State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Heath and his ministers were well aware of the arguments against internment. In March, the British representative in Belfast had reported that Army Intelligence estimated that they would catch only 20 per cent of the Provisionals’ membership (‘and then mostly small fry’), while the RUC had advised that ‘there would be a lot of younger people whom the police did not know and who would not be picked up’. The new commanding officer in Belfast, General Sir Harry Tuzo, observed in July that the arguments against it were ‘very strong’ and that it would be ‘primarily a political decision’, not a military one. And at the end of the month, the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, had warned that there was no way he could introduce internment south of the border without splitting his own party. Heath ‘should reflect very seriously’ before taking such a ‘grave step’, he told the British ambassador in Dublin, warning that ‘it would produce an explosion that it would be impossible to contain … With the extreme unionists apparently on the rampage, all the [Catholic] moderates would identify themselves with the internees.’ Even when the ambassador raised the prospect of direct British rule, Lynch ‘reverted again and again to the immediate problem of the unwisdom of internment, saying that surely we had enough troops, police and intelligence resources to manage without it’.25

  It could hardly be said, then, that Heath was unaware of the dangers. The problem, though, was that he was now totally committed to Faulkner. If he turned him down and Faulkner resigned, then the only alternative might be direct rule, which nobody in Westminster wanted. And there were possible compensations: not only might internment break the back of the Provisional IRA, but as Maudling pointed out, it might be the only way to forestall a ‘Protestant backlash’ against the Catholic minority. At six on the evening of 5 August, therefore, Heath told Faulkner he could have what he wanted. He noted, however, that internment ‘could not be said … to be justified by any military necessity’, but was ‘a political act, which would be thought to be directed against one faction and must accordingly be matched by some political action, in the form of a ban on marches, which would represent its counterpart in relation to the other faction’. Faulkner tried to wriggle out of a ban on Orange marches, but Heath stood firm. Internment ‘should be seen to be impartial in its application’, he added, ‘and it would presumably be desirable for this purpose that those interned should include a certain number of Protestants’.This was good advice. Unfortunately, Faulkner did not heed it.26

  When Richard McAuley went to bed on the night of Sunday, 8 August 1971, he found it difficult to get to sleep. Like thousands of other Belfast teenagers, he was waiting nervously for his A-level results to come in the post the next morning, and he did not drift off until almost three. But when he finally awoke at half-past seven and came downstairs, there was no sign of the post – or the postman. ‘There was a barricade at the top of the street,’ he remembered.

  It was incredible. In our street! Barricades! I didn’t understand it. Stories were going around that people were being lifted out of their homes and the word was that internment was in. And there I was asking people, ‘What’s happened to the postman?’ They were all saying, ‘His van’s probably at the top of the street.’ And my A-level results were with him. Then I thought to myself, ‘Internment? … They can’t do it. They wouldn’t be so daft.’

  But they had; the postman never came that day. So Richard and a couple of friends hurdled the barricades and walked the short distance to school, where they found their results. Richard’s were good; he went to St Joseph’s College to train as a teacher, fulfilling a lifetime’s ambition. But he never graduated; instead, he dropped out a few years later, and joined the Provisional IRA.27

  ‘Operation Demetrius’, as it was called, was a shambles, a debacle, a disaster for the cause of peace in Northern Ireland. Acting on intelligence provided by the RUC, British troops sealed off streets across the province and snatched a total of 342 men in a series of dawn raids, whisking them off to various makeshift camps, most famously at the Long Kesh airbase. Some of their captives were indeed IRA activists, and they did manage to extract some decent intelligence. But whatever slight benefits they gained were overwhelmingly outweighed by the mistakes, the terrible public relations and the ferocity of the reaction. The RUC’s files on the IRA were horrendously out of date; the split between the Officials and the Provisionals, as well as the emergence of the militant new generation, meant that they were not even close to identifying the key players. Their intelligence, one British officer said, ‘was very, very poor’. He himself had the unenviable task of storming into a house at four in the morning to pick up an ‘elderly gentleman who was well into his eighties who was rather proud to be arrested’. ‘I’m delighted to think that I’m still a trouble to the British Government,’ his captive said wryly, ‘but I have to tell you I’ve not been active since the Easter Rising.’ Needless to say, he was soon released; indeed, no fewer than a hundred people were released after just two days, which says it all about the quality of the RUC’s information.28

  But internment was no laughing matter. Kevin Duffy, a 21-year-old joiner from the little country village of Moy, was watching television with his mother when soldiers surrounded the house and threatened to kick the door in unless he gave himself up. He had never joined the Provisionals, the Officials or any republican group; he had never been connected with the civil rights groups; his only qualifications for arrest were that he had learned Gaelic and was a member of the Gaelic Athletic Association. And he was, of course, a Catholic. Despite what Heath had said in London, and despite Maudling’s encouragement to ‘lift a few Protestants’, every single one of the 342 people arrested that morning was a Catholic.29

  Faulkner always insisted that the policy had been a success. The army was excising ‘a deep-seated tumour’, he said, which was ‘not a pleasant business. Sometimes innocent people will suffer.’ But as news of the raids spread across Belfast, anger turned into outright fury, and fury into violence. In Catholic areas, women banged hundreds of dustbin lids to warn of approaching army vehicles while teenagers dragged together cars, mattresses, old furniture, even builders’ skips and rubble to construct makeshift barricades. Milk vans were seized and their bottles converted into petrol bombs; paving stones were torn up and smashed into missile-sized fragments. As smoke rose over the bleeding city, the first reports of deaths reached the local press: in two days, seventeen people were shot dead, ten of them Catholic rioters shot by the British army, while enraged mobs forced 7,000 people out of their homes. Buses came to a standstill, and thousands of people stayed away from work: a wise decision, given that almost every hour brought news of fighting breaking out somewhere else in the city. In the Ardoyne, at least 200 houses were ablaze by Monday evening, as Protestant families fled their homes after attacks by nationalist mobs. Many set fire to their own houses to ensure that Catholic families would not take them over, and as the crowds of fleeing refugees straggled down the roads, some defiantly flying the Union Jack, IRA snipers and British soldiers exchanged gunfire in the streets. ‘All shops were closed, and the destruction of so many lorries and tankers meant that the city was running out of food and fuel,’ wrote Kevin Myers, who watched the devastating scenes in the Ardoyne with fascinated horror. ‘A perpetual pall of smoke hung in the city’s skies, its acrid vapours accosting everyone who stepped out of doors … Belfast was paralysed.’30

  Reginald Maudling spent the day relaxing by his swimming pool in suburban Hertfordshire, rousing himself from time to time to ring Whitehall and ask how things were going. In interviews over the next few days, he blandly repeated Stormont’s propaganda that internment was a terrific success, telling the Guardian what his biographer calls the ‘outright lie’ that he had merely been following army advice. And when the BBC’s Robin Day asked why the army had not arrested any loyalists, Maudling came out with the absurd line that ‘if any Protestant organisations were behaving like the IRA we should treat them in precisely the same way’ – which completely m
issed the point that not only had the loyalist UVF committed the first murders of the Troubles, but the UDA was even then building up its strength on Protestant estates. Within the army, however, there was much less complacency. As one officer put it, internment had been a ‘complete disaster’. Among other things, it destroyed the last vestiges of a moderate political consensus in Northern Ireland, with the SDLP walking out of public bodies and organizing a rent and rates strike until the internees were freed. And by turning so many Catholics against the British, internment completed what the Falls curfew had begun, utterly undermining the hearts and minds campaign the army had been conducting for two years. One account of the Troubles calls it ‘a misjudgement of historic proportions’; Maudling’s biographer even calls it ‘one of the great blunders of recent British political history’. The tragic irony was that neither Heath nor the army had wanted to introduce it in the first place. But by listening to Faulkner, Heath had committed one of the worst errors of his career. The big winners, of course, were the Provisionals, who not only survived with their weapons virtually untouched, but could now count on huge support on the nationalist estates. ‘That’s when it became clear to me’, said one Belfast woman who joined the Provos, ‘that the Brits were here to suppress the Catholic minority, and for no other reason.’31

  Initially, most papers scoffed at claims that the army and the RUC had tortured internees in Northern Ireland. Here, Cummings addresses the issue with his usual sensitivity in the Daily Express, 27 October 1971.

  What made internment even more of a disaster, however, was the treatment of the prisoners. Incarceration in the bleak solitude of Long Kesh, which with its low Nissen huts and barbed wire fences looked like a Nazi concentration camp, was bad enough, but as early as mid-August Irish newspapers began running reports that suspects were being tortured by the army and the RUC. One Belfast man, for example, told the Tyrone Democrat that he had been made to run over broken glass; others reported suffering violent beatings, being forced to stand spreadeagled with hoods over their heads, or being subjected to white noise and bright lights. But while the government insisted that this was merely IRA propaganda – and indeed republicans gleefully repeated allegations of brutality as loudly as possible – the terrible reality was that the stories were true. In April 1971, the army and the RUC had held a secret meeting in Belfast to plan the interrogation of suspects if internment were introduced. During colonial operations in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden, intelligence officers had already perfected what they called the ‘Five Techniques’, which involved making suspects stand spreadeagled against the wall for hours on end, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to white noise, giving them only water to drink and a little bread to eat, and keeping them awake for days on end. There was nothing new about these techniques, and they owed nothing to anti-Irish racism, as some republicans claimed. They were merely part of the army’s colonial repertoire, and it never occurred to its officers that, quite apart from any moral considerations, they might not be suitable within the United Kingdom itself. For one thing, they had explicit government approval. As Lord Carrington later told his colleagues on GEN 47, the special Cabinet committee set up to handle Northern Ireland, both he and Maudling had approved the ‘proposed methods of interrogation’ the day after internment was announced. As the minutes blandly concluded, ‘the lives of British soldiers and of innocent civilians depended on intelligence. We were dealing with an enemy who had no scruples, and we should not be unduly squeamish over methods of interrogation in these circumstances.’32

  The memories of men interrogated according to the Five Techniques make chilling reading. The Belfast republican Liam Shannon, for example, claimed that he had been beaten constantly before being hooded, spreadeagled and exposed to white noise for a solid seven days, and then interrogated with a bright light shining in his face, ‘like something you see in KGB films’. Other men were treated to more rudimentary methods: Tommy Gorman recalled being ‘battered, just battered, for three days. There was no subtlety to it. It was just, you were hauled out of bed at two o’clock in the morning and brought in and questioned, battered against the wall.’ That two men as intelligent as Maudling and Carrington thought that such techniques were acceptable in Northern Ireland is a reminder that British officials often saw the conflict through a colonial prism. If the techniques had been appropriate for Aden, they thought, there was no reason why they would not work in Belfast. Even so, it beggars belief that they genuinely thought the techniques could be kept quiet. As early as August 1971, the pressure was such that Heath set up an inquiry under Sir Edmund Compton to investigate the allegations. But before it could report back, a major investigation by the Sunday Times’s Insight team on 17 October uncovered eleven potential cases of torture. And while Compton’s report concluded that there had been no ‘physical brutality as we understand the term’, a second inquiry by the Privy Council a few months later produced rather different results. Two of the three-man panel backed the government, but the third, Lord Gardiner, was blistering in his condemnation of techniques ‘which were secret, illegal, not morally justifiable and alien to the traditions of what I believe still to be the greatest democracy in the world’.

  After that there could be no going back. On the same day the report came out, Heath announced that the Five Techniques would never be used again. The damage, however, was done. ‘If I, as a Catholic, were living in Ulster today,’ Graham Greene wrote to The Times, ‘I confess I would have one savage and irrational ambition – to see Mr Maudling pressed against a wall for hours on end, with a hood over his head, hearing nothing but the noise of a wind machine, deprived of sleep when the noise temporarily ceases by the bland voice of a politician telling him that his brain will suffer no irreparable damage.’33

  Internment was a public relations catastrophe. Viewed from Dublin or New York, it gave the impression that the arrogant imperialists were once again stamping with brutal callousness on a defenceless people. And even in mainland Britain it provoked fierce criticism. Ever since troops had been sent to protect the Catholics in 1969, a minority on the far left had insisted on seeing them as the equivalent of the American troops fighting in Vietnam, reducing the conflict to a simplistic morality tale of imperialists and insurgents. And although the Provisional IRA were one of the least countercultural organizations imaginable, they became the unlikeliest of folk heroes in the squats and festivals, the polytechnic classrooms and hippy communes that made up the far-left landscape in the Heath years. As early as the summer of 1971, marchers in London waved placards reading ‘GAY LIBERATION FRONT SUPPORTS BATTLE FOR FREEDOM IN IRELAND’. It probably says it all that John Lennon, always keen to advertise his bleeding heart, went along to one march waving a countercultural newspaper with the headline: ‘For the IRA – Against British Imperialism’.

  Two years later, a coalition of ‘trade unionists, housewives, students and ex-soldiers’, as they rather disingenuously called themselves, gathered at Fulham Town Hall to set up the Troops Out Movement, modelled on the American movement against the Vietnam War. Although this organization professed to be entirely non-partisan, much of its money and muscle came from Tariq Ali’s International Marxist Group. Its literature frequently defended IRA atrocities while devoting vast swathes of newsprint to the alleged crimes of the British army. The province’s unionist majority, meanwhile, were either dismissed as imperialist puppets or ignored altogether. And while the Troops Out Movement never came close to securing mass support, its arguments did filter slowly into the mainstream. ‘Give Ireland back to the Irish,’ sang Paul McCartney and Wings in 1972, in a single that was banned for political reasons by the BBC, although they might have done better to suppress it for crimes against musical taste. Certainly nobody could accuse McCartney of excessive sophistication: ‘Great Britain you are tremendous / And nobody knows it like me / But really what are you doing / In the land across the sea?’34

  Still, Lennon and McCartney were hardly unusual in
knowing so little about the conflict in the land across the sea. Instead of explaining the roots of the troubles, the tabloids often preferred to feed their readers’ worst fears, such as when the Mirror told its readers that the IRA had ‘hired assassins from behind the Iron Curtain to gun down British troops’, or when the same newspaper claimed that the IRA had recruited ‘British Trotskyists and Marxists’ to organize ‘a blitz of shopping centres, rail-way stations and other government offices’. And behind the ignorance lay centuries of dislike, suspicion and outright prejudice. In Glasgow, Protestant Rangers fans cheered the news of army offensives in Northern Ireland, while Celtic fans sang bloodthirsty Fenian songs. Even on BBC programmes, overt anti-Irish sentiments were not uncommon. In Till Death Us Do Part, Alf Garnett is forever thundering against ‘the Micks’, while few Irish viewers could have been entirely delighted by Sybil Fawlty’s verdict on the builder O’Reilly in September 1975: ‘Not brilliant? He belongs in a zoo! … He’s shoddy, he doesn’t care, he’s a liar, he’s incompetent, he’s lazy, he’s nothing but a half-witted thick Irish joke!’ And once the Provisionals launched their mainland bombing campaign in 1973–4, there were brief spasms of fierce anti-Irish harassment, with reports of Irish pubs and clubs being attacked in major cities. ‘Even mates that I’ve worked with for years, Eddie from Wales, I’ve seen him blank me,’ said one Irishman living in London. ‘Mates in the pub, they come out with comments like “Bloody Irish murderers, they should all be shot.” ’35

  Yet what is most striking about British attitudes to Northern Ireland is the sheer indifference. Although more than a million Irish men and women lived in Britain in 1971, making up more than 2 per cent of the population, the conflict in the Six Counties never became a major electoral issue; indeed, between the two major parties there was an undeclared but virtually unbroken consensus. Beyond Westminster, most people simply could not care less. In September 1969, just after British troops had been sent to Belfast and Derry, an NOP survey found that people ranked Northern Ireland rock bottom in a list of ten problems confronting the government. Even at the height of the violence, it lagged well behind public anxiety about the economy. In fact, as the conflict got worse during 1972, so Northern Ireland actually receded as an issue. By April 1973, less than 10 per cent of the population described the conflict as Britain’s biggest problem – a proportion that steadily fell in the next few years. As an American reporter astutely remarked, the ‘televised spectacle of suffering in Ulster has become monotonously familiar’, with the images of weeping mothers and bombed-out homes now ‘stale with repetition, an O’Casey drama with no last act’.36