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

by Tim Pat Coogan

How this system worked in practice can best be seen in Derry City, the capital of the county Farrell grew up in. It was also the storm centre where, in a real sense, the gerrymandering system blew up in the Unionists’ faces, bringing British troops on to the streets in 1969 and thus inaugurating the contemporary Irish Troubles. The population of Derry was roughly two-thirds Catholic to one-third Protestant, and the Catholic population kept growing. Nevertheless, the population increase did not mean that the Catholics could ever overtake the Protestants. Successive gerrymanders repeatedly redrew the electoral boundaries, so that the Unionist one-third were able to control the city. The results were that Catholics could not get municipal jobs or houses. Unemployment was rife and Farrell recalls: …appalling slum conditions in Derry and yet people just couldn’t get houses. They had to live in converted army huts. They had to live a couple of families to a house and so on. The enforcement of these conditions was not due to an inherent cruelty on the Unionists’ part. Inefficiency played a role, because they did not build enough houses anyway for either Catholic or Protestant, but, overall, housing policy had a basic political goal. It could be summed up in the same word that governed Sir James Craig’s action in turning down the recommendation of a British cabinet committee in 19195 which offered not a six- but a nine-county Ulster. The word is: control.

Sir Basil Brooke is on record as having told a Twelfth of July gathering in 1933 that because Roman Catholics were disloyal they should not be employed. He said that he took care to ensure that not one was employed about his estate. Pleased with the reaction this statement elicited (from Unionists), he repeated it several times, ultimately becoming the object of a censure motion put down by Nationalists at Stormont in 1934. The then prime minister, Lord Craigavon, responded by moving an amendment which said that the employment of ‘disloyalists’ was prejudicial to the state and took jobs away from loyalists.20 Sir Basil went on to become Viscount Brookeborough and to rule as prime minister for twenty years until O’Neill succeeded him in 1963.

One, Professor Corkery, a Unionist senator, opined that ‘The parents of large families should be fined for having so many children.’27 This was no isolated view. In 1956 the Catholic birth rate had caused the Unionists to attempt a derogation from the established policy of moving in step with Britain to introduce to the north any social welfare improvements effected in the ‘UK mainland’. The initial enabling Bill sought to give fourth and subsequent children less than the British benefits. But liberal Protestant opinion forced Brookeborough to announce on 12 June 1956 that he was dropping the proposal.

Paisley in fact was rooted in a historical line of fundamentalist political evangelists like Henry Cooke and Hugh ‘Roaring’ Hannah, who in times of economic, political or sectarian tension arose in stentorian fashion to make a bad situation worse.

By way of heightening the inflammation, Paisley staged one of the most dangerous confrontations of the year shortly after the package was unveiled. A civil rights march had been scheduled for Armagh on 30 November. He and Bunting arrived in the town before the march at the head of a cavalcade of cars from which emerged men armed with cudgels whose efficacy had been improved by having large nails protrude from them. Further aids to the democratic process were provided by the contents of the car boots – these had been filled with stones. The Paisleyites then proceeded to take over the centre of the town. In order to prevent trouble the RUC halted not the Paisleyites but the civil rights march. The counterdemonstration tactic was a favourite Paisleyite ploy. By staging a counterdemonstration to a planned civil rights march it proved possible to get the civil rights march cancelled.

O’Neill resigned on 28 April 1969. David Bleakley has painted a not unfriendly portrait of his tenure in office: …he was in many ways a prisoner of the aristocratic remoteness associated with the O’Neill line. It was at once his greatest asset and his heaviest liability – good for foreign consumption, but difficult to retail at home… It was right for O’Neill to make the attempt and a great pity that more of his party had not made the move earlier… But O’Neill laboured under the difficulty of his clan: he moved among the Roman Catholic population like some ancient lord, anxious to do the decent thing by his tenants, but he could not really make contact…

John Hume was shot in the chest with a gas cartridge at point-blank range as he walked up the path to Rosemount police station, by a policeman standing at the door. Hume was attempting to mediate between the police and a mob who wanted to stone and, if possible, petrol-bomb the barracks. As soon as he recovered he continued his efforts, eventually persuading the mob to stop stoning in return for the police ceasing to fire gas canisters. The mob did not know that the police had almost run out of gas. After the riots someone remarked to a sergeant that Hume had saved the barracks. ‘No he did not, ’ said the RUC man, pointing at an arms rack on the wall. ‘We always had these.’ The rack contained sub-machine-guns.

With reports of riot and insurrection coming in from all sides, the Stormont Government authorised a number of steps which had the effect of making a bad situation worse. In Belfast, Shorland armoured personnel carriers mounted with heavy Browning machine guns were deployed by the RUC. The sound of these weapons, magnified in built-up areas, spread panic. The bullets tore through walls as if they were cardboard. A nine-year-old boy, Patrick Rooney, was killed as he lay asleep, leaving his distraught father to scrape his brains off the wall with a spoon and a saucer.

But one can’t help feeling that there was more than a touch of symbolism about the manner in which Ted Heath, the Tory leader, came to the problem. He was taking part in the Fastnet yacht race, off the coast of Cork, when he was contacted by radio to discuss the statement which Quintin Hogg, the Tories’ Northern Ireland spokesman, intended to issue on the sending-in of the troops. The toing and froing over the wording of the statement used up so much power that the batteries of the yacht’s engines went dead. Because of the siting of the mast it proved impossible to get at the engine to recharge the batteries. Then the wind dropped, leaving the Conservative leader helplessly adrift in Irish waters.

In fact the IRA posed very little threat to anyone during those days. So little that the disgusted inhabitants of the area, used to regarding the IRA in the traditional role of ‘the Defenders’, wrote up the letters IRA on gable walls as Irish Ran Away.

His second-in-command, Jim Sullivan, was responsible for setting up the Central Citizens’ Defence Committee, on 16 August, to organise defence and welfare for Catholics who were throwing up barricades all over Belfast. Paddy Devlin has described life behind these barricades at this stage: …good cars, which local people had worked strenuously to borrow for or buy, had been commandeered and thrown into the debris of the barricades. Local traders and businessmen who provided employment also found their vans and implements hijacked… young vigilantes had taken over my house. They sat around the floors demanding meals, tea and coffee, sleeping, plotting revolution and revenge, until in a temper, when more tried to get in the already overfilled house, she [his wife, Theresa] chased them all… Criminal elements were gradually emerging, charging ‘royalties’ to tradesmen for using the roadways and robbing vans of their contents if they did not pay…

But arms were not the only objectives of the search. It was intended as a rough-handed ransack operation which would pacify the natives. By chance the curfew trapped an Italian film crew inside the cordons. Its producer, Franco Biancicci, a veteran of the Algerian war, had also been in the Kasbah immediately after General Massu had ransacked it. ‘It was the same thing exactly, ’ he told me. Doors were kicked in, furniture smashed, floorboards pulled up, wall plaster ripped off, holy pictures stamped underfoot or thrust down lavatories, mainly by members of the Scots Black Watch regiment. 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.

The army had had enough. General Anthony Farrar-Hockley went on television to name the Republican leaders he had been dealing with, and blamed them for the rise in violence. The genial Sir Anthony has been known in Clonard ever since as Sir Horror-Fuckley.

Devlin also singles out a factor which was to be of crucial importance in tipping the Six Counties into anarchy later in 1971: the quality of military intelligence. Devlin terms this ‘appalling’. He says: 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. Innocent teenage boys and old men thus found themselves held at the point of a British rifle, and many people I dealt with then were so alienated by the experience that they joined the Provos and later became notorious terrorists.

Next day in Derry we called at the home of Hume’s colleague, Ivan Cooper. Outside Cooper’s house, his car was a heap of tangled wreckage. While we were in Donegal he had got a phone call telling him that one of his principal election workers had been injured in an accident and taken to hospital. He was rushing out to the car when it struck him that the caller had not specified which hospital, so he turned back into the house and rang to check. While he was doing so a bomb went off under his car. Had he driven straight to the local hospital, as he had intended, he would have been killed.

However, though he did not get his way at that meeting, Faulkner continued to work steadily towards his goals. By 25 May he felt confident enough to signal a new hard-line policy on the part of the army. Speaking at Stormont he said: Any soldier seeing any person with a weapon or acting suspiciously may, depending on the circumstances, fire to warn or with effect without waiting for orders.

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, sometimes, an early death. I spoke to a psychiatrist who had the thankless task of trying to rehabilitate some of the interrogation victims (at the behest of the British Government), and he told me that they were ‘broken men’, most of whom did not survive into their fifties.

Two days after Lynch and Heath met, the Provisionals let off a bomb in a Shankill Road bar. Two people were killed, many maimed for life. Trigger-happy soldiers shot two women in a car on the Falls Road a few days later. Next day, other soldiers in Newry dealt with three teenage would-be muggers by shooting them dead. 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.

Rather than contemplate the human misery triggered by any one of those deeds, it is easier to take refuge in statistics and say that 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.

However, sporadic assassinations continued… or did not, despite Craig’s continued eagerness to fight to the last drop of Protestant militants’ blood. He made what to me still ranks as one of the most extraordinary statements of the entire period, at the right-wing Conservative Monday Club in London on 27 April. In the course of a rambling and often incoherent, but nevertheless widely reported speech, Craig said that he was prepared ‘to shoot to kill’ to keep Ulster British, and went on: ‘When we say force, we mean force. We will only assassinate our enemies as a last desperate resort when we are denied our democratic rights.’

I was hit in the ribs with a rifle as two paratroopers asked me if I was in the IRA. I said I was not and they replied, ‘Well, fucking join so that we can shoot you.’

By now the party had suffered a number of notable defections over this issue. Paddy Devlin had been expelled in 1977 because he argued that the party was moving away from socialism. Austin Currie resigned in 1979 to fight the Fermanagh/South Tyrone Westminster seat as an independent SDLP candidate, but lost. He subsequently made his political career in the south. He joined the Fine Gael party, eventually becoming a junior minister in the ‘rainbow coalition’ Government formed in 1995. Apart from the attention of politics, Currie had other personal reasons for leaving the north. Several attacks on his home included one in which a UVF raiding party missed him and vented their spleen by carving the initials UVF on his wife’s breasts.

FitzGerald, an economist and journalist, by contrast looked like an unmade bed, the epitome of the absent-minded professor. He acted (and sounded) like the embodiment of well-meaning, liberal, middle-class Dublin values. However, whereas FitzGerald’s father, Desmond, had been the principal IRA apologist of Michael Collins’ day, the son was an implacable foe of all things Republican. He said repeatedly that one of his principal political motivations was a desire to crush the IRA. Where Northern Ireland was concerned, he reflected the influence of his Presbyterian, Northern Ireland mother in his continuous attempts to woo the Unionists. However, these, with their northern bluntness, tended to prefer Haughey on the grounds that the devil you know is preferable to one who makes strange, conciliatory noises. FitzGerald’s overtures to the Unionists also made Nationalists suspicious of him.

The possibility of a break in the talks logjam opened up on 11 May when, after a meeting between Peter Brooke and a group of Unionist leaders, it was announced that, though the Anglo-Irish Agreement would not be suspended, there would be a moratorium on meetings of the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference. However, Unionist conditions on when these talks should begin – not until after there had been substantial progress on devolution – made both Dublin and the SDLP go cold on the proposal, and on 5 July, during a debate on the renewal of direct rule, Brooke was forced to inform the House of Commons that he was unable to report any schedule for talks. The IRA didn’t require one. On 24 July, in Armagh, a 1, 000lb bomb triggered by a command wire not only killed three RUC men but claimed the life of a nun, Sister Catherine Dunne, into the bargain. At the end of the month, on 30 July, the IRA also killed Ian Gow, the Sussex MP, with a car bomb outside his home. Two IRA men were shot dead at Loughgall on 9 October. And on the 24th of the month the IRA retaliated by killing five soldiers near Derry and another soldier and a civilian near Newry, in ‘human bomb’ attacks in which the drivers were strapped into cars and forced to drive to their targets.

It was a period marked also by enormous bombings. Belfast was badly hit by two bombs in Bedford Street on 2 August. In September, the Northern Ireland Forensic Science Laboratories were devastated by a 2, 000lb IRA bomb which damaged 700 homes and injured several people. On 21 October, the main street of Bangor in Co. Down was blitzed, as was the heart of Coleraine on 13 November. And Belfast’s central shopping area was again attacked on 1 December. The first member of the Royal Irish Rangers (into which the UDR had been subsumed) to be killed by the Provisionals was shot on 20 October. No matter what the uniform of the security forces, they were the enemy in any shape or guise.

The points about resisting interrogation and alienating support merit comment. Taking the last first: the IRA on occasion have enlarged their list of ‘legitimate targets’ at will and sometimes with disastrous effects. They have indulged in kidnappings to raise funds; forced informers to drive proxy bombs to targets, where the bombs blew up killing both bomber and victims; shot contractors who carried out work on barracks for ‘helping the enemy war machine’; and enforced order in ghetto districts by dropping concrete blocks on the limbs of alleged criminals. All this, of course, in addition to judges, policemen, soldiers, members of the UDR, innocent victims caught in crossfire, and so on. Even the IRA would not claim that most of these actions ‘enhanced’ anything. The fact that the movement has survived these actions of its own, rather than the onslaughts of its enemy, probably says more for the strength of its support than any claim that has ever appeared in An Phoblacht.

Feakle was in fact the fourth attempt at peace talks which the Provisionals had taken part in. That involving Whitelaw we have already discussed. The first of the other three was the unveiling of the Eire Nua (New Ireland) proposals on 5 September 1971. In return for British acceptance of this idea, and one or two other small matters such as ending internment, abolishing Stormont and leaving the country, the Provisionals were prepared to declare an immediate halt to violence.

However, neither Morley nor the IRA had any power to alter the substance of the speech, a decision to remove Special Category status. Days after Rees spoke, the IRA handed over a document to the prison authorities stating that negotiations were being broken off. This document said: ‘We are prepared to die for the right to retain political status. Those who try to take it away must be fully prepared to pay the same price.’19 At the time this seemed like a piece of braggadocio, but both the IRA and the British were serious about their respective policies. Prison Officer Cassidy was one of the warders subsequently shot (on 16 April 1979). He was attending a wedding at the time. As he emerged from the church with his three-year-old daughter he was shot in the body. He fell to the ground, squirming, his screaming child standing over him. Another gunman pushed through the crowd and shot him in the head.

The shoot-to-kill incidents generally tended to occur as a result of the mounting of stake-outs or checkpoints. After the fusillades died away it would be alleged that the dead had opened fire when challenged to put up their hands, or perhaps had driven past the checkpoints, firing at the security personnel, or somesuch. In any event, only insiders realised that the deaths resulting from these sanguinary encounters usually included prominent IRA activists such as a local OC, or a much-wanted sniper or bomber. Usually, but not inevitably. To give but one example: sixteen-year-old John Boyle, shot dead in broad daylight by the SAS on 11 July 1978, had nothing whatever to do with the IRA. He had entered a graveyard out of curiosity to examine an arms cache which his family had reported finding to the police. Although he then went on to acquit the soldiers involved Mr Justice Lowry found, on 4 July 1979, that after the teenager’s death the soldiers had emptied the contents of the bag containing the guns on to the ground to make it appear that the lad had been shot moving the cache. The judge said: The Army and Soldier A [in such cases it is common practice to refer to soldiers by letters of the alphabet only, so as to protect their identities] and the patrol gravely mishandled the operation because they shot an innocent boy who, whether he was holding a gun or no, had no capacity to harm them.

The journalist John Ware has truly (see next chapter) said that ‘good advanced intelligence can do more to save a life than all the 20, 000 soldiers and armed police on the streets in the province today’. But Ware also points out that: vital though this undercover war is, it has become a very Dirty War. There have been too many unexplained killings, too many examples of collusion between Loyalist paramilitaries and rogue members of the security forces, too many stories of unjustifiable pressure applied on young men and women to become ‘informers’ against the paramilitaries – for which the penalty in Northern Ireland is usually hideous torture and death.

But even the finding concerning the techniques not constituting a practice of torture did not satisfy Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, the one judge who opposed. His findings have abided with me through the years. He had this to say: According to my idea of the correct handling of languages and concepts to call the treatment involved by the use of the five techniques ‘inhuman’ is excessive and distorting, unless the term is being employed loosely and merely figuratively… He then went on to give examples of figurative speech: One hears it said, ‘I call that inhuman’, the reference being to the fact that there is no dining-car on the train. ‘It’s degrading for the poor man’, one hears with reference to an employee who is being given all the unpleasant jobs. ‘It’s absolute torture to me’ and what the speaker means is having to sit through a boring lecture or sermon. There is a lesson to be learned here on the potential danger of hyperbole.78 Unfortunately Patrick Shivers and some of the other ‘hooded men’ on whose behalf the torture case was begun did not have very much time to study Sir Gerald’s warnings on the dangers of hyperbole. As indicated earlier, they began dying shortly afterwards as a result of their experiences.

The various components of the INLA had degenerated into drug-dealing, something which had always been anathema to the Provos, and racketeering of all kinds. Torture was commonly used. A member of one INLA splinter group, the Irish Revolutionary Brigade, boasted of using a bolt-cutter to lop off a man’s fingers before he murdered him because he ‘wanted to give him a hard death’. An autopsy revealed that he had forced another of his victims to eat his own fingers before killing him. The leader of this wing, Dessie O’Hare, who became nationally known as the ‘Border Fox’, is now in Portlaoise jail following a notorious kidnapping in 1987. A prominent Dublin dentist, John O’Grady, was captured by his gang and his fingertips were hacked off with a hammer and chisel for inclusion with a ransom note.

Unquestionably the unfortunate McLaverty did survive and did identify his assailants from a police car. But what were the RUC and all the intelligence forces doing in the months while the Shankill Butchers were operating more or less openly out of well-known paramilitary drinking haunts? As Martin Dillon has pointed out: …it is clear that many policemen compromised their neutrality by continuing to frequent and socialise in premises controlled by the paramilitaries. In the Shankill area the UDA often killed people in illegal drinking clubs and were not concerned about leaving traces of the victim’s blood on the floor or walls… The police knew such places were being used for murder… I uncovered evidence that as late as 1975 policemen in the Shankill were drinking in pubs which were the haunts of UDA and UVF units…

The whole period was punctuated by outbursts of uproar over bannings or imposed changes, such as those in the seven-part series The Irish Way, directed by Colin Thomas. Thomas resigned in May 1978 over changes ordered by BBC Northern Ireland. Looking back at the coverage of the twenty-five years of conflict it would appear that – apart from the overall consideration of control of the news flow – there were three major concerns in the minds of the censors. Firstly, a reluctance to allow the screening of material which might tend to arouse support for the Nationalist position, in other words the policies of both the Dublin Government and the SDLP. Secondly, an extreme sensitivity to information which placed the security forces in a bad light (one of the cuts which prompted Thomas’s resignation was a shot of a tombstone which read: ‘Murdered by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday’). Thirdly, an abhorrence of anything which depicted the IRA in situations which indicated either the possession of a degree of community support or a human face.

Writing to the Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, Sir Michael Swarm, Havers said: Any interview with a person purporting to represent a terrorist organisation is potentially a source of information of the nature referred to in Section 11 of the Act arising not only from the actual contents of the interview but also any negotiations leading up to and the actual arrangements for it.52 The Havers ruling meant in effect that British journalists seeking subsequently to report on the IRA had to be mindful of the fact that failure to disclose any contact they made, of whatever kind, could render them liable to prosecution.

Nineteen days after the inquest verdict on the Gibraltar shootings (on 19 October 1988, in the House of Commons), the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, announced a ban on direct statements by representatives of Sinn Fein, Republican Sinn Fein, and the UDA.53 This led to the employment of the device of having an actor speak the words of someone like Gerry Adams, while the actual spokesman appeared on the screen, with lips moving silently. Inevitably it was said in Dublin that Sinn Fein could be seen but not Hurd.

Finally he asked me a question about Adams’ real standing in the community. Did he have authority? At the time I had been following the serialisation of James Clavell’s Japanese opus, Shogun, on TV, and this prompted me to answer rather waspishly, ‘Of course, he’s the Shogun.’ Triumphantly Emery replied to the effect that the term ‘Shogun’ had a military connotation. That brief exchange, deployed in such a way as to indicate that I supported the programme’s thesis – namely that Adams had a ‘spurious legitimacy’ and had merely adopted ‘the guise of community politician’ – was the only snippet used from the huge expenditure of film.

However, the basic inefficiency of this ‘will to win’ approach – which of course also nearly made of Portlaoise jail another H Block – was fatally underlined by its failure to protect the new British Ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs. A few days after his appointment he met with Garda officers to discuss his security. He raised with them, according to his diary, the possibility of an attack on his car. ‘It hasn’t happened yet, ’ he was told.78 Nine days later it did happen and he was killed by a Provisional IRA bomb a few hundred yards from his official residence.

But on 3 September 1976, Bud Nossiter, of the Washington Post, interviewed Cruise O’Brien as to how he envisaged the new legislation being implemented. O’Brien responded by pulling open a drawer in his desk filled with letters to the editor of the Irish Press. Many of these either disagreed with some aspect of government policy, were about the Portlaoise or Six County situation, or expressed a Nationalist viewpoint. Nossiter, coming from the paper that uncovered Watergate, was understandably appalled. Did O’Brien intend to take action against people whose crime was to write letters to the newspapers? Not the writers, the editor, was O’Brien’s reaction.

Obviously it would be in the Unionists’ interests to actively engage with this kind of thinking. But there is still a hankering after the old days, a refusal to recognise that a basic component of Unionism is gone for ever – supremacy. A second problem for Unionism is the unacknowledged fact that, for all their talk of British heritage, a majority of the British on the ‘UK mainland’ would cheerfully vote them out of the Union if they ever got the opportunity do so by way of referendum.

Just across from the ambassador’s residence in Phoenix Park lies Aras an Uachtarain, the residence of the President of Ireland. It used to be the home of the British viceroys who once ruled the country. During the visit of President Kennedy to Ireland in 1963, I had stood beside him as he planted a sapling in the garden of the Aras, in the shade of a gigantic oak which Queen Victoria had planted. Victoria’s visit had taken place during the potato famine which had driven Kennedy’s ancestor from tiny Dunganstown in Co. Wexford to America, and the Kennedy dynasty. One would have had to be utterly deficient in a sense of history not to have felt the significance of that little tree-planting ceremony – or not to have experienced an eerie sensation at the symbolism of the fact that the sapling later died. Was it killed by the shade of Victoria’s oak, or did a wind blow from Dallas?

The answers were finally given to Sinn Fein on 19 May 1994. Before passing them on, Reynolds rang an incredulous Bill Clinton to tell him that he had both the questions and the answers in his hand. Clinton was impressed: ‘The questions and the answers, boy, that’s what politics are all about!’ Clinton had been distinctly unimpressed two months earlier when the IRA mortared Heathrow Airport on three successive days. Dummy rockets had been used and no one was injured. But while the incident was seen by the IRA as a valuable morale booster, it was not so received in the White House. Attacks of any sort on a civilian airport were regarded as being a very poor return for the by-passing of the Arafat test.

A special three-day emergency debate on the beef tribunal had to be interrupted for statements on the ceasefire! The reports of its subsequent proceedings were completely lost in those describing the reactions to the ceasefire.

Paisley and two of his henchmen (Peter Robinson and William McCrea) were angrily ordered out of Downing Street by John Major after the ceasefire for refusing to accept his word that no deal had been done with the IRA. The three then locked themselves in a lavatory to compose a press statement before leaving Downing Street, causing themselves to be nicknamed the ‘Pee Musketeers’

St Patrick’s Day in the White House was a night to remember. The roof almost lifted off to the sound of the cheers that greeted John Hume, when he broke off singing ‘The Town That I Loved So Well’ to say: ‘Come up here Gerry and join in.’ As the applause for the Hume and Adams duet died away, Bruce Morrison turned to Niall O’Dowd and asked: ‘Do you think the State Department will get the message now?’ It was truly a night in which Irish eyes were smiling. Nuns and priests, Loyalist paramilitary leaders, Cardinals and diplomats, the great and the good of America seemed to be saying that peace in Ireland was assured. Travelling around the country at that time I found that a glow had spread through the Irish community. However, after the party, the hang-over. The Irish-Americans had not anticipated the virulence of the British reaction to the reversal on the fund-raising decision and the extending of the invitation to the White House to Gerry Adams. John Major was so furious that for a whole week he refused to accept a phone call from Clinton. It was a moment unparallelled in recent Anglo-American relationships.

I once asked a Finnish friend of mine to explain how the tiny Finnish Army had managed to mount such an extraordinary performance against the vastly superior Russian Army in the early stages of World War II. ‘Snow and vodka’, he replied. ‘With the snow we could not see how many of them were out there. With the vodka, we didn’t care’.

Rarely has the tradition of ‘conditional loyalty’ been better demonstrated. At Drumcree police were taunted as traitors by crowds which sometimes included their fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins. Members of the RUC were frightened from their homes and loudspeakers blared out their families’ addresses. One police officer, who had allegedly suffered a miscarriage, was threatened that she would ‘never give birth to another living thing’. Although it was the Orangemen who defied the police, as the troubles spread through the Six Counties and Catholic hooligans also began rioting and petrol-bombing, the RUC vented their spleen on the Catholics and not the Orangemen.