by Daniel Finn
Part of the Problem
It was some time before the Provisionals began to make their mark. Their leadership team always intended to launch an offensive against British rule in the North, but they were in no position to do so by the time the split became public knowledge at Sinn Féin’s Ard Fheis (party conference) in January 1970. According to Martin Meehan, Billy McKee told him to prepare for the long haul when he joined the new organization: ‘People have to be trained. People have to be motivated. People have to be equipped. All this won’t just happen overnight.’27 Most importantly, there would have to be a dramatic shift in the mood of the Catholic ghettoes if British soldiers were to be seen as legitimate targets for the IRA.
That shift came sooner than most people could have imagined when Harold Wilson decided to send in troops. In the meantime, however, the transformation of the political environment after the August disturbances seemed to offer the civil rights movement fresh opportunities to press for reform. After all, one of their main goals had been to force Westminster to intervene over the heads of the local government. The British political elite was now plainly involved in the affairs of Northern Ireland – not under circumstances that NICRA would have wished for, but involved nonetheless. The movement was now in a position to demand change from those at the summit of the British state, by-passing its Unionist foothills altogether.
This was not lost on the Officials. As the new decade began, they called for renewed agitation in support of the civil rights programme: ‘Demand it, not from Stormont, but from the British Government and Parliament which is wholly responsible for the area.’ However, they rejected the idea of direct rule from Westminster, claiming that the British government wanted to regain control over the entire island through an ‘Anglo-Irish Federation’ that would ‘tie the whole country more closely to Britain than ever’. The Officials summed up their reformist platform with the demand for a legally entrenched Bill of Rights that could not be repealed by any local administration. This would make it possible to ‘democratize Stormont, overrule the right-wing Unionists, [and] develop a more Irish-oriented framework in the Six Counties within which some of those one million Protestants can be won in time to stand for a united Ireland’.28
The end of British rule thus remained a long-term aspiration, not an immediate demand. NICRA endorsed this approach at its AGM in February 1970. In a report on the civil rights gathering, the United Irishman noted the emphasis on ‘forms of protest which would be effective and yet minimize the danger of sectarian tension’. Street marches were thus ‘likely to be a less common tactic than before’.29 The Officials entered into a close alliance with the Communist Party, which also supported the Bill of Rights slogan.30 Over the next two years, the Officials and their Communist allies had the strongest voice in NICRA’s leadership, using it to advance a shared reformist perspective.31
The Provos now offered a home for those who considered it futile to seek reform while Northern Ireland was still part of the UK. But NICRA also faced competition on the opposite flank from a new political force, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). The SDLP brought together a group of MPs from Stormont and Westminster who could loosely be described as moderate nationalists. Gerry Fitt was the new party’s leader, with John Hume as his deputy. Some of the SDLP’s founders had carved out a political foothold before NICRA took to the streets, while others rode the civil rights wave into Stormont at the beginning of 1969. Although they had taken part in many of NICRA’s marches over the previous two years, the SDLP leadership now wanted to concentrate on parliamentary politics and establish themselves as the main nationalist interlocutor for the British government.32
Whatever strategy NICRA or the SDLP decided upon, all future developments in Northern Irish politics hinged on the choices being made in London. When Harold Wilson ordered the deployment of troops in August 1969, he decided not to revoke Stormont’s authority. Shortly before the Apprentice Boys march in Derry, James Callaghan had warned the Unionist leader Chichester-Clark that Westminster would play a bigger role in local affairs if he was forced to send in the British Army.33 However, after the deployment of troops, Callaghan told his cabinet colleagues that their policy should be to work through the Northern Irish government for as long as possible and avoid assuming direct responsibility.34
The logic that flowed from Callaghan’s choice was very simple. Any conceivable Stormont prime minister would have to come from the Unionist Party, and if they wished to avoid Terence O’Neill’s fate, would have to muster sufficient backing from the party’s MPs. Chichester-Clark was already under pressure from his hard-line opponents, inside and outside the cabinet.35 Ian Paisley had now formed a group of his own, the Protestant Unionist Party – soon rebranded as the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). The only way for the prime minister to satisfy his critics would be through the imposition of tough security policies, directed exclusively against nationalists.
The Army’s General Officer Commanding, Ian Freeland, showed that he understood the sectarian character of such policies perfectly well in remarks for a staff conference in October 1969. Freeland noted that ‘many people, mainly Northern Ireland Protestants’ wanted to know why the Army didn’t ‘restore Law and Order’ when it was brought in. To Freeland, the real meaning of such questions was clear: ‘Why didn’t the Army counter the resistance of the Roman Catholics behind their barricades by force of arms and reduce this minority to their original state of second-class citizenship?’36
According to the Army’s official history of the conflict, junior officers posted to the region were ‘well aware of the discrimination and deprivation, and asked themselves at the time why the Government did not do anything about it’. But there was no chance of any ‘substantive action’ from the power-holders in Belfast: ‘Stormont was part of the problem and could have been so recognized at the time.’37
It took a while for the logic of the British government’s position to work itself out. When troops first arrived, most people believed that their mission was to protect nationalist areas from attack – including the soldiers themselves.38 The well-worn anecdotes about British soldiers receiving endless cups of tea in Catholic neighbourhoods all date from this period. A minority of shrewd observers recognized that the Army’s real mandate was to support the ‘civil power’, which remained wholly Unionist in character.39 When James Callaghan visited the Bogside at the end of August, local nationalists applauded his promises of reform. The radicals who were still distrustful of British intentions could not make their voices heard.40 The barricades that had marked out the territory of ‘Free Derry’ were dismantled, and soldiers began to carry out routine patrols.41
Callaghan’s second visit in October 1969 marked the high point of nationalist goodwill towards his government. Under pressure from London, Chichester-Clark had appointed a new minister for community relations and created the post of complaints commissioner to hear allegations of unfair treatment by local councils. A new central authority was to control the allocation of public housing. However, as long as the ‘Orange State’ and its machinery of government remained intact, such reforms would gradually be drained of their substance in the passage from blueprint to reality.42
By the spring of 1970, relations between Catholics and the Army were already beginning to fray. The use of colonial-style policing methods in Derry, which imposed restrictions on whole communities rather than individual suspects, put an end to the honeymoon period.43 An Irish civil servant, Eamonn Gallagher, visited the city at the end of March to observe the Officials’ Easter parade. He found that the throwing of stones at the Army was ‘becoming almost a routine occurrence’, and that such activity met with ‘a considerable degree of tolerance from residents of the Bogside when feeling runs high’.44
It wasn’t just the methodology that the Army had imported from its far-flung colonial wars. Two of its units in Belfast and Derry absent-mindedly held up crowd-control banners taken from a recent campaign in Aden. The text orderi
ng rioters to disperse was in Arabic rather than English.45
In April there were violent clashes between soldiers and teenage rioters in Ballymurphy, sparked off by one of the year’s first Orange marches. The Official IRA commander Jim Sullivan tried to contain the violence, but to little avail.46 When Chichester-Clark met with the Army commander Ian Freeland a few days later, he blamed his party’s loss of two recent by-elections on ‘a lack of faith in the Government’s ability to maintain law and order’, and demanded ‘firm counter-measures’ if there was any repeat of what happened in Ballymurphy.47
The Westminster general election of June 1970 guaranteed there would be no change in British policy. James Callaghan had been toying with the idea of imposing direct rule if his party remained in office, but the unexpected Conservative victory put paid to that, and Stormont remained in place.48 Many Unionists hailed Edward Heath’s accession to power, expecting a more sympathetic hearing from the new government.
Matinee Performances
In a repeat of the previous year’s pattern, it was the summer marching season that brought matters to a head. Stormont had established a Joint Security Committee to coordinate between the Northern Irish government, the Army and the police. The RUC urged Chichester-Clark to ban the Orange marches in Belfast. The prime minister insisted that his party would destroy him if he did. Speaking on behalf of the Army, Freeland recommended following the path of least resistance: ‘It is easier to push them through the [nationalist] Ardoyne than to control the [loyalist] Shankill.’49
By the time the June marches commenced, the Provisionals were ready to make their public debut, and they seized the opportunity to present themselves as defenders of the Catholic ghettoes. When sectarian rioting broke out in north Belfast, Provo bullets killed three loyalists. But the main confrontation was in the Short Strand, an isolated nationalist enclave in east Belfast, where a group of Provisionals led by Billy McKee took up position in the grounds of St Matthew’s Church. The ‘Battle of St Matthew’s’ entered Provo mythology as proof that their Volunteers could stop any repetition of what had happened the previous August.50 Across Belfast, the weekend of 27–28 June resulted in six deaths and half a million pounds of damage to property.
Worse was to come. In the wake of the violence, the Joint Security Committee decided that the Army would respond to the next outbreak of trouble with a show of force. At the same time, Chichester-Clark’s government approved legislation to impose mandatory six-month jail sentences for all those convicted of ‘riotous behaviour’, ‘disorderly behaviour’ or ‘behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace’.51
Shortly before the latest disturbances in Belfast, Bernadette Devlin lost her appeal against a prison sentence for her role in the ‘Battle of the Bogside’. When word of Devlin’s arrest filtered through to a meeting in Derry where she had been due to speak, a full-scale riot erupted.52 Eamonn McCann described the motivation of the rioters:
The ‘defence of the area’ in August 1969 had already passed into local folklore. It was a noble episode in which we had all participated when, after decades of second-class citizenship, we had finally risen and asserted in a manner which made the world take notice that we were not going to stand for it any more. The jailing of Miss Devlin was a challenge to the area to stand by that estimation of its own action.53
If the commanders of the British Army had grasped the nature of that sentiment, as widespread in Belfast as it was in Derry, they might have hesitated before launching a search for arms on the Lower Falls Road at the beginning of July.
The Lower Falls was a stronghold of the Officials, and it was their weapons that soldiers took from a house in the area on the afternoon of 3 July. In its propaganda since the split, the Official IRA had projected two very different faces to the outside world. Alongside the reformist civil rights platform, readers of the United Irishman could find a strong case being made for traditional methods: ‘Only an armed, determined people will be listened to with respect. The war against Britain has never been halted and never will be halted as long as Britain claims a right to legislate for Ireland.’54 The movement’s Easter message spoke of the ‘necessary and inevitable confrontation in military struggle with the forces of British imperialism’, and issued a challenge to its detractors: ‘Let those who have been so quick with their criticism now help the IRA to equip itself with modern weapons.’55
Having endured taunts from their rivals and seen the Provos win plaudits for their action in the Short Strand, the Officials now had to decide on their response to the Army’s challenge. A crowd of local nationalists confronted the soldiers and began throwing stones. When Ian Freeland heard about this limited skirmish, he ordered the show of force that the security committee had mandated, and a full-scale invasion of the area began.56
The Officials decided to take the Army on. Their local commander Jim Sullivan ordered his men to confront the soldiers with every weapon that came to hand.57 By nightfall, Freeland had imposed a curfew of doubtful legality on the entire district. It lasted for two days, during which the Army saturated the Falls with CS gas, fired almost 1,500 rounds of live ammunition and killed four civilians without losing a single man.58 But their standing among nationalists suffered incalculable damage.
When the Army brought two Unionist cabinet ministers on a provocative tour of the area in Land Rovers, the fiasco was complete. The SDLP’s Paddy Devlin, who observed these developments with horror, later described the impact of the curfew on nationalist opinion: ‘Overnight the population turned from neutral or even sympathetic support for the military to outright hatred of everything related to the security forces.’59 The Army’s own history of the conflict picked out two examples of ‘poor military decision-making’ in the whole of the Troubles that had ‘serious operational and even strategic consequences’: the first was the Falls curfew, the second was the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry.60
The Officials could now claim to have led the biggest confrontation between republicans and British forces for half a century, with the Provos nowhere to be seen. They were quick to make use of this in their propaganda. Malachy McGurran, one of the leading northern Officials, baited the Provos at Bodenstown the following year for their absence from the ‘Battle of the Falls’.61 Having taken so much abuse from the Provisionals since the split, the Officials were naturally keen to pay them back in their own coin. Recruitment to the Official IRA soared.62 But the Falls Road curfew, and the broader political context of which it was a symptom, held as much danger as promise for the Officials. Unlike the Provisionals, they were not planning to launch a full-scale war against British rule in the North. But they could not simply cash in their chips after winning the first round: once they had started to compete with their rivals as a force that could take on British soldiers, they would have to match them every time the stakes got higher, or else fold. This proved to be a game for which the Provos were much better equipped.
On 17 July, James Chichester-Clark met with Edward Heath and his home secretary, Reginald Maudling. Maudling asked whether ‘firmer action on the law-and-order front’ could be combined with a gesture of some sort to the nationalist minority. Chichester-Clark insisted that a recent bill against incitement to religious hatred had ‘just about exhausted legislative remedies’ on that front.63 Northern Ireland now entered a transitional phase, bridging the demonstrations of 1968–69 and the onset of direct hostilities between republicans and the British Army in the spring of 1971.
Again, Ballymurphy was in the vanguard. During the final months of 1970, there was intense rioting in the area as its teenagers confronted the Army, pelting soldiers with stones, bottles and nail bombs while dodging rubber bullets and gas canisters.64 The use of CS by British forces cemented local hostility to their presence: the rioters mostly belonged to a narrow age group, but the gas clouds which hung over Ballymurphy’s estates affected everyone. Brendan Hughes, who became one of the most important Provisional leaders in Belfast, recalled being sent to the dis
trict by Billy McKee on a mission to attack British soldiers. The local commander Gerry Adams warned Hughes and his men not to interfere with their enemy while he was making a mistake: ‘He wanted to keep the rioting going. He didn’t want any gunfire.’65 That strategic patience helped transform Ballymurphy into a solid base for Adams and his comrades when the street clashes had completed their radicalizing effect.
According to Eamonn McCann, similar confrontations in Derry found their raw material among a layer of unemployed youths who had been ‘briefly elevated into folk-hero status in the heady days of August, praised and patronized by local leaders for their expertise with the stone and the petrol bomb’, before finding themselves ‘dragged back down into the anonymous depression which had hitherto been their constant condition’.66 After the Falls curfew, their weekly clashes with British troops on the edge of the Bogside became a regular routine: the ‘Saturday matinee’, in local parlance. Army intelligence identified McCann as the only prominent figure with any influence over the rioters, and the Derry Labour Party even set up a short-lived ‘Young Hooligans Association’ in the hope of directing them towards more constructive political tasks.67 But such efforts were largely unavailing.
McCann noted that sympathy for the rioters was far from unanimous among older residents of the Bogside.68 However, the Criminal Justice Act that Stormont had passed in a hurry the previous year proved to be the legislative equivalent of CS gas, striking at random and nurturing communal solidarity against the state. By the end of the year, the authorities had charged 269 people with offences carrying mandatory sentences; 109 of these charges went to court, with a conviction and six-month jail term handed down in every case.69 British troops further stoked the fires of nationalist anger by arresting alleged ‘hooligans’ several days after a riot had taken place. The Derry Journal highlighted the case of one teenager who was identified as a rioter by two Army witnesses, when his boss, his timecard and his fellow workers all placed him on the night shift at a local factory.70
