For the Provisional IRA, the spring and summer of 1972 represented the high point in their long campaign for Irish unity. As they saw it, direct rule was merely the first step towards British withdrawal: they were jubilant that the façade of self-government had been torn down, and looked forward to mobilizing the population against the colonial oppressor. ‘Everyone felt we were very close to victory,’ said one IRA man. ‘Most people on the ground felt that it was only a matter of time before the British were going to finally admit defeat.’ This explains why, in the summer of 1972, the IRA were keen to make contact with the British government and explore the basis on which they could be persuaded to pull out. In March, they had already held a secret meeting with Harold Wilson in Dublin, albeit to no great effect. But on 13 June, the Provisional leadership went further, holding an audacious press conference in Londonderry to announce they were ready to declare a truce if Britain would agree to peace talks. Not surprisingly, Whitelaw publicly ruled it out. Behind the scenes, however, he knew he could not afford to ignore even the slimmest hope for peace. Six days after the IRA’s offer, he quietly met two of their conditions for a ceasefire, releasing Gerry Adams, the commander of the Provisionals’ Ballymurphy Battalion, and granting ‘special category’ (that is, political) status to IRA prisoners. The next day, two men from Whitelaw’s office – Frank Steele, who was also an MI6 agent, and Philip Woodfield – drove to a secret location outside Derry, and for the first time British officials sat down across the table with the IRA.32
Given the history of antagonism between the British and the IRA, it is striking that, as Woodfield reported, the meeting unfolded in ‘an informal and relaxed atmosphere’. The IRA men, David O’Connell and Gerry Adams, were ‘respectable and respectful’ throughout, even addressing Woodfield as ‘Sir’. ‘They made no bombastic defence of their past,’ he noted, ‘and made no attacks on the British Government, the British Army or any other communities or bodies in Northern Ireland. Their response to every argument put to them was reasonable and moderate.’ After three hours the four men had hammered out the arrangements for a short IRA ceasefire, a telephone hotline between O’Connell and Steele in case anything went wrong, and the conditions for an IRA meeting with Whitelaw himself. Woodfield thought that both O’Connell and Adams ‘genuinely want a ceasefire and a permanent end to violence’. Steele, too, was impressed by what he heard. O’Connell, he recalled, ‘was a very quiet, self-contained and self-disciplined man … I know it’s an unfashionable thing to say, but I liked him.’ As for Adams, who was only 23, Steele found him ‘very personable, intelligent, articulate and self-disciplined’. As they were leaving, the MI6 man, almost paternally, said: ‘You don’t want to spend the rest of your life on the run from us British. What do you want to do?’ ‘I want to go to university and get a degree,’ Adams replied. ‘Well, we’re not stopping you,’ Steele said. ‘All you’ve got to do is renounce violence and you can go to university and get a degree.’ Adams thought about it. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to help to get rid of you British first.’33
Two days later, the Provisionals announced that a ceasefire would begin the following Monday, 26 June, to pave the way for ‘meaningful talks’. But it was not until 7 July that the meeting went ahead, with the RAF secretly flying a group of IRA men from Belfast to London. As so often on such occasions, there was more than a hint of the ridiculous: on the way to the initial rendezvous, one of the IRA delegation’s cars broke down, so all six of them had to cram into one small vehicle. Having been picked up by an MI6 minivan, they then contrived to get stuck behind a farmer with a herd of cows. ‘I do think the British army could have given us a better escort,’ remarked Seán MacStíofáin, making perhaps the only joke of his life. But the Provisionals were nervous, even refusing the apples Frank Steele had thoughtfully brought for the journey because they might be drugged. And even when they arrived at the agreed venue, an elegant house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, belonging to Whitelaw’s junior minister Paul Channon, they remained stiff and hesitant. It was a stiflingly hot day, yet when Whitelaw offered his guests a drink, they refused – perhaps less because they were worried about poison than because they were nervous of looking weak in front of their comrades.
Compared with the meeting outside Derry, the Cheyne Walk summit was not a success. Since there were now six IRA delegates, it was hard to strike up an informal relationship, and the tone seemed stilted from the start. Whitelaw did his best to play the emollient host, congratulating the Provisionals on their observance of the ceasefire and promising that he would be a man of his word, yet his guests remained almost icily cold. It was MacStíofáin who did most of the talking. Producing a piece of paper from his pocket, he curtly read a list of demands, including complete British military withdrawal by January 1975, the release of all ‘political prisoners’, and an all-Ireland referendum on the border between north and south. Frank Steele thought that MacStíofáin had completely misread the situation: he saw himself as ‘the representative of an army which had fought the British to a standstill’, and acted ‘as if we British wanted out’. Whitelaw, meanwhile, was astonished that his visitors were so inflexible. They must surely realize, he thought, that no British government could renege on its commitment to let the people of Northern Ireland decide their future on their own. But MacStíofáin showed no sign of giving way, and the meeting eventually broke up with nothing agreed. As Whitelaw put it, the historic summit had been a total ‘nonevent’. It had been based on a mutual misunderstanding: the British thought that the Provos would prefer talking to fighting, while the IRA thought that the British had lost their nerve. And as Steele joined the Provisionals on the flight back to Belfast, he remarked that he hoped they were not going back to their ‘bloody stupid campaign of violence’:
I said if they really wanted a united Ireland, they were wasting their time shooting at British soldiers and bombing Northern Ireland into an industrial and social slum. They should be trying to persuade the Protestants and the unionists that they would have some sort of satisfactory life – jobs, housing and so on – in some sort of linkage with the South. But their basic line was, ‘so long as you’re there, we’ll never come to a sensible agreement with the unionists … We’ve got to get rid of you British first. And the way to get rid of you British, as has been proved all over your Empire, is violence. You will get fed up and go away.’34
Of course it is tempting to wonder how many lives could have been saved if the Provisionals had listened to Steele’s advice. But the truth is that they were nowhere near ready to renounce the gun. As they saw it, violence had brought Britain close to defeat, and they thought they had everything to gain from pressing home their advantage. As Steele reflected, ‘there were too many people who could influence the continuation of the ceasefire who didn’t want it’, from IRA hardliners like MacStíofáin to Protestant paramilitaries who were desperate to see the IRA shot down in the streets. ‘I don’t think either community had suffered enough to want peace, to make peace an absolute imperative,’ Steele said sadly. He was right. Two days after Cheyne Walk, fighting broke out in West Belfast, where a group of Catholic families, driven out of their homes on Protestant estates, were trying to occupy some empty houses. That Sunday night the Provisionals were eager for battle, and as the army tried to disperse the crowds, the IRA fired more than 300 rounds in anger. The next morning, Britain and Ireland awoke to the news that between them the army and the IRA had killed eleven people, six of them Catholics and five Protestants. On Wednesday, the UDA killed three more people and the IRA two. On Thursday, three British soldiers were shot in the Falls while the army killed two more Catholics in the Ardoyne. In total no fewer than forty-two people lost their lives in just nine days following the collapse of the ceasefire. Jaw-jaw had failed; it was back to war-war. ‘Maybe you can’t bomb a million Protestants into a united Ireland,’ one IRA man remarked, ‘but you could have good fun trying.’35
With the end of the ceasefire, Belfast returned to the c
ycle of sectarian bloodshed, only on a more savage scale than ever before. Repetition dulled the shock, though some atrocities were so appalling that even the most hardened cynics found themselves biting back tears. Many paramilitaries no longer made any pretence of attacking military targets; instead, they sought to cause the maximum fear and mayhem, sacrificing the lives of ordinary men, women and children to the greater good of a united Ireland or a Protestant state. So in one hour on Bloody Friday, 21 June, the Provisionals set off twenty-two bombs in the centre of Belfast after giving a series of hoax warnings. In the chaos, nine people were killed and 130 seriously injured, many of them maimed for life. The scenes of carnage defied adequate description: one police officer in Oxford Street bus station saw ‘a torso of a human being lying in the middle of the street’, its anatomy laid open to public view. Nearby, a soldier’s arms and legs lay on the ground, the rest of the body having been blown through nearby railings. ‘One of the most horrendous memories for me’, the policeman said later, ‘was seeing a head stuck to a wall.’ Some bodies were blown apart over 30-yard areas; in the hours and days that followed, the police had the dreadful task of scooping up the human remains and shovelling them into plastic bags.
For MacStíofáin, who insisted that these were ‘industrial, commercial and economic targets’, the Provisionals were completely blameless. The slaughter was all the fault of the British, he said, because they had failed to act on the totally inadequate and deliberately misleading warnings. Even so, many Provisionals themselves were horrified by the slaughter. But although Bloody Friday left deep psychological scars in hundreds of families as well as physical ones in Belfast’s battered cityscape, it was eventually overtaken by other atrocities and virtually forgotten. On Remembrance Sunday, the Reverend Joseph Parker, whose teenage son Stephen had been killed while trying to warn shoppers about the bombs, held a service outside City Hall, planting a white cross for every person killed in the Troubles. It was meant to be the first in an annual series, but two years later the Reverend Parker emigrated to Canada, a broken man. Eventually the services were discontinued because of lack of interest.36
And so the killing went on, a nightly ritual of prejudice and hatred played out against a bleak backdrop of working-class poverty and economic stagnation, what Kevin Myers calls ‘a seventeenth-century religious conflict bottled in a late twentieth-century industrial decline’. In the shimmering heat of summer or the driving rains of winter, it was the same story. Teenagers were murdered because they were walking down the street at the wrong time; women and children were killed because they were in the wrong place when a bomb went off; even postmen were not safe, gunned down from the paramilitaries’ cars on a clear winter’s morning. By the end of 1972, the bloody rampage had accounted for 2,000 bomb explosions, 2,000 armed robberies and more than 10,000 shooting incidents, while 5,000 people had been badly injured and 479 people killed – all in just twelve months. More than half of the people killed were not soldiers or paramilitaries but ordinary members of the public, quietly going about their business until a bomb or a bullet brought the horizon crashing down. And although the army accounted for its share of the slaughter, by far the biggest killers were the paramilitaries. The IRA alone killed three times as many people as the British did – with the additional and surely crucial distinction that whereas the army never set out to hurt civilians, the Provos wanted to cause as much public suffering as possible. But they had no monopoly on savagery, as the loyalist death squads who murdered 121 people over the course of the year, often for no other reason than that they happened to be Catholics, proved only too well.37
For all his external exuberance, Willie Whitelaw found his mission to Belfast an emotionally punishing and physically exhausting experience. Like many who found themselves trapped in the madness of Northern Irish politics in the 1970s, he numbed the shock with alcohol: when he returned to Westminster, old friends were startled by the amount of drink he put away, including several bottles of wine merely at lunch. Meetings at Stormont were generally lubricated with vast quantities of whisky, and although Whitelaw held his drink well and never let it interfere with his job, it was hardly good for his health. And as if the pressure in Belfast was not enough, he also faced criticism from Tory activists back home. At the party conference in October 1972, speakers who defended the government’s record in Ulster were booed, whereas those who demanded a harder line or mouthed trite anti-Irish rhetoric were warmly applauded. And although the army sent tanks, bulldozers and 12,000 men to dismantle the nationalist barricades and recapture the ‘no-go’ areas, the success of Operation Motorman did not dispel Whitelaw’s doubts about his own security forces. Talking to the head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Robert Mark, he confided that he thought the RUC badly needed reform, while even the army ‘had gone a bit too far’ in some of their operations. Unlike Maudling, he never took army reports at face value.38
In the autumn of 1972, Whitelaw published a Green Paper, The Future of Northern Ireland, which became the cornerstone of every future attempt to bring peace to the bleeding province. The ideal solution, he argued, was for Northern Ireland to have its own devolved government that guaranteed a role for the minority population: in other words, a power-sharing executive. Meanwhile, he acknowledged for the first time that since the problem of Ulster had a specifically Irish dimension, any settlement must ‘recognise Northern Ireland’s position within Ireland as a whole’, and be ‘acceptable to and accepted by the Republic of Ireland’. This was too much for some unionists, who condemned Britain’s appeasement of Papist terrorism, yet Heath and Whitelaw were convinced it was the only possible road to peace. On 20 March 1973, just short of the first anniversary of the introduction of direct rule, Whitelaw published a White Paper setting out in more detail his plan for Northern Ireland. Under the new scheme, Stormont would host a new seventy-eight-member legislative assembly elected by proportional representation, with an executive sharing power between the different factions and a Council of Ireland to forge links between north and south. All in all, it was an arrangement remarkably similar to the power-sharing executive agreed in the late 1990s, thousands of deaths later. But in 1973, The Economist called it a ‘reasonable constitutional framework which could work reasonably well if it were operated by reasonable people’. For precisely that reason, the magazine observed, it was bound to fail.39
Whitelaw’s proposals ripped the Ulster Unionist Party apart. The former Prime Minister Brian Faulkner, still nominally the driving force in unionist politics, agreed to back the scheme, even though he admitted that the White Paper was ‘one of the most controversial documents ever produced by a British Government’. By contrast, both Ian Paisley and William Craig rejected it out of hand. And when the people of Northern Ireland went to the polls on 28 June, Whitelaw’s birthday, to elect their representatives in the new assembly, the results were bewilderingly indecisive. With 211,000 votes and 24 seats, the Ulster Unionists were comfortably the biggest party, followed by the moderate nationalist SDLP (which also backed the deal) with 160,000 votes and 19 seats. Confusingly, however, a variety of other unionist parties, such as Craig’s Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party, had won 26 seats, while some of Faulkner’s own candidates made it clear they would not support the arrangement. And when experts looked at the results more closely, it became clear that perhaps 27 unionist candidates rejected the White Paper while only 22 supported it. Most of the Protestant population had voted for hardliners rather than moderates; indeed, at least half a dozen of the rebel unionists had paramilitary connections. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Assembly’s opening session on 31 July was a total farce, with Ian Paisley and the other rejectionists howling down their opponents, rampaging through the chamber and even physically seizing control of the Speaker’s chair, to the disbelief of watching reporters. ‘To say that the first day of the assembly represented a return to the old Stormont Parliament would be too kind,’ wrote Robert Fisk the next day. ‘It was far worse.’40
Mean
while the slaughter continued. Fewer people died in 1973 than the year before, partly because Whitelaw’s initiative had reinvigorated the political process, but also because the army’s renewed offensive against the IRA had damaged the Provos’ organizational structure and reassured Protestants that they were not all about to be murdered by Papist maniacs. There were still plenty of moments to chill the blood, however. In March, a 19-year-old Lancashire soldier, Gary Barlow, became separated from his patrol in the Lower Falls and was surrounded by a crowd of locals. While he burst into tears with fright, some women suggested they escort him to the nearest army base. Other women, however, kept him waiting until a Provisional arrived; then, while Barlow was crying for his mother, the gunman shot him through the head. More atrocities followed. In June, an IRA bomb killed six pensioners, all in their seventies, on a day out in the County Derry countryside. Five days later, the Ulster Freedom Fighters – set up as the militant killing squad of the UDA, and made up of unemployed thugs full of drink and prejudice – took a gruesome revenge by kidnapping and murdering Paddy Wilson, a former SDLP senator in Stormont’s upper house, and his friend Irene Andrews, a Protestant civil servant and one of the city’s best ballroom dancers. Paddy Wilson was stabbed thirty times and had his throat cut from ear to ear. Irene Andrews suffered twenty stab wounds and had her breasts cut off in what was clearly a frenzied attack. Their killer was a man called John White, the founder of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1978. Two decades later, having renounced violence, he had the pleasure of walking into Downing Street as part of a loyalist delegation and shaking the Prime Minister’s hand.41
State of Emergency: the Way We Were Page 66
