by Andy Beckett
It was an ambitious, in some ways naive strategy. It ignored the ability of unionists to resist a British withdrawal, by peaceful means and otherwise; it did not consider Britain’s capacity, demonstrated in recent decades from Cyprus to Malaya, for enduring long counterinsurgency campaigns that involved significant casualties; and it assumed that IRA members based in beleaguered Catholic areas of Northern Ireland would act exactly as the IRA leadership in distant, relatively peaceful Dublin instructed. But during 1970 and 1971, the IRA’s new campaign developed a momentum regardless. From the early summer of 1970, snipers began firing sporadically at British soldiers. In January 1971, there were sixteen IRA bomb attacks in Ulster. In February, there were thirty-eight. On the 6th, a Royal Artillery patrol in a rioting section of Belfast met an IRA man with a sub-machine gun. Billy Reid had never fired such a weapon before, but he hit and killed Gunner Robert Curtis. Curtis was the first British soldier to be killed in Ireland for more than half a century. Reid himself was killed in a gun battle with the army three months later.
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The response of the Heath government to the worsening Ulster crisis was, as its response to crises tended to be, erratic. Like many members of the Wilson administration, Heath disliked the discrimination that had come with unionist domination of Ulster and had a tentative degree of sympathy for Irish nationalism. ‘I had no objection to reunification in principle,’ he writes in his autobiography, ‘with the consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland.’ Yet, at first, the new Conservative government took a more authoritarian, more pro-unionist approach to Ulster, allowing the British army and the government of the province to participate in an escalating confrontation with militant Catholics. Partly this was due to circumstances: the IRA campaign, the growing bloodshed and Heath’s small majority in the Commons. His party had its historic ties to Ulster unionism, and there were still twelve unionist MPs at Westminster. But in other ways the new Tory approach suggested a reversion to the old British impatience with Ireland.
In June 1970, after a weekend of rioting and gunfire in Belfast during which the army had partially lost control of events and had managed to antagonize both Protestants and Catholics, Reginald Maudling made his first visit to the province as home secretary. An officer at the army’s headquarters in Lisburn, south of Belfast, later recalled: ‘He sat in my office with his head in his hands and said, “Oh, these bloody people! How are you going to deal with them?”’ The next day, Maudling flew back to London. ‘For God’s sake, bring me a large Scotch,’ he was infamously reported to have said on the plane. ‘What a bloody awful country.’
Even Heath’s most able Ulster lieutenant, who from 1972 would pursue a much more subtle and even-handed policy, at first regarded the province as political purgatory. In Tory circles, William ‘Willie’ Whitelaw, a former Conservative chief whip, was revered for his air of calm and his ability to arm-twist discreetly and make deals that appeared to please everybody. Yet he took a while to acquire a worldliness about Ulster. ‘I had been to Northern Ireland only twice in my life,’ he confessed in his memoirs, ‘the first time to attend a friend’s twenty-first birthday just before the war and the second on a golf tour in the 1950s.’ Two decades later, on hearing of his posting there as a minister, he told a Conservative Party meeting, ‘I am undertaking the most terrifying, difficult and awesome task.’ At the end of his first ministerial day in the province, he held a press conference for local journalists. ‘Questions were fired at me like bullets from a machine-gun,’ he wrote with slightly flustered indelicacy later, ‘couched in the most aggressive, and usually personal, terms. Several questioners spoke at once, there was a general atmosphere of background noise and turbulence and few opportunities to complete an answer …’
Whitelaw’s arrival in Ulster in March 1972 signalled the beginning of what was known as Direct Rule. The province’s parliament and government were suspended and replaced by an outpost of Whitehall, the Northern Ireland Office, with Whitelaw as secretary of state. This new British bureaucracy – a world away from the half-dozen distracted civil servants of old – required a substantial headquarters. In Belfast, Ulster’s biggest city and its capital, the British chose a location that scored highly for its practicality, although rather less so for its political sensitivity: Stormont.
On my second day in Belfast I took a bus there. It was an icy clear morning in the city centre, but as the bus moved into Protestant east Belfast it entered a thick mist. Union Jack bunting hung from houses in the gloom. Unionist murals guarded grimy cul-de-sacs. Then the road climbed, and gardens and larger houses began to materialize. We passed a private school, a rugby pitch, Mercedes estates parked in driveways. We could have been in Bath.
I got off the bus at a pair of enormous gates. Behind them a wide straight road, flanked by benches and lamp posts at stately intervals, disappeared into the trees and mist of the Stormont estate. The road led uphill past infinities of lawn to a large statue of a man standing with one leg thrust forward and a hand heroically clutching the air. ‘Carson’, said the plaque. ‘Erected by the Loyalists of Ulster.’ Edward Carson, Conservative minister, Ulster unionist leader, organizer in 1914 of armed Protestant resistance to Irish Home Rule (and therefore to the Liberal government in London whose policy it was), had personally supervised the unveiling of the statue in 1932. By then Stormont had already housed the unionist-dominated Northern Ireland government and parliament for a decade, and would continue to do so until Direct Rule.
Behind the statue was the cream neo-classical bulk of the parliament building, like some enormous marooned Whitehall ministry or an English country house expanded to monstrous proportions. And to the right of the parliament, down in a dip and half-hidden by trees, were the faint grey towers and battlements of Stormont Castle. Until 1972, the castle was the administrative hub of the Ulster government. When Direct Rule was imposed, the British took over its cramped rooms with their spectacular Belfast views. Civil servants from London moved in to work alongside – and often exclude – their Northern Irish counterparts. With the legislature suspended, the Northern Ireland Office occupied the parliament building as well. Members of MI5, MI6 and Military Intelligence squeezed into the castle’s attics and turrets. Whitelaw acquired an office with French windows. ‘At no time during his spell in Northern Ireland’, record his biographers Mark Garnett and Ian Aitken, ‘could he look out over the city without expecting to see a plume of smoke; it was even possible to hear the larger detonations.’
Between the summer of 1971 and the autumn of 1972, the most violent phase of the conflict so far, there were four bomb explosions and approaching thirty shootings on an average day in Northern Ireland. Increased British military activity poured petrol on the flames. In August 1971, after months of lobbying from the struggling Northern Ireland government, the Heath administration agreed that terrorist suspects could be interned – detained indefinitely without charge – and interrogated. At 4 o’clock in the morning on Monday 9 August, thousands of British troops, equipped with lists of names and addresses by the RUC, began hammering on doors across the province and taking people away. The IRA had long been expecting such a move, and many of its members were sleeping elsewhere. No IRA leaders were apprehended; a third of those arrested had to be released within two days. ‘Many of those arrested had not been active members of the IRA for years,’ Heath wrote in frustration afterwards, ‘some [not] since the 1920s.’ More damagingly still, none of those arrested were Protestants, despite the growing number of attacks that loyalists were carrying out on British troops and Catholic civilians. Internment had been used before in Northern Ireland against the IRA, with a degree of success, in 1922, 1942 and the late fifties; yet this time it appeared little more than the clumsy harassment and collective punishment of Catholics.
Defenders of internment in the seventies would attribute its biases, not altogether convincingly, to a British blindness about the sectarianism of some of the RUC’s intelligence-gathering. What wou
ld be harder to explain away was the fate of the internees who were not quickly released. Most of them were taken to an old army-vehicle depot outside Belfast known first as Long Kesh, and then as the Maze Prison. For the British governments of the seventies, with their Cabinets full of proud veterans of the Second World War and the fight against fascism, the ‘cages’ of Long Kesh, with their hastily strung barbed wire and converted Second World War Nissen huts, were shaming enough. But thirteen of the internees endured much worse. They were taken to other British military bases in Northern Ireland and held in secret interrogation centres. There, for a week or more, they were subjected to the ‘Five Techniques’.
There was nothing about them in any British army directive or training manual. Their origins were highly problematic: they were derived from the methods of questioning used by North Korea against British prisoners during the Korean War. Yet the Five Techniques had been employed, refined and passed on by word of mouth in the British army for decades, as it fought its small, semi-clandestine post-colonial wars. The techniques included depriving prisoners of food; depriving them of sleep; putting hoods over their heads; forcing them to listen to continuous high-pitched noise; and making them stand spread-eagled for hours against walls. These methods were applied with such brutality in Ulster in the late summer and autumn of 1971 that five years later the European Commission of Human Rights found Britain guilty ‘not only of inhuman and degrading treatment but also of torture’. In 1978, the European Court of Human Rights downgraded the offence to ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’. The British government was delighted. Such were the diminished expectations of Northern Ireland policy by the late seventies.
In February 1972, Heath announced that the Five Techniques would no longer be used. But by then the international notoriety of Britain’s behaviour in Ulster had been deepened by another, even more corrosive scandal.
In Salisbury, Heath brought up the subject of Bloody Sunday without my asking. ‘What this group on Ireland’ – he did not dignify the Saville inquiry which was re-examining Bloody Sunday by using its name – ‘is going to produce in its report, I can’t tell,’ he said, trying to sound philosophical. But then he let out a bitter, exasperated laugh. ‘I was the first prime minister who’s been summoned by a fully established committee of inquiry – if you like to call them that. And I was kept there for three weeks …’
In Derry, a year later, I visited the half-dozen underheated rooms of the Bloody Sunday Centre. The steward that afternoon was a big man of about sixty with an air of studied restraint. I asked him if he thought it was a shame that Heath had died before the Saville inquiry reported. The steward gave a small smile. ‘Well, he had to meet his maker.’
In the next room, the events of 30 January 1972 and what led up to them were set out in greying photographs: Catholic barricades standing in the Bogside, waist-high and rushed-looking, all rubble and wire and steel girders; the roof of the Rossville Flats, the tower block that used to dominate the area, with an orderly line of milk and lemonade bottles leaning against the low parapet, each one filled with petrol and a neat little fuse of rolled-up carpet; a scene from an anti-internment protest near Derry eight days before Bloody Sunday, with soldiers lunging at demonstrators on a wintry beach, one with his rifle held upside down and the butt raised; and a crowd standing over two inky bodies on Bloody Sunday itself.
Fourteen unarmed people were killed that day by the British army. One hundred and eight shots were fired by the soldiers. The next day, Heath summoned the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Widgery, a former brigadier, to lead an inquiry. As they talked in Downing Street, Heath told Widgery that ‘it had to be remembered that we are in Northern Ireland fighting not only a military war but a propaganda war’. Three months later, Widgery concluded that while some of the soldiers’ shooting had ‘bordered on the reckless’, their actions had been essentially justified.
Most observers outside the British army and the Heath government disagreed. In the days following Bloody Sunday, there were protests across Northern Ireland. In Dublin, demonstrators burned down the British embassy. In the Commons, the independent Ulster MP Bernadette Devlin, a Catholic who had been in Derry on Bloody Sunday, got up from her seat and slapped Maudling in the face. In Australia, dockers boycotted British ships. In America, donations to Irish Northern Aid (NORAID), which raised funds for IRA weapons, increased threefold between January and July 1972. In Canada, there was still sufficient interest thirty years later for a commemorative television documentary called Bloody Sunday: Massacre of the Innocents. The steward in Derry put a tape of it on for me. When the film had finished, I went to have a look at where the shootings had happened.
The December afternoon was dimming when I got to the Bogside. The light went quickly down there, in the narrow flatlands beneath the Creggan on its hill to the west and the old city walls on the ridge to the east. Low blocks of flats in drab post-war pastels stood in the gloom. The Rossville Flats were gone, but little else seemed altered. ‘You Are Now Entering Free Derry’, said the famous murals. Fresh IRA graffiti was scrawled on other walls. Behind the buildings were the same alleys, cul-de-sacs and blind corners where terrible things had been done. In the bare courtyard between the maisonettes of Glenfada Park, four people were killed on Bloody Sunday. In 1997, a previously unheard account of the day, written shortly afterwards by one of the soldiers present, appeared in the Dublin Sunday Business Post. It would become one of the main reasons for the setting up of the Saville inquiry. As the shooting reached its climax on Bloody Sunday, the soldier wrote,
A group of some 40 civilians were there running in an effort to get away. [Another soldier] fired from the hip at a range of 20 yards. The bullet passed through one man and into another and they both fell … A Catholic priesran across to the bodies shouting about giving the last rites. He was clubbed down with rifle butts … I remember thinking … that no one would ever know about it.
In 2005, the courtyard was still exposed and bleak, just kerbstones and grey tarmac, with the tiny back windows of the maisonettes looking blindly on. In one corner a shipping container had been turned into a beleaguered-looking newsagent’s, like something you might imagine seeing in Baghdad or Kabul. Somewhere in the walls around the courtyard there were still two bullet holes, preserved by order of the Saville inquiry, but I couldn’t find them in the dusk. The courtyard was deserted and I didn’t feel like lingering. I started walking back towards the city centre and my bed-and-breakfast, where the owner had talked vividly, almost entertainingly, about the bomb shrapnel from the seventies embedded until recently in his living-room wallpaper and how the IRA used to roll car bombs down the steep hill outside his windows.
As I was crossing the last road of the Bogside, a man came up to me. He was middle-aged but very thin and held two creased carrier bags. He indicated my notebook. I said I was doing some research about Bloody Sunday. ‘I was shot too,’ the man said, eyes suddenly like lasers. ‘I was in an active-service unit. Do you want to see the scar?’ Despite the December air he started to untuck his red check shirt. I got a glimpse of rigid muscle, then he stopped. ‘Can’t show it to you here,’ he said abruptly, tucking the shirt back in. I made an excuse about not being able to go with him, and he walked nervily off towards Glenfada Park.
Bloody Sunday was a nadir in the war in Northern Ireland, but it was also a turning point. Afterwards, few people in the British army or the Heath administration believed – if they ever had – that the Ulster crisis could be ended by military means alone. The first consequence of this was Direct Rule, which terminated the unionist government of the province, with its vulnerability to Protestant pressure for ever more draconian and disastrous anti-IRA clampdowns. The second consequence was a more nuanced use of force by the British. In truth, the behaviour of the army in Ulster had rarely been as brutal as in a classic counter-insurgency operation: the province’s proximity to Britain, its population made up of UK citizens and the presence of so many reporters saw to th
at. Now, after Bloody Sunday, the British mounted more careful undercover operations of deliberately blurred official and legal status but growing effectiveness, and better-planned conventional manoeuvres such as Operation Motorman, the biggest deployment by the British since Suez, which captured Free Derry and other IRA-controlled ‘no-go’ areas in July 1972 with barely a shot fired.
The third consequence was a readiness to talk to the Provisionals. Alternating between confrontation and conciliation, or pursuing both approaches simultaneously, had long been a Heath trademark. It was also how the British state traditionally dealt with rebellions against its authority that could not be straightforwardly defeated. As Heath justifies the switch in his Ulster policy, a little testily, in his autobiography: ‘British government representatives have been meeting terrorists in different parts of the world for years … It was Lloyd George’s meetings in 1921 with de Valera and the leader of the IRA, Michael Collins, which had made an independent Ireland possible … the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya would [not] have been settled had it not been for meetings with the rebel leaders …’
By the summer of 1972, the Provisionals were also ready to talk. This was partly because they felt their position was strong. They believed that they were winning the war, and they wanted to see what concessions they could force the British to make. But the IRA’s new stance also derived from the worry that their position might soon weaken. After nearly four years of increasingly indiscriminate bloodshed – the IRA’s attacks on ‘economic’ targets were often hard to distinguish from crude sectarian warfare against Protestants – a disillusionment with the armed struggle was beginning to settle over even some militant Catholic areas. In May, the Official IRA killed a nineteen-year-old soldier from Derry who had never served in Ulster and was on leave at his family home in the Creggan. The local outcry was so strong that the Officials declared an indefinite ceasefire and renounced violence permanently.
