norm during these sessions.

The anti-Unionists were even more determined that it would not function. On the day that the Council of Ireland conference began at Sunningdale, the anti-executive Unionists came together. Paisley’s group, that of Taylor and West, and the Vanguard under Craig agreed to establish yet another Unionist umbrella organisation, aimed at bringing down the executive. It was known as the United Ulster Unionist Council.

Whatever gloss Whitelaw or Heath subsequently put on this move, there is no doubt that both Nationalists and, indeed, many Unionists took it as an indication that the interests of Ireland in general and the Six Counties in particular were completely ‘subordinate to those of the UK mainland’.

there would be a two-tier Council of Ireland, a fourteen-man council of ministers, and a sixty-member consultative assembly, half of which would be drawn from the Dail and half

from the Northern assembly. All decisions would have to be unanimous and the council’s functions were envisaged as lying mainly in the field of economic and social co-operation.

The SDLP’s task was to convince its supporters that the Council of Ireland meant more than it actually did; in other words that it did offer the possibility of a united Ireland. The Unionist component in the executive had the contrary task of telling its constituents that the thing was no more than a figleaf.

214 British soldiers had been killed. This was the biggest death toll the army had suffered since the Korean War.