by Mia Bloom
At Templepatrick, near Newry, the airport bus started to pull away from the border customshouse and then jerked to a stop. Without warning, several uniformed police officers boarded the bus. They scanned the faces in the crowd and made a beeline for Siobhan. The other passengers looked on quizzically, not yet alarmed, as patrols often boarded the buses to check ID and travel papers. When they began to question Siobhan, the passengers may have assumed that something had happened to the baby’s father or that there was some emergency. She looked at them with big blue eyes, trying to appear calm, but they asked her for her identification papers and immediately escorted her off the bus. When they were on the curb, one of the police officers quickly frisked her. The patrol did not yet know what they were dealing with. He undid the metal buttons fastening her overalls and the bib dropped to her waist, exposing the bomb strapped to her midsection. The officers escorted Siobhan to another area and instructed the driver to move the bus as the passengers looked on with horror. The young woman was not pregnant at all, but carrying a bomb. No one had ever seen anything like this before.
Siobhan was loaded into a police car and driven to the station for interrogation. The special explosive unit defused the bomb slowly and carefully and destroyed it with a controlled explosion. Curiously enough, An Phoblacht/Republican News, the official newspaper of Sinn Féin (and the PIRA’s mouthpiece according to critics), claimed that the attack was successful, writing in its war news a few days later that an IED had exploded at the customhouse, without mentioning that Siobhan had been caught before her mission was complete. An Phoblacht never even mentioned her name.
The Belfast airport bombing by a woman feigning pregnancy did not happen that day. When a Sri Lankan woman emulated the tactic the following year, she managed to blow up herself and former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, India, on behalf of the Tamil Tigers. History records that Gayatri (Thenmuli Rajaratnam) was the first female bomber to feign pregnancy when, in fact, the women of the IRA had been smuggling explosives in their panties and under the guise of pregnancy for years; they just hadn’t been suicide bombers.
Siobhan was sentenced to fourteen years on May 21, 1990. The judge tried to convince her to recognize the authority of the court, take a guilty plea, and throw herself on the court’s mercy. After all, she was so young, she could have pled to a lesser charge as a minor. She refused. The authorities and even the defense lawyers then tried to pressure her parents to get her to consent and work with the authorities. Siobhan recalled with a smile that her parents had told them where to go, and how to get there.
THE RISE, FALL, AND RISE OF THE IRA
Religious and sectarian violence began in Ireland as far back as the twelfth century, but it culminated in the 1970s during the Troubles. The Emerald Isle had been invaded by Vikings, Romans, and Normans, but the invaders that stayed were the English. Beginning in the twelfth century, the English began to assert their control. Gaelic Ireland was completely defeated by 1691, at which time thousands of Scottish and English settlers were brought in to farm its rolling green hills. The Gaelic Irish were Catholic and their new masters were Protestant. This religious divide had both economic and political ramifications, with Irish Catholics banned from becoming members of parliament under the Penal Laws, even though they constituted 85 percent of the population. All economic and political power rested in the hands of the Anglo-settler community for two hundred years and land distribution and access to resources varied depending on people’s religion.
In 1798 Wolfe Tone, influenced by ideas from the French and American revolutions, led the Irish Rebellion against English rule. The rebellion possessed some of the worst characteristics of a civil war. Sectarian resentment, fueled by the Penal Laws, resulted in even more repression. Rumors of atrocities and massacres multiplied on both sides. Executions of Protestant Loyalist prisoners were answered by the massacres of captured Catholic rebels. The 1798 rebellion was the most concentrated episode of violence in Irish history, and resulted in thirty thousand deaths over three months.
As a result of the rebellion, the English employed a divide-and-rule strategy, using the sectarian conflict to whip up nationalist sentiment among Protestants. In 1801, in the Act of Union, the United Kingdom formally annexed Ireland, making it part of Britain’s colonial empire. While King George III had vetoed emancipation of Catholics, in 1829 his son George IV signed into law the Catholic Relief Act, which sanctioned their participation in parliament. This mitigated the source of conflict, but Ulster, in the north, where most of the British had settled, remained the center of the violence between Catholics and Protestants. Elsewhere, tensions had an economic cause, as a growing divide between landowners and tenant farmers resulted in social unrest. Land allocation and socioeconomic status were often highly connected to religious affiliation and so hostility between the two religions remained high.
Most Catholic families had only enough property to plant a single crop: potatoes. When a blight hit the island, the potato crop failed, and much of the population went hungry. The tensions in the countryside reached a crescendo during the Potato Famine of 1845–49, which resulted in one million deaths and another million Irish emigrants to America, Canada, and Australia. The famine profoundly impacted the political, economic, and social development of the island. The situation became catastrophic when epidemics of typhoid, cholera, and dysentery devastated the population. Most of the little food produced on the island was exported to Great Britain, leaving hundreds of thousands of Irish people starving to death. The growing communities of Irish emigrants living abroad helped found the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in 1858, a secret society whose goal was the independence of Ireland. This and comparable nationalist groups funneled arms and money to the conflict until the 1980s.
Beginning in the 1880s, a series of “home rule” bills was introduced in the British parliament. Some would have allowed Ireland to govern itself independently from Britain while others called for repeal of the Act of Union. Thousands of Unionists, led by Sir Edward Carson, signed the Ulster Covenant of 1912, pledging to resist home rule. The threat of a civil war loomed large and led to the creation of local militias like the Ulster Volunteers, who resisted home rule, and the Irish Volunteers, who supported it. In small villages in County Cork and County Kerry, Catholics began to organize their opposition. These early groups provided the inspiration for the terrorist organizations that would emerge in the twentieth century. The Irish Volunteers were the forerunner of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) gave rise to half a dozen Protestant militant groups.
Conflict between north and south reached a crisis in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin and the subsequent guerrilla campaign. During World War I, the British were pressured by the Woodrow Wilson administration to resolve the Irish problem. The Treaty of Versailles, which formally ended the war, recognized the principle of self-determination for all peoples. However, even with the landslide victory for Sinn Féin, the political party representing Irish republicanism, in the 1918 British general election, Ireland did not achieve independence. Although many in the British political establishment believed that it was time to get out of Ireland, they could not leave because they owed allegiance to “kith and kin” in the north, the Protestant majority, who considered themselves to be British.5
Between 1918 and 1921, the Irish Republican Army waged a highly successful guerrilla campaign against British security services in Dublin and police and troops in both the north and south of the island. The insurgency was led by Michael Collins and Eamonn de Valera.6 In response, the British government reinforced its garrisons in Ireland and began to recruit auxiliary forces, including the dreaded Black and Tans, mostly veteran servicemen, criminals, and mercenaries from World War I. The British prime minister, Lloyd George, sought a compromise. The Government of Ireland Act (1920) partitioned Ireland, creating two states, one for the six northern counties (Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down, Fermanagh, and Tyro
ne) and one, the Irish Free State, for the remaining twenty-six. It also allowed for the possibility that at some future date, the island could once again be united. The settlement satisfied neither side.
The Irish parliament, the Dáil, voted 64 to 57 in favor of the treaty in January 1922. This rift over the partition of the island had parallels within the IRA, and Northern Ireland was born amid bloodshed and communal disorder. The pro- and anti-treaty allegiances thrust the island into a bitter civil war that lasted until 1923. Ironically, more Irish killed each other during the civil war than had been killed by the British during the preceding War of Independence. Collins himself was shot and killed by one of his former allies in his native Cork. Sinn Féin reorganized under de Valera and reemerged to contest the 1923 elections.7
In the 1930s widespread riots in Belfast and the towns of Larne, Portadown, and Ballymena, some of which involved the IRA, caused yet more deaths. The violence peaked in 1935 when twelve people were killed and six hundred wounded. In the southern Free State, former IRA members were absorbed into state bodies, and the organization was officially declared illegal in 1936. The sectarian violence faded as the economic situation improved, and the organization had virtually disappeared by the 1940s. During World War II, Ireland remained neutral; de Valera officially refrained from joining either the Allies or the Axis.8
For much of the 1940s and 1950s, the IRA was virtually absent from the political scene on both sides of Ireland’s north–south border. The acronym IRA came to signify the much-touted and contemptuous slogan “I Ran Away.”9 The dreadful failure of an IRA offensive from 1952 to 1962 owed more to apathy than to the competence of law enforcement. The last gasp of resistance ended with a communiqué stating that the IRA would abandon the military struggle altogether and concentrate on political-socialist objectives.
The denunciation of armed struggle seemed to guarantee that the 1960s would be free from Republican violence, but it led instead to a new iteration of sectarian violence with the emergence of a charismatic religious leader (and founder of one of the Protestant paramilitary groups), the Reverend Ian Paisley, among the Protestants in the north.10 Radical voices within the Protestant Unionist movement outlawed the colors of the Irish flag, and flying the tricolor in West Belfast provoked a riot in 1964. Ian Paisley was head of the Free Presbyterian Church and the Protestant Unionist Party and played the leading role in demanding the removal of all symbols of Irish nationalism or independence. Paisley was opposed to any political reconciliation with the Catholic community.
The response was civil rights marches, beginning in 1968. Catholics, seeking equal employment, good housing, and equality under the law, found themselves at loggerheads with state authorities. The civil rights movement demanded an end to discrimination in jobs and housing, the disbandment of the B Specials (the Ulster Special Constabulary), and an end to the gerrymandering of voting districts. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) called for one man, one job, and for one family, one house.11 Their most important demand was “one man, one vote.”12 In the Northern Ireland parliament, known as Stormont, Catholics remained a minority even though they outnumbered the Protestants in the general population. Without a peaceful and legal framework to achieve civil rights, Catholics believed that they had no alternative but to take to the streets. The success of the civil rights movement in America suggested nonviolent protest as a means to achieve their political goals, but the government’s ban on peaceful demonstrations allowed militant voices to emerge and take over the movement.
The campaign became much more radical in 1969. The riots in Belfast in August led to the resurrection of the Irish Republican Army and a political split between the Official Republicans, who believed in nonviolence, and those who came to be known as the Provisionals, who advocated the use of force. The group deliberately used the word “provisional ” to emphasize that they were the real heirs to the the Irish provisional government (Rialtas Sealadach na hÉireann) of 1922 and to emphasize that this was a provisional decision until such time that the full General Army Convention could formally vote on the split. The Provisionals maintained the principles of the pre-1969 IRA, and considered both British rule in Northern Ireland and the government of the Republic of Ireland to be illegitimate. The official reason for splitting the IRA was a disagreement that emerged from their annual conference over whether to recognize the Irish or British parliaments. Since partition, the Republican movement had followed a policy of abstentionism. The new policy was to take their seats if they were elected. The Provisionals walked out of the conference, set up their own organization, and called themselves the Provisional Sinn Féin and Provisional IRA. The first Provisional Army Council, composed of Seán Mac Stíofáin, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, Paddy Mulcahy, Sean Tracey, Leo Martin, and Joe Cahill, issued its first public statement on December 28, 1969:
We declare our allegiance to the thirty-two county Irish republic, proclaimed at Easter 1916, established by the first Dáil Éireann in 1919, overthrown by forces of arms in 1922 and suppressed to this day by the existing British-imposed six-county and twenty-six-county partition states.13
Unlike the leaders of 1916, who were elite, fairly well-educated men who spoke for all of the people of Ireland, the new generation of leaders were children of the Belfast and Derry ghettos. Most were from urban backgrounds and had suffered from sectarian discrimination. The Provisionals or “Provos” would differentiate themselves from the other Republicans through a campaign of armed and violent resistance: they would employ the language of the gun. After the split, the Provisional IRA began planning for an “all-out offensive action against the British occupation.”14
The civil rights organization People’s Democracy (PD) unilaterally decided to march from Belfast to Derry in January 1969, emulating the Selma to Montgomery marches in the United States, even though the government had outlawed peaceful demonstrations of any kind. The marchers were met with violent opposition at Burntollet Bridge, and this event, along with the emergence of the Provos, destroyed the campaign of nonviolent protest in Ireland. The most strident voices and those with weapons now set the agenda.
Back in Britain there was a change in government in 1970. Harold Wilson’s Labour government had implemented some civil rights reforms. In May Labour was replaced by a new Conservative government, led by Edward Heath, who had close links with the Unionists in Northern Ireland. The new British government decided that the answer to Northern Ireland was not more reforms, but punitive military action.
Catholics in Belfast soon felt that they were under siege. To complicate matters, Catholic and Protestant communities lived side by side, intermingled, so a Catholic community would be physically next to a Protestant one. The main Catholic neighborhood was located along the Falls Road. Next to it was an area, known as the Shankhill Road, which was the main Protestant working-class community and headquarters for many of the Protestant militant organizations associated with the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Both the IRA and the UVF had a slew of offshoot organizations from these neighborhoods that engaged in ever-increasing levels of violence.15 The red hand was the symbol of the Protestant vigilante groups, many of whose members were policemen during the day and killers at night. Because Protestants were the majority in some neighborhoods of the north, and because there was complicity with the security forces, they were able to inflict more damage on the Catholic community than vice versa.
The army, in trying to control events, made matters much worse. Its use of CN (tear) gas and CS (chlorobenzylidene malononitrile) gas, which permanently damaged the heart and liver, dramatically escalated tensions. The Catholics living behind the barricades in their neighborhoods believed that the British government meant to destroy them as a people. As a result, the logic of oppression, responding to the pressure exerted by violent protesters, led to the gassing of civilians, the massacre on Bloody Sunday, mass arrests, and hunger strikes, all of which became powerful recruiting agents for the Provisional IRA. People became
convinced that violence was the only answer and young people joined the Provisional IRA in droves.
In July 1970, a year known as the time of the Falls Curfew, the army fired 1,600 canisters of CN gas into the densely populated Falls Road. The violence escalated even more on January 30, 1972, when British forces engaged in an affray with the Catholic community in Derry. During a civil rights march led by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, attended by ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children, soldiers chased stone-throwers and, within minutes, shot thirteen marchers dead, seven of them teenagers. A fourteenth victim died days later. In total, twenty-seven civil rights protesters were shot that day, five of them in the back.
Bloody Sunday, as the day came to be known, was a watershed. It united the Catholic community of Northern Ireland, and British authority completely collapsed. World opinion condemned the shootings while the British tried to whitewash the events despite journalistic accounts and eyewitness reports.16 According to Bishop Edward Daly, “What really made Bloody Sunday so obscene was the fact that people afterward, at the highest level of British justice, justified it.”17 It was unquestionably a terrific recruiting tool for the PIRA. Their leaders, men such as Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, found themselves having to turn people away, so many wanted to join.18
Bloody Sunday became a clarion call to Catholics throughout Northern Ireland, summoning them to resistance. What started as a small battle in a single Catholic community became a war that spread throughout Northern Ireland, and was the turning point in the Irish struggle.
MAIRÉAD FARRELL
