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
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