State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Heath’s patience was now exhausted. Six days before, he had secretly agreed the terms of an ultimatum to Faulkner, and on 22 March he summoned Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister to Downing Street and presented him with the options. Almost unbelievably, Faulkner had no idea what was coming: the day before, he had confidently told his Cabinet that Heath wanted him for ‘consultation rather than announcement of decisions’. He was wrong about that: when his guest sat down in Downing Street, Heath bluntly announced that Stormont must agree to let Westminster take over the entire machinery of law and order, to scrap internment, to hold a new plebiscite on the Irish border and to invite the moderate SDLP to join a ‘community government’. If not, Heath said, self-government would be suspended and direct rule imposed from London. Faulkner was stunned; as the watching Willie Whitelaw remembered, he ‘really could not believe that Ted Heath was in earnest’. They argued for more than nine hours, but there was never a chance that Faulkner would agree. For one thing, he ‘felt completely betrayed’ that his friend could abandon him in this way; for another, he was insulted by Heath’s admission that he basically saw Stormont as a glorified ‘county council’. But when Faulkner flew back to Belfast late that evening, it was to news of yet another atrocity, this time a 100-pound bomb that had left the city’s main railway station in ruins and injured more than seventeen people in the Europa Hotel next door. It made a suitably gloomy backdrop for the final meeting of Faulkner’s last Cabinet, held the next morning in an atmosphere of outraged defiance. An hour later, he telephoned Downing Street and told Heath that he had decided to resign.19

  On the evening of Friday, 24 March, Heath addressed the nation. After three of the most gruelling months in modern British history, after the pressure of mounting unemployment and the miners’ strike, after the long battle for European entry, after the dramatic decision to change the thrust of his entire economic policy, he cut a tired figure, his face grey and weary, his voice clipped and strained. ‘I am speaking to you tonight’, he began, ‘as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; and in particular to the people of Northern Ireland, whatever your job, your politics or your religion.’ He had decided, ‘after long and anxious thought’, he said, ‘that we must make possible a completely fresh start’. His proposals having been rejected by Stormont, the government had decided to ‘take over for the time being full responsibility for the conduct of affairs in Northern Ireland’. Stormont was prorogued; at the end of the month, Willie Whitelaw would arrive in Belfast as the first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, an imperial proconsul with enormously sweeping powers. And to the nationalist population, Heath made a specific appeal. ‘Now is your chance,’ he said earnestly. ‘A chance for prosperity, a chance for peace, a chance at last to bring the bombings and killings to an end.’20

  But his words rang hollow. In Dublin, both wings of the IRA pledged that the war would go on until they had a united Ireland. At Stormont, Brian Faulkner told an emotional press conference that many people would draw a ‘sinister and depressing lesson’ from the imposition of direct rule: ‘that violence can pay, that violence does pay, that those who shout, lie, denigrate and even destroy earn for themselves an attention that responsible behaviour and honourable behaviour do not’. In the streets of Belfast, more than 6,000 workers from the Harland and Wolff shipyards marched in protest, their voices raised in chants against Heath, the IRA and the Catholic Church. Two days later, shops and offices closed across the province as the hard-line Ulster Vanguard movement called a national strike to protest at the imposition of direct rule. In Lurgan, British troops fired rubber bullets to dispel mobs of unionist protesters; in Carrickfergus, troops had to escort Catholic workers who had refused to join the strike; in Portadown, Protestant vigilantes blocked off the centre of the town with barricades bedecked with Union Jacks while gangs of hooligans roamed the streets. At Stormont, a vast crowd, well over 100,000 people according to many estimates, assembled in front of the parliament building, a sea of Ulster flags and Orange banners as far as the eye could see. And that afternoon, two men were killed when the IRA planted a car bomb outside the RUC headquarters in Limavady, County Londonderry. Neither was a policeman; they were just ordinary people, who had the misfortune to be driving past when the bomb went off. Everything had changed; everything had stayed the same.21

  From its position at the top of a long, narrow avenue, the white neoclassical façade of Northern Ireland’s Parliament Buildings looks down over the Stormont estate with an air of regal grandeur. Built in the early 1930s, it made an incongruously magnificent setting for a legislature governing just over a million people, with its great chandeliers and marble staircases, its leather benches and glowering portraits. But at the end of March 1972, almost exactly forty years after it had been opened, Parliament Buildings fell silent. The members’ library, with its collection of 27,000 books, was closed. The bar, in which journalists had swapped so many confidences and anecdotes, was shuttered up. The dispatch boxes over which so many politicians had argued, the Mace that had symbolized the Parliament’s authority, were hidden away in a strong- room underneath the great white building. Now the only voices echoing down the marble corridors were the murmurs of the security guards, and the only sounds in the debating chamber were the squeaks of the cleaning ladies’ shoes as they polished the benches on which nobody sat.

  Half a mile to the east, Stormont Castle, a rambling Victorian baronial pile, ornamented with Gothic turrets and battlements, made a curiously appropriate new home for a man who even then seemed a throwback to a vanished age of patrician politics. To his contemporaries, Willie Whitelaw seemed the very incarnation of One Nation Conservatism: a landed gentleman by birth, an old-fashioned country squire by style, a consensus politician by trade. Born into a Scottish landowning family in the last year of the First World War, he had gone to Winchester and Cambridge, won a Blue for golf, served as a tank commander in Normandy, and became a Tory whip during the 1950s and 1960s. As Leader of the House in Heath’s first two years, he cut an amiable and popular figure: when difficulties arose he resorted to self-parody, forever joking about ‘my simple brain’. Critics sometimes suggested that the mask and the man were identical, and in the end Whitelaw’s exaggerated performance of woolly vagueness would cost him the ultimate political prize. But he was no fool. The Stormont mandarin Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, who advised every Secretary of State until 1991, wrote that it was ‘one of the great pleasures of my life to enjoy the company, and, I hope, the confidence of that large, emotional, sometimes irascible, apparently spontaneous but infinitely cunning man. His big personality lit up any room, and we were soon to become familiar with his booming cries of “Wonderful, wonderful!” … “Splendid, splendid!” ’22

  On his very first night in Belfast, Whitelaw tried to inspire his staff with a typically optimistic pep talk. ‘Well, here we are. We’ve arrived,’ he said breezily. ‘However awful things are outside, however many bombs go off, when we’re together in private we’re going to enjoy ourselves. One house rule – no long faces. That won’t make anything better.’ It was good advice, but it was easier said than done. Across Belfast, loyalist posters read ‘Outlaw Whitelaw’, while one of the biggest Unionist papers erroneously reported that the new Secretary of State was a Catholic. And few people drew much reassurance from his first press conference, held in the dingy surroundings of an RAF mess just moments after he had got off the plane from London. Harried with questions about Bloody Sunday, he gave a string of increasingly vague answers before finally snapping: ‘I do not intend to prejudge the past.’ The Times’s reporter Robert Fisk thought it was ‘one of the most glorious sentences ever uttered by a politician in Ulster’.23

  But to most people in Northern Ireland the past was no laughing matter. And to the crowds outside Stormont with their Ulster flags and angry placards, Whitelaw’s arrival was an affront to their tradition of self-government and a craven surrender to the Provisional IRA. E
ven many Northern Ireland civil servants felt insulted by the presence of their new masters: one official, Joan Young, who had worked at Stormont since the days of Captain O’Neill, remembered being ‘disgusted and quite seriously offended’ by the attitude of the English newcomers who had been put up in the grand Culloden Hotel on the shore of Belfast Lough. The Culloden was ‘for Northern Irish people, a very special place to go’, she said: the place people celebrated birthdays, engagement parties and grand occasions. But when she went there for the first time under direct rule, all dressed up in her evening finery, she was stunned to see ‘tables of people in casual sweaters and jeans’. To the Belfast guests, for whom it was meant to be a special place, a treat, the English visitors’ casual superiority was almost heartbreaking. ‘They just didn’t treat the place as we would have liked,’ she recalled.24

  Since the politicians had manifestly failed to stem the tide of violence, many Protestants concluded that they must find their champions outside the Ulster Unionist Party. One obvious candidate was the evangelical preacher Ian Paisley, whose ferocious rhetoric had done so much to heighten the political temperature in the 1960s. As the founder of the hard-line Democratic Unionist Party and Westminster MP for North Antrim, Paisley was a central and compelling figure in Northern Irish society. Some accused him of inciting violence: since the late 1960s, there had been murmurs about his links with the terrorist Ulster Volunteer Force, although Paisley insisted that any collaboration (such as the purchase of guns and gelignite) went on entirely behind his back. But his position in the early 1970s was weaker than it would later become. Paisley seemed confused by the dramatic lurch into sectarian violence, and while his rhetoric dripped with anti-Catholic bile, his stance on specific issues often seemed oddly conciliatory. To the surprise of his supporters, he opposed internment and thought that Northern Ireland should be fully integrated into the Westminster political system. ‘Stormont is a thing of the past,’ he insisted, ‘and there is no good use for Unionists to think that, by some way or other, Stormont shall return.’ The result was that while his anti-Catholic rhetoric put off the respectable middle classes, his more moderate positions failed to win favour on Belfast’s estates. For the time being, therefore, Paisley’s support was limited to the Orange Order and the pious Protestants of the farms and villages in north Antrim and north Armagh. For a more defiant attitude to the new regime, unionists had to look elsewhere.25

  The man who stepped forward as the voice of resistance was William Craig, a former Home Affairs minister who had founded the Ulster Vanguard movement in February 1972. From the outset, Vanguard was ostentatiously confrontational: at its first meeting in Lisburn, Craig warned: ‘God help those who get in our way, for we mean business.’ Unsympathetic observers often described it as a fascist movement, although Craig insisted that Vanguard’s events were based on the Covenant rallies of Unionism’s founding father, Sir Edward Carson. In fact, with their great seas of Ulster banners, their menacing UDA security staff, their strutting party officials in orange sashes, their meetings looked more like Nuremberg rallies. In other circumstances Craig would have cut a ludicrous figure, an Irish equivalent of Roderick Spode, antagonist of Bertie Wooster, proprietor of the Eulalie Soeurs underwear emporium and founder of the sinister Black Shorts. But in the spring of 1972 Craig’s organization seemed genuinely frightening. He made no secret of his links to the UDA; indeed, while Paisley’s rhetoric was merely inflammatory, Craig’s was positively spine-chilling. Addressing a rally of 60,000 Protestants in Ormeau Park a week before direct rule, he pledged to ‘build up a dossier of the men and the women who are a menace to this country, because if and when the politicians fail us, it may be our job to liquidate the enemy’. These words – ‘liquidate the enemy’ – were greeted at the time by an enormous bellow of approval. Even decades later, Craig refused to apologize for ‘speaking in black and white’.26

  When Heath scrapped Stormont, it seemed that Vanguard’s moment had come. It was Craig who called the general strike that briefly brought the province to a standstill at the end of March 1972, and weeks later he organized a recklessly provocative march into the Derry no-go areas, which ended with street fighting on the city’s Craigavon Bridge. The British government were traitors, he insisted; it was time to set Ulster free for a bloody reckoning with the IRA. Addressing a private meeting of the hard-right Monday Club in the House of Commons in October, he frankly admitted that he was ‘prepared to come out and shoot and kill. Let us put the bluff aside. I am prepared to kill and those behind me will have my full support. When we say force we mean force.’ That was too strong even for Ian Paisley, who thought that Craig’s intemperate remarks had done ‘terrible damage’ to unionism’s image in Britain. Even other Vanguard officials thought that the speech was ‘unfortunate’, and they were not reassured by reports that Craig had been ‘highly emotional’, ‘stumbling’ and ‘over-tired’, especially since he had been convicted of drink-driving only months before. In the long run, the speech did him enormous damage, destroying any chance of Vanguard winning middle-class support. But Craig, who had none of Paisley’s cunning, refused to moderate his tone. If Britain ‘betrayed’ Northern Ireland, he thundered just a few days later, ‘there will be a holocaust that the western world has never seen’.27

  Unfortunately, the political context meant that it was impossible to dismiss Craig as a drunken tub-thumper. For a young Belfast man called Andy Tyrie, shortly to become the leader of the UDA, he was simply ‘being honest … the only way to beat terrorism was to terrorize the terrorist – and be better at it’. His views won considerable support on the Protestant estates, where tens of thousands of young men had rushed to join vigilante groups since the spring of 1971. As one American reporter observed, it was a little-acknowledged fact of the conflict that many recruits were bored working-class men who found life as a paramilitary more exciting and more lucrative than life on the dole. Even in the early 1970s, there was only the thinnest of lines between paramilitaries and gangsters. The UDA, for example, ran a betting business, collected protection money from local businesses and regularly hijacked lorries carrying televisions, cigarettes and alcohol. Indeed, one UDA entrepreneur did not even come from Northern Ireland. Born in Essex, Dave Fogel had been posted to Northern Ireland as a private in the army, was discharged in murky circumstances after a ‘difficulty’ about another soldier’s radio, and settled down with a local Protestant girl. After becoming involved with his local vigilante group, he fell in with the UDA when he met their leader at, of all things, a pigeon-fanciers’ club. Much in demand because of his military experience, Fogel became a major figure in the Belfast UDA, a big man and a would-be political boss. As the American reporter noted, it was a lot better ‘than lying listlessly around a cramped house, watching television and waiting for the weekly dole cheque’.28

  Indeed, despite their horrific handiwork, there was often something blackly comic about the paramilitaries’ pretensions. When the reporter Peter Taylor went at Fogel’s request to see a UDA unit training in a field outside Belfast, he watched amusedly as ‘a series of overweight loyalists panted for breath as they “monkey-climbed” a rope suspended above the ground and went through the motions of less-than-agile hand-to-hand combat’. Kevin Myers, meanwhile, was struck by the incongruity of working-class hooligans in dark glasses and desert-warfare slouch hats pretending to be the heirs of the British army when they could not even say ‘lieutenant’ properly, pronouncing it ‘loo-tenant’ in imitation of the Americans they had seen on television. ‘What other terrorist organisation in the world’, he wondered mordantly, ‘would have its own preposterous regimental blazer, complete with gold badge?’29

  And yet to tens of thousands of frightened Protestants, there was nothing funny about the UDA. It was, they thought, all that stood between them and the murderous designs of the IRA and its Catholic supporters. By the spring of 1972, UDA leaders were already bragging that they had more than 20,000 members. Funds were no problem, although
since they lacked the Provos’ network of contacts in Ireland and the United States they found it much harder to buy weapons. But since the UDA was not technically illegal, its members had no compunction about parading openly in the streets, and throughout 1972 the sight of men in masks, dark glasses and army fatigues marching through Belfast became depressingly frequent. Its appeal reflected the sheer fear on Protestant estates, as well the collapse of their trust in the British government and the army to defend them from the IRA. By the end of the year, informed estimates placed the UDA’s membership at 26,000, making it the biggest paramilitary group in the Western world.30

  Since the UDA was supposedly a defensive organization and had no open quarrel with the British or the army, it never became as notorious as the IRA. In the autumn of 1972, a confidential Ministry of Defence memo even argued that the UDA fulfilled an ‘important function’, channelling ‘into a constructive and disciplined direction Protestant energies which might otherwise become disruptive’. Yet it is a myth that the British regarded unionists and loyalists through rose-tinted spectacles. Lord Carrington told friends that he was ‘appalled by the bigotry, drunkenness and stupidity of the Unionist Party’, while after just two months Whitelaw confided that he was ‘appalled by the bigotry and fear so much in evidence among the Protestants’. In any case, the criminal side of loyalist politics was hardly a secret. Once the vigilante groups lost their independent government at Stormont (which carried great symbolic importance, even if loyalists felt it was too weak), they decided to take the law into their own hands. In February, vigilantes murdered a Catholic army veteran walking along the Crumlin Road; in March, they killed a young Catholic teenager in revenge for the Abercorn bomb; in April, they shot another teenager who was walking along the Crumlin Road. Then the killings escalated. In May, loyalist gangs murdered nine Catholics, one a 13-year-old girl walking through her nationalist estate. In June, they killed five more; in July, thirteen. These murders were born in an atmosphere of intense fear, but they also reflected the worst kind of sectarian passion, aimed at forcing Catholic residents out of Belfast. Usually fuelled by drink, they were also terrifyingly brutal: on 11 July, for example, four drunken loyalists broke into the home of a Catholic widow in the Oldpark area, shooting her mentally handicapped son before raping her and leaving her for dead. ‘You may well think’, the barrister told the jury at the ensuing trial, ‘that in this case we have reached the lowest level of human depravity.’31