State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  This was not just political spin: although Heath gets a bad press for his policy in Northern Ireland, and made more than his fair share of dreadful mistakes, he set out with the best of intentions. In his detailed study of Heath’s policy in his first twelve months, the historian Jeremy Smith concludes that ‘on the issue of reform, on future north–south connections, on political change within Northern Ireland and even the constitutional link with the United Kingdom, the British government was positive, open-minded and mildly radical’. Of course, this does not sit well with simplistic views of the conflict in which the British are cast as clichéd stage villains. But the fact remains that in the crucial months of late 1970 and early 1971 it was the Provisionals who set off bombs, intimidated local residents, murdered soldiers and deliberately escalated the conflict. Of course, they were not stage villains either. But while Heath had everything to lose from violence, they thought they had everything to gain.16

  If anybody thought that Gunner Curtis’s death would bring an end to the violence, the events of the next few days destroyed their illusions. The following Tuesday, five BBC engineers were killed by an IRA land-mine near a transmitter in County Tyrone; the mine had been meant for a passing army patrol. A week later, a second British soldier, 22-year-old John Laurie, was shot by the IRA, and on 26 February Provo snipers shot and killed two RUC men patrolling in the Ardoyne. For many observers, however, it was what happened on the evening of Wednesday, 10 March that marked Northern Ireland’s descent into anarchy. That night, three young Royal Highland Fusiliers – Dougald McCaughey, 23, and the brothers John and Joseph McCaig, just 17 and 18 respectively – were enjoying a quiet pint in Mooney’s Bar in the centre of Belfast. They were off duty and wearing civilian clothes; in those days, there were no restrictions on soldiers visiting pubs and clubs on their evenings off. When a friendly stranger, introducing himself as a former soldier, offered to buy them some drinks and asked if they would like to come to a party, they readily agreed. It was only hours later, when a group of schoolchildren on a remote country road came across three corpses with bullet holes in the backs of their heads, that it became clear that the stranger was a member of the Provisional IRA, an Ardoyne man who had been kicked out of the SAS for mental instability after killing a civilian in Cyprus.

  The murder of the three young Highlanders left many observers numb with disgust; it was telling that, even though they had been killed by an IRA unit, the Provisionals’ leadership refused to accept responsibility. ‘After all the horrors of recent weeks and months, Ulster people have almost lost the capacity for feeling shock,’ observed a local newspaper editorial. ‘But the ruthless murder of three defenceless young soldiers has cut to the quick. These were cold-blooded executions for purely political purposes.’ Protestant and Catholic leaders united to condemn the killers; from Dublin, Jack Lynch branded them the ‘enemies of all Irish people’, and said that the atrocity brought ‘Belfast closer to the abyss’. And yet on the streets, where it counted, the murder of the three men only stoked the passions higher. Kevin Myers noted that their deaths ‘caused much quiet satisfaction amongst republicans’, since as Scots they were ‘presumed to be Protestant and Glasgow Rangers supporters’. The consensus now was that ‘British soldiers simply had what was coming to them’. Some talked openly of civil war: even Myers’s Catholic taxi driver told him with shining eyes that ‘the war’s coming and it’s going to be serious’, that ‘the Provies have fresh gear coming from America’ and that ‘there’ll be people dying in this town who’ve never fucking died before’. And in the army, there was now a mood of white-hot fury, a grim determination to strike back against the thugs who had slaughtered three unarmed men. Harry McCallion, a working-class Scottish Catholic in the elite Parachute Regiment, remembered that he and his comrades heard the news in silence. ‘I looked at the faces of the older soldiers around me,’ he recalled. ‘I read on them the same thing: “Just wait until we get across” … For me and everybody at the table, that was the major turning point.’17

  For unionists, the murder of the three Scottish soldiers provided definitive proof that the IRA were nothing more than barbarians, poised to destroy the very basis of the state they loved. Few had much faith in the British government or even in the army, which they blamed for not cracking down properly on the republican subversives in their midst. Many working-class Protestants, already frightened for their jobs and livelihoods, decided that they would have to take up arms to defend themselves, like their ancestors before them. By the spring of 1970, local communities across Belfast were already organizing vigilante ‘defence associations’ to protect themselves against their old enemies in the IRA. Like their counterparts in the nationalist community, these early loyalist groups put the blame on their adversaries, insisting that they wanted only to defend their families; as so often in sectarian conflicts the world over, violence and hatred were rooted in fear that the other side would strike first. Martin Snodden, a 16-year-old boy who joined the UVF in 1970, killed two people in a bomb attack and became an activist for reconciliation after being released from prison, recalled that on his estate – a unionist enclave in a predominantly nationalist area – there were ‘daily attacks on Protestant families’, including stonings, shootings and ‘riot situations’. Snodden’s grandfather had been a B Special and his father a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment: for an impressionable teenager, picking up a gun was a way of defending his family, asserting himself as a man, and associating himself with the history of his people. He felt ‘a combination of fear and love’, he said; ‘fear for what could happen and what was happening in the area at the time but also a wider sense of love for my whole tradition and the country that I had grown up in’.18

  In homage to the three Scottish soldiers, young loyalists across Belfast set up what they called ‘Tartan’ groups, teenage gangs who roamed the streets of their estates harassing Catholic families whom they blamed for supporting the IRA. In their flared jeans, bovver boots and tartan scarves, the Tartans looked like nothing so much as Glaswegian football hooligans; indeed, when the Shankill Young Tartans marched back from watching their team, Linfield, they would often pause to throw missiles at the Catholics in Unity Flats. Unlike ordinary hooligans, however, they had the chance to graduate from throwing stones to throwing bombs. Whereas most English youths were content merely to parade the colours of their team, the future loyalist Eddie Kinnear used to travel to school every day with a rucksack bearing the initials SYT (Shankill Young Tartan), YCV (Young Citizens Volunteer) and UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force). That said, however, it is worth remembering that most people never joined a paramilitary organization. When the loyalist vigilante groups banded together to create the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), complete with a military hierarchy just like the IRA’s, it attracted tens of thousands of volunteers. Yet when the UDA’s recruiting sergeant visited one Belfast estate already guarded by baseball-bat-wielding vigilantes, the response was something less than overwhelming enthusiasm.

  ‘He walked in in full combat uniform,’ recalled the watching Sammy Duddy, ‘put a Union Jack on the table, a Bible on top of it and a Sterling sub-machine gun in the middle of the lot. He says, “Right, we’re all here to join.” I was nearly killed in the queue to get out. There was a mad rush for the door.’ Of the fifty vigilante teenagers, he estimated, only fourteen joined the UDA. Duddy was one of them, becoming the group’s press officer. Unusually for a paramilitary, he maintained a double life as a drag artist by the name of Samantha, performing in loyalist clubs in fishnet tights, a black wig, heavy mascara and scarlet lipstick. In his heyday, he was known as ‘the Dolly Parton of Belfast’.19

  For the Stormont government, the murder of the three Scotsmen was a catastrophe, a symbol of its total failure to impose the rule of law on a sectarian conflict rapidly lurching out of control. ‘The telephone exchange of one Belfast newspaper was swamped with callers,’ reported The Times, ‘many of whom were demanding not only the immediate intensification o
f security measures but the resignation of the Chichester-Clark Government.’ At the very least, Chichester-Clark needed to make a dramatic gesture, and Unionist hardliners hoped that he would urge the army to introduce internment under the Special Powers Act. Internment – the detention of IRA suspects without trial – had been used on both sides of the Irish border with great success as recently as the 1950s, and there were persistent rumours that the government was going to reintroduce it. Indeed, in December 1970 Maudling and the Defence Secretary, Lord Carrington, had considered plans to hold IRA suspects on the troopship HMS Maidstone, and the following February a secret army report identified a possible site at the disused Long Kesh airbase, near Lisburn. Clearly this would be a controversial and risky step, yet in the immediate aftermath of the three Scots’ deaths, there seemed a decent chance that even some Catholics would accept it as a way to stop such atrocities happening again. Gerry Fitt, the founder of the SDLP and spokesman for moderate nationalism, privately urged the British to introduce ‘the immediate internment of all Provisional IRA men known to the police in order to rid Belfast of intimidation’.

  Even south of the border, where the Dublin authorities were increasingly disturbed by IRA recruitment and gun-running, harsh measures might not be entirely unwelcome. In December 1970, Ireland’s Minister of Justice, Desmond O’Malley, had publicly threatened to introduce internment to crush the republicans’ ‘secret armed conspiracy’, and six months later the Irish government set up ‘special criminal courts’ without juries to handle IRA terrorist trials. And even though Chichester-Clark had publicly ruled out bringing back internment, arguing that it would create more problems than it solved, the pressure seemed irresistible. Two days after the murders of the three soldiers, thousands of angry unionists descended on Stormont, waving Union Jacks and carrying placards demanding immediate internment, the rearming of the RUC and a major army offensive into ‘no-go’ areas. It was time, said the Unionist hardliner Harry West, for the murderers to be ‘rooted out’.20

  On 16 March, Chichester-Clark flew to London. To the surprise of his hosts, though, he did not ask for internment, because both the army and the RUC had warned him that it would provoke serious street protests and that given the poor state of intelligence on the IRA, it would be impossible to pick up all the right people. (This was a view echoed in London: when Heath’s Cabinet first discussed internment in February, they agreed that it must remain a last resort because it was bound ‘to exacerbate communal tensions afresh’.) Instead, Chichester-Clark wanted a broad security crackdown, with at least 3,000 more British troops sent in to occupy the nationalist ‘no-go’ areas, to impose curfews and cordons, and to forestall what he melodramatically warned might be a ‘general uprising’ against the IRA. This idea was a non-starter: army chiefs were adamantly opposed to the thought of their men becoming sitting ducks on nationalist estates, while Heath had no desire to throw thousands more men into a British Vietnam. So when Chichester-Clark flew back to Belfast, it was with a British offer of just 1,300 extra men, nowhere near enough to satisfy his increasingly vituperative critics on the right of the Unionist Party. For this decent man, painfully out of his depth, it was the final straw. Two days later, he decided to ring Maudling and announce his resignation.21

  Chichester-Clark’s departure unfolded in blackly comic circumstances. Maudling, it turned out, was giving a lecture at Merchant Taylors’ school, and when his Special Branch bodyguards approached him with news of the Stormont Prime Minister’s call, they found him having lunch with the headmaster – a lunch ‘made up entirely of whisky’, one said. Although Maudling then headed back to London, his car mysteriously ‘broke down’ in Watford, preventing him from taking the call – a breakdown probably arranged by his officials, given that by now he was steaming with booze. Instead, Chichester-Clark was put through to Heath himself, a very different prospect from the lazy, amiable Maudling. ‘What is the reason?’ Heath snapped when Chichester-Clark mumbled about resigning. ‘In what way are you disappointed? … Well, I don’t know what your justification for thinking that is … You’re responsible for your own intelligence, and you’ve agreed that it’s extremely weak … Well, I don’t understand what you mean by saying that.’

  Every time Chichester-Clark tried to justify himself, largely by blaming the British, Heath stamped all over him. The transcript reads like an account of a bulldozer crushing a rabbit:

  HEATH: Can you give me any examples where the IRA could have been apprehended and we failed to take action?

  CHICHESTER-CLARK: No, I can’t, no.

  HEATH: Well, then, Prime Minister, you can’t give me a single example. How can you say that we are just sitting there and doing nothing? On the one occasion that you raised with me at Chequers, we immediately took action.

  CHICHESTER-CLARK: Well, indeed, I appreciate that. I am not really trying to dispute that. I am not really trying to dispute that …

  Poor Chichester-Clark was not so much out-argued as overwhelmed. To a man of Heath’s obstinate rigidity, the notion that Chichester-Clark would walk away was simply unfathomable. ‘What exactly is your personal position?’ he demanded angrily. ‘Have you told the Cabinet that you intend to resign? … So in fact the decision is taken? … I see.’ And when Chichester-Clark muttered that he intended to blame the British army, Heath exploded. ‘Well, all I can say is that I consider that absolutely unjustifiable,’ he snapped. ‘I shall make it quite plain from here that it is absolutely unjustifiable. In fact it bears very little relation to the truth. I think it is doing immense harm to Northern Ireland and I think it makes the position of any successor of yours absolutely impossible. Absolutely impossible.’ That was the end of that; it would have taken a man with a much stiffer backbone than Chichester-Clark’s to stand up to Heath in this form. ‘Well, I will certainly look at what I propose to say again,’ he said weakly. ‘The last thing I want to do is to do anything that is in any way unhelpful.’ But Heath was in no mood to be magnanimous. ‘I don’t think there is anything further to discuss,’ he said bluntly. ‘Goodbye.’22

  Chichester-Clark’s successor was a very different proposition. As the heir to the world’s biggest shirt-making company, Brian Faulkner saw himself as the spokesman for Northern Ireland’s business interests, rather than the old landed gentry. Unlike most of his Unionist colleagues, he had not served in the Second World War and, perhaps to compensate, cultivated a brusque, no-nonsense style. As Stormont’s Minister for Home Affairs in the late 1950s he had taken the credit for crushing the IRA’s last major campaign, and he was reputed to be the best administrator that Unionist politics had ever produced. Cunning, energetic and fiercely ambitious, he saw himself as the only possible saviour of Northern Ireland, not least because his tough line had a strong appeal to the Protestant working classes. Indeed, even before Chichester-Clark’s resignation, Heath had told his Cabinet that Faulkner might be the only man who could stop the rise of ‘the extreme right wing’ in Unionist politics. If Faulkner failed, then Britain would have to take over. But Faulkner had no intention of failing, and in his first words after his election by the Ulster Unionists he struck a predictable theme. His priority, he said, was ‘law and order … What we need on this front are not new principles but practical results on the ground in the elimination not only of terrorism and sabotage but of riots and disorder.’23

  Far from the situation improving in Faulkner’s first few months, however, it got steadily worse. With an average of two bombs going off a day, the people of Belfast were becoming used to the distant thump of another explosion, the plumes of smoke, the smell of cordite, the sight of bleeding, crying casualties. On Sunday, 11 July, the Provos twisted the knife with a fresh bombing offensive along the route of the Orange marches planned for the Twelfth, as well as an attack on the Daily Mirror’s new Belfast printing plant. By now Faulkner’s words were looking like yet more empty promises. So far, 1971 had seen 300 explosions, 320 shooting incidents and more than 600 people rushed to hospital,
while 10 soldiers and 5 policemen had lost their lives. And as Faulkner mulled over the latest terrible headlines, there seemed only one way forward. As he saw it, he had already offered concessions to the nationalists by promising the SDLP that their representatives could chair two new committees reviewing government policy and legislation; now it was time to balance the equation. Internment was risky, but it had worked for him in the late 1950s, and it would shore up his shaky Protestant base. On 2 August, The Times reported that Faulkner’s most vociferous critic, the former Home Affairs minister William Craig, was already calling for new leadership and the foundation of an armed Protestant reservist force on the lines of the old B Specials. Three days later, Faulkner flew to London and formally asked Britain to introduce internment.24