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Excluded from the shipbuilding industry and other attractive professions, Catholics often simply left, emigrating to England or America or Australia, in search of work they couldn’t find at home. The Catholic birth rate in Northern Ireland was approximately double the Protestant birth rate—yet during the three decades prior to the march on Derry, the Catholic population had remained virtually static, because so many people had no choice but to leave.
Many people on the English “mainland” seemed only faintly aware of this restive province off the coast of Scotland; others would be happy to let Northern Ireland go. After all, Britain had been shedding colonies for decades. In the words of one English journalist writing at the time, the unionists in Northern Ireland were “a society more British than the British about whom the British care not at all.”
For a utopian architectural project, Divis had yielded dystopian results, becoming what one writer would later describe as a “slum in the sky.”
At night, when gun battles broke out, Arthur bellowed, “Down on the floor!” and the children would drag their mattresses to the center of the apartment and sleep there, huddled in the middle of the room. Sometimes it felt as if they spent more nights on the floor than in their beds. Lying awake, staring at the ceiling, Michael would listen to the sound of bullets ricocheting off the concrete outside. It was a mad life. But as the anarchy persisted from one month to the next, it became the only life he knew.
For an army, they were also conspicuously unarmed. In a surpassingly ill-timed decision, the IRA had actually sold off some of its remaining weapons in 1968, to the Free Wales Army. There was still some residual expertise in how to manufacture crude explosives, but the IRA had developed a reputation as an outfit whose bombers had a tendency to blow themselves up more often than their targets.
If the image of an “IRA man” in Belfast during the 1960s entailed a gin-blossomed barstool radical, a shambling has-been, full of tales about the old days, the Provisionals set out to upend this caricature. They aimed to be clean, disciplined, organized, ideological—and ruthless.
In some later era, the condition would likely be described as post-traumatic stress, but one contemporary book called it “the Belfast syndrome,” a malady that was said to result from “living with constant terror, where the enemy is not easily identifiable and the violence is indiscriminate and arbitrary.” Doctors found, paradoxically, that the people most prone to this type of anxiety were not the active combatants, who were out on the street and had a sense of agency, but the women and children stuck sheltering behind closed doors.
because each successful operation drew new followers to the cause. In the words of one of Hughes’s contemporaries in the IRA, “Good operations are the best recruiting sergeant.”
When the guns arrived, fresh graffiti on the walls of West Belfast heralded a game change: GOD MADE THE CATHOLICS, BUT THE ARMALITE MADE THEM EQUAL.
The number of British troops in Northern Ireland had escalated dramatically in a short period of time: during the summer of 1969, there were 2,700; by the summer of 1972, there were more than 30,000. The soldiers were often just as young and inexperienced as the paramilitaries they were fighting: gangly, pimply, frightened young men who were scarcely out of their teens.
What would success look like? How would you define victory? They had been sent to Northern Ireland to quell the unrest during the summer of 1969, but since their arrival, the bloodshed had only intensified. What would they have to achieve before they could all go home? The army that deployed in the Troubles was not the army that had fought the Nazis. It was an organization that had come of age fighting small wars of colonial disentanglement. But what was Northern Ireland? Was it part of the United Kingdom? Or was it one of those restive colonies?
Adams had been ruminating, lately, about counter-interrogation techniques. “I had seized upon the device of refusing to admit I was Gerry Adams as a means of combating my interrogation,” he later recalled. “By continuing to assert that I was Joe McGuigan, I reasoned that I would thwart the interrogation by bogging it down on this issue.”
The first was Dolours Price’s childhood friend Francie McGuigan, the former “Hooded Man” who had been tortured at the secret army facility. One day in February 1972, McGuigan donned a set of borrowed black robes and, mingling with a visiting delegation of priests, walked right out the front door. Eighteen months later, another man, John Francis Green, managed to escape using the exact same ruse.
Working with Danny Morrison, the editor of Republican News, Adams began to mold a new philosophy that, on the surface, seemed to embody a contradiction: Sinn Féin would run candidates for office while the IRA continued to bring a bloody war to the British. Morrison would eventually capture the strategy in a famous aphorism, asking, at a Sinn Féin gathering, “Will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?”
Opponents joked that the upstart political party had accounts at every bank in the country, which they regularly drew upon, at gunpoint.
This paradox would become a signature of Adams’s emerging persona: homespun whimsy mingled with armed insurrection, cake fairs with a dash of bloodshed.
There were vastly more Irish Americans than there were people in Ireland itself.
one fundamental lesson was that a central pillar of Britain’s approach to counterinsurgency was “to mould leaderships whom they could deal with.”
but the IRA was, in actual fact, hopelessly penetrated by double agents. In a subsequent submission to a tribunal in Dublin, one handler who worked in British military intelligence estimated that by the end of the Troubles, as many as one in four IRA members worked, in some capacity, for the authorities.
All those bright lines that bureaucrats and legal scholars draw to delimit the government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force, those boundaries that are meant to separate order from barbarism, had been transgressed. “We were not there to act like an army unit,” one former British officer who served in the MRF later acknowledged. “We were there to act like a terror group.”
One night, someone smeared the house of one of his neighbors with excrement—wrong address, apparently—a gesture whose combination of vindictiveness and clumsiness had all the hallmarks of the IRA.
both were indignant because Adams had ordered them to take brutal actions, then disowned them, claiming that they alone bore moral responsibility, because he was never in the IRA.
But the walls were still tagged with runelike slurs—K.A.T., for “Kill all Taigs,” a derogatory term for Catholics, on one side; K.A.H., for “Kill all Huns,” a reference to Protestants, on the other.
When it came to the Troubles, a phenomenon known as “whataboutery” took hold. Utter the name Jean McConville and someone would say, What about Bloody Sunday? To which you could say, What about Bloody Friday? To which they could say, What about Pat Finucane? What about the La Mon bombing? What about the Ballymurphy massacre? What about Enniskillen? What about McGurk’s bar? What about. What about. What about.
