In Derry the GOC had come to an agreement with leaders of moderate Catholic opinion in August 1971 that the army would lower its profile in order to allow the ‘extremists’ to be marginalized. By the end of the year it was obvious that the wager on moderation had failed: ‘At present neither the RUC nor the military have control of the Bogside and Creggan areas, law and order are not being effectively maintained and the Security Forces now face an entirely hostile Catholic community numbering 33,000 in these two areas alone.’44 This had allowed both sections of the IRA in the city large zones for rest and recuperation, from which they had emerged as the most formidable military challenge in the North. The large numbers of nationalist youth, ‘Derry Young Hooligans’ as the military commanders in the city referred to them, also used the ‘no-go’ areas as bases for incursions into the city centre, which was being decimated by the effects of rioting, arson and Provisional bombs. By the end of the year, faced with an increasingly rampant level of ‘Young Hooligan’ activity, which the IRA often used as a means of luring soldiers into situations where they were vulnerable to snipers or nail-bombs, there was a feeling amongst some senior military commanders that a more aggressive posture was necessary. This was the background to the events of Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972, when, after rioting that had developed in the wake of a banned civil rights march, members of the Parachute regiment, whose deployment in Derry had been questioned by local police and army commanders because of their reputation for gung-ho brutality, opened fire, killing thirteen civilians.
The material released to the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, set up in 1997 by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, provides no evidence that the killings were the result of a policy decision by either the Faulkner or Heath cabinets. Instead there was a clearly defined local dialectic leading to the disaster. Major-General Ford, the Commander of Land Forces who was responsible for day-to-day operational decisions in Northern Ireland, had come to the conclusion that a ‘softly-softly’ approach to the Bogside and Creggan had placed an increasingly intolerable strain on his men as they faced strong and self-confident aggression from ‘Derry Young Hooligans’ and from the local IRA. He was contemptuous of the moderate advice coming from the local RUC commander, a Catholic. Afraid that the city centre itself was in danger of becoming a ‘no-go’ area, Ford had come to believe that only the shooting of identified ‘ringleaders’ would stop the rot.45
The Heath cabinet had no desire to push events in Derry to such a brutal conclusion, as a minute of the cabinet discussion shows:
As to Londonderry, a military operation to impose law and order would require seven battalions… It would be a major operation, necessarily involving civilian casualties, and thereby hardening even further the attitude of the Roman Catholic population.
Heath's own summing-up of the situation on 11 January was that a military operation to ‘reimpose law and order’ in Derry might become inevitable, but it should not be undertaken until there was a successful political initiative.46 The British political and military establishment may have been prepared to contemplate civilian deaths in Derry during an operation against the IRA in the Bogside and Creggan, but only when they believed that the political conditions were right. This would entail a major political initiative and one was not yet on the horizon when Bloody Sunday occurred. Less than a week before, the Chief of the General Staff, Sir Michael Carver, on a visit to the province, had defined the ‘IRA propaganda machine’ as the main enemy.47 The actions of the First Parachute Regiment on 30 January provided that machine with sufficient fuel to guarantee years of effective work.
Direct Rule and the Fragmentation of Unionism
The Derry killings unleashed a wave of angry protest in the South that culminated in the burning of the British embassy in Dublin after it had been attacked by a crowd of more than 20,000. Amidst a torrent of international criticism and with growing unease amongst his own colleagues and Tory backbenchers, Heath summoned Faulkner to Downing Street to discuss the possibility of a political initiative. Faulkner was confronted with a series of ideas, including repartition, a periodic border poll, a broadening of his government to include members of the recently formed moderate-nationalist Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) and the transfer of all Stormont's security powers to Westminster.48 On 3 March, as newspapers carried a number of speculative articles on the imminence of direct rule, Faulkner read out a telegram from Heath to the annual meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council. In it, Heath had described the stories as ‘pure speculation’. Kenneth Bloomfield noted that Faulkner ‘should have been more wary of that elastic form of words’.49 Even at a cabinet meeting the day before the crucial Downing Street meeting on 22 March, Faulkner told his colleagues that ‘consultation rather than announcement of decisions was what was in Mr Heath's mind – indeed he thought it would be unrealistic after weeks of independent study for him to be expected to accept any new ideas on the strength of a one-day meeting.’ Harry West was the only minister who is recorded as regarding Faulkner as ‘over-optimistic’: ‘preparations should be made for either of two extreme situations – an anti-climax causing major trouble by Republican supporters or such radical solutions being imposed on the Government that it would have to seriously consider its position collectively and individually’.50 It was West who was proved correct. At their meeting the following day Heath spelt out the realities as perceived in London:
At present there were 17 Battalions in Northern Ireland; the Army presence had existed for two and a half years and it was now becoming apparent that while the Army could deal with the IRA up to a point… there could be no purely military solution. The drain on United Kingdom resources was very considerable and there had been massive interference with the British Government's international commitments.
The United Kingdom Government had a situation where they had a responsibility and the blame for what happened as regards internment and on the security front but were without real power: this was a very unsatisfactory situation which was accentuated by the growing financial dependence of Northern Ireland.51
A military solution would mean an ‘escalation of force, whereas what was needed was a de-escalation… to swing the Catholic community away from those who were using force’. A political initiative was needed, and the British government did not consider that Faulkner's proposals were ‘sufficient to give the permanent, active and guaranteed role to the minority’. No specific proposals were put forward by the British, but they suggested the need to phase out internment and added that in order to do this it was necessary for Westminster to take over responsibility for law and order.52
Faulkner recounted his response: ‘I was shaken and horrified, and felt completely betrayed.’ The next day he set out the British proposals to the cabinet and admitted that he had been proved wrong about Heath's intentions. The cabinet's almost unanimous decision was to resign rather than to stay on as a ‘bunch of marionettes’.53 But as the Unionist government accepted its peaceful expropriation, it remained to be seen how the unionist community would react and what the implications would be for the leaders of the UUP.
Unionism was driven towards a bitter and fevered fragmentation by the twin threats of Provisional violence and British intervention. Deaths from the conflict had risen from fourteen in 1969 to 174 in 1971. The first three months of 1972 produced eighty-seven more, and that year would be the worst in three decades of violence with 470 deaths, 14 per cent of all those killed in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998. Other indices of sharply escalating violence were a rise in the number of shootings from seventy-three in 1969 to 1,756 in 1971 and of explosions from nine to 1,022 in the same period.54 On 20 March the Provisionals made their most destructive and indiscriminate contribution to the tool-kit of terrorism with the first use of a car-bomb in a devastating explosion in Belfast's Donegall Street. Claimed to be a blow at ‘the colonial economic structure’55 and the British ruling class, this Provisional bomb killed six people, most of them members of the cre
w of a bin-lorry.56 With the IRA declaring that 1972 would be the ‘Year of Victory’ and Harold Wilson being prepared to meet leading Provisionals in Dublin and declare his support for their inclusion in all-party talks in the event of an IRA ceasefire, many unionists scented betrayal, fearing that Wilson was a surrogate for Heath, who would do anything to extricate his government from the Irish quagmire.57
This was the environment in which support for both radical constitutional change in the form of a possible independent loyalist state and the much more localistic and almost apolitical vigilantism of the emerging Protestant paramilitary groups developed. The politician who temporarily dominated the Protestant reaction was William Craig. He had played a leading role in all the anti-reformist movements that had developed since O'Neill had sacked him from the cabinet. He warned that if the British government abolished Stormont it would be met by massive resistance; a provisional government would be formed and, if necessary, Northern Ireland would go it alone.58 As the IRA campaign intensified he criticized Faulkner's acquiescence in London's ‘interference’ in Stormont's security responsibilities and demanded the creation of a ‘third force’ of loyalists, essentially a return of the B Specials, to deal with the republican threat.59 In the aftermath of ‘Bloody Sunday’, with rumours of imminent direct rule abounding, Craig launched Ulster Vanguard on 9 February. Although other leading members of Vanguard, such as the Presbyterian minister and leading Orangeman Martin Smyth, saw the organization as a means of reunifying the Unionist Party around more right-wing policies,60 Craig's willingness to be associated closely and publicly with loyalist paramilitaries was an embarrassment to the staid and conservative figures who were the backbone of the right within the party. Vanguard's initial role was to scare off any interventionist urges Heath might be planning to indulge by a theatrical politics of threat. Craig was borne in an ancient limousine, complete with motorcycle outriders, to mass rallies stiffened by the presence of paramilitaries in uniform, where he threatened violence: most graphically to a crowd of over 60,000 in Belfast's Ormeau Park on 18 March, where he proclaimed, ‘We will do or die. We will not accept direct rule… We must build up dossiers on the men and women who are the enemies of Northern Ireland because one day, if the politicians fail, it will be our job to liquidate the enemy.’61
When on 24 March Heath announced the suspension of the Stormont parliament after Faulkner and his cabinet refused a demand for the transfer of all security powers to London, Vanguard's response was a two-day general strike. Although it was relatively successful, it did little to obstruct the unfolding of British policy. The introduction of direct rule was hailed by the Provisional IRA as a victory, which they declared ‘places us in a somewhat similar position to that prior to the setting up of partition and the two statelets. It puts the “Irish Question” in its true perspective – an alien power seeking to lay claim to a country for which it has no legal right.’62 But the significance of direct rule was elsewhere: its introduction marked the definitive end of the ‘Orange state’, and it allowed the British government to introduce a strategy of reform from above. Northern Protestants were inevitably divided in their reading of the conflicting interpretations of direct rule put forward within a unionist politics characterized by disarray and confusion.
Craig advocated an independent Ulster as the only defence against the IRA and a Conservative government that a Vanguard pamphlet portrayed as ‘tired, even bored with Irish politics from which they wish to extricate themselves’.63 In a newspaper article he denounced British treachery:
They had experience of Westminster politicians from Gladstone to Wilson. Consistently at every crisis Westminster has produced politicians prepared, for party advantage, to renege on Ulster. If the gentlemen at Westminster are bent on seriously tampering with our constitution, Vanguard will seek a transfer of power from Westminster with the objective of achieving some form of friendly dominion status.64
But Vanguard's willingness to contemplate fundamental constitutional change and its association with Protestant paramilitary groups was unappealing to many unionists. Distrust of the British governments was a much more widespread phenomenon amongst unionists than a willingness to contemplate a radical loosening of the constitutional link with the British state.65 There was also little evidence that the emergence of Protestant paramilitary groups as players in inter-communal conflict had allowed them to develop the sort of political and ideological legitimacy that the Provisional IRA had achieved in the Catholic community.
The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) – its name adapted from that of the unionist paramilitary grouping created in 1912 to resist Home Rule – had been formed in 1966 by ex-servicemen who worked in the shipyard and lived in the Shankill district of West Belfast. They had been involved with Ulster Protestant Action, founded in 1959 to ensure that Protestant employers looked after loyalists as redundancies threatened, and were influenced by the anti-ecumenical and anti-republican preaching of Ian Paisley. However, the UVF's murder of two Catholics in 1966 and the arrest of its leader Gusty Spence and two of his associates dealt it a near-fatal blow and left little in the way of enduring organization or support.66
It was the communal violence in West and North Belfast in August 1969 and after internment that propelled Protestant paramilitarism from the lumpen fringes of loyalist activity to, at least temporarily, a more central role. Although the UVF would benefit from the violent and febrile conditions post-August 1969, the main organization to emerge was the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). The UDA was established in September 1971 out of the fusion of a number of vigilante groups that had emerged in North and West Belfast. At its peak in 1972 it had a membership of between 40,000 and 50,000 men.67 The declared motivation of the UDA was the defence of its communities from republican attacks. Most of the membership had full-time employment and so tended to play little part in the day-to-day running of the organization, coming out at night and weekends to man barricades or take part in marches and demonstrations, which were common in the centre of Belfast in 1972. However, a hard core of often unemployed members would work full time for the organization, and, as in the smaller UVF, it was these who were also involved in violent actions under the nom de guerre of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF). The object of its attacks was defined as the republican movement, but UFF targets extended well beyond known IRA men to include any Catholic unlucky enough to come into the path of one of its assassination squads. In the eighteen months after its first killing of a Catholic vigilante on the Crumlin Road in February 1972 it would kill over 200 people.68 Although some of the more cerebral of its leaders would rationalize these sectarian killings as an attempt to dry up the reservoir of popular support and sympathy for the Provos in the Catholic community, many were ad hoc responses of small groups of UDA men enraged by an IRA attack and often inflamed by alcohol and sectarian hatred.
Although the Provisionals had a less nakedly sectarian agenda than that of the loyalist groups, their campaign was also tainted by sectari-anism.69 Until the onset of the ‘Ulsterization’ of security policy in the mid 1970s, the Provisionals had a large and easily identifiable non-Protestant target in the British Army. Even then their use of car-bombs in Belfast and other town centres showed a cavalier disregard for the lives of civilians, the majority of them Protestants. Nor did the IRA hesitate to bomb pubs in Protestant areas: in September 1971 a Provisional bomb at the Four Step Inn on the Shankill Road killed two people and injured twenty.70
In this situation of political instability and intense violence, Ian Paisley posed the biggest threat to the position of the Unionist Party. There was nothing inevitable about this, for down to 1973 it was to William Craig that most disaffected unionists looked to provide leadership against Faulkner's ‘appeasement’ policies. Paisley was by 1971 a member of both the Stormont and Westminster parliaments, but his coarse and unsophisticated anti-Catholicism made him and his Protestant Unionist Party appear too extreme for the vast bulk of ‘respectable’ unionists. His suppor
t was still largely confined to rural Ulster, where he had, in areas such as north Antrim and north Armagh, a following composed of a mixture of pietistic Protestants and members of the Orange Order.71
However, the hostility he had experienced from other MPs at Westminster led him to modify the more fanatical features of his public persona. He was also affected by his friendship with the Ulster Unionist MP for Shankill, Desmond Boal. Abrasive, intelligent and one of the North's leading lawyers, Boal emphasized the importance of class issues if Paisleyism were to become an effective challenge to the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). Both he and John McQuade, the ex-docker and ex-soldier who was MP for Woodvale in North Belfast, personified the dissident Unionist tradition that had produced previous independent Unionist MPs such as J. W. Nixon and Tommy Henderson, who combined ultra-loyalism and strong Orange credentials with a record of criticism of the Unionist Party on social and economic issues.72
Paisley and Boal made a bid to widen their political appeal by the replacement of the Protestant Unionist Party with a new organization, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), founded in September 1971. Boal defined it as being ‘right wing in the sense of being strong on the constitution, but to the left on social issues’. But although some of its Belfast activists were from the NILP tradition, most of the DUP's belonged to Paisley's Free Presbyterian Church. This provided the party with an infrastructure of dedicated and ultra-loyal activists who in time would emerge as a disciplined and monolithic threat to the defensive and divided Unionist Party. However, for most of the first two years of the DUP's existence the policy stances adopted by Paisley did much to confuse his supporters and limit his appeal. Paisley opposed internment, supported Northern Ireland's full political integration into the UK political system and speculated that changes in the Republic's Constitution might change Protestant attitudes to a united Ireland. These heretical statements created confusion and incredulity amongst his supporters. They also prompted the IRA leadership to praise his ‘statesmanship’, and evoked a prediction from William Whitelaw, first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, that he would be ‘the future leader of Northern Ireland’.73
Ireland Since 1939 Page 32
