by Andy Beckett
On 7 July, a minibus with brown paper taped across its side windows containing a single British negotiator and an army officer in civilian clothes met a car containing Mac Stíofáin, Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and three other senior IRA negotiators close to the border with the Irish Republic. From a nearby field a British army helicopter took the seven negotiators to Aldergrove airport outside Belfast, where they were saluted by an official RAF greeter with a disbelieving expression and flown to England. ‘We landed at Benson RAF airport in Oxfordshire’, Adams recalled, ‘and were transferred to two limousines. At Henley-on-Thames we stopped: Seamus Twomey [the commander of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade] wanted to go to the toilet … Seamus was away for what seemed to be a very long time and this caused consternation amongst our minders … Eventually Seamus strolled back … remarking on how pleasant the place was.’ The limousines drove on to London. They stopped outside a large house near the Thames in Chelsea. It belonged to one of Whitelaw’s junior ministers. The IRA men were invited in.
The secret talks did not go well. Whitelaw was late. ‘When he came in,’ Adams writes, ‘he struck me as florid and flustered; his hand was quite sweaty.’ Mac Stíofáin began by reading out a list of essentially impossible demands: that Britain should allow the fate of Ulster to be decided by the whole population of Ireland; that Britain should publicly promise to withdraw all its forces from Northern Ireland by 1 January 1975; and that, before then, Britain should issue ‘a general amnesty for all political prisoners … internees and detainees and … people on the wanted list’.
The meeting broke up not long afterwards. Whitelaw dismisses it in his memoirs as ‘a non-event’. Yet in the fact of the meeting itself, in the many small indignities swallowed by both sides to make it happen and in some of those present – notably McGuinness and Adams, who said little while Mac Stíofáin declaimed and Twomey thumped the table – the distant outline of a more peaceful Northern Ireland could perhaps be glimpsed. For almost a fortnight before the meeting and two days afterwards, the IRA maintained a ceasefire: ‘It was agreed that the IRA and the British army could both have the freedom of the streets,’ records Adams, ‘and the IRA could bear arms – openly displaying them in republican areas only.’
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But there was a problem with placing too much hope in these developments. Ending the bloodshed in Northern Ireland was not just about tentative and perilous negotiations between the British and the Provisionals; there were the militant unionists to consider too. Their politics had had a violent edge for years; now, confronted with the rise of the Provisionals, the deaths of increasing numbers of Protestant civilians in IRA attacks and the threat by the British government to unionism’s traditional hold on the province from Stormont, the Protestant vigilantes of the late sixties became paramilitaries.
In 1971, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) was founded. It began barricading off its own ‘no-go’ areas and killing Catholics, sometimes in the belief that this would cut off support for the IRA, sometimes purely at random. Within a year, the UDA was murdering twice as many civilians as its republican counterpart. In February 1972, William Craig, the former Stormont home affairs minister and outspoken opponent of the civil-rights movement, set up another loyalist paramilitary organization, the Ulster Vanguard. ‘We must build up a dossier of the men and women who are a menace to this country,’ he told a rally of supporters in Belfast the following month, ‘because if and when the politicians fail us, it may be our job to liquidate the enemy.’ Craig arrived at the rally in a car with motorcycle outriders; ranks of men in leather jackets among the crowd of 70,000 gave the occasion an additional menace. Ten days later, when the imposition of Direct Rule was met by unionist rallies, strikes and power cuts, a rumour circulated that the Ulster Vanguard was about to mount a coup.
The rumour, like the Ulster Vanguard itself, quickly evaporated. The UDA’s ‘no-go’ areas were, for now, easily dismantled by the army, but the killings of Catholic civilians continued, generating their own revenge killings of Protestant civilians by the IRA. And the threat of unionist militancy remained: both to any British deal with the IRA or more moderate republicans to secure peace, and to the more realistic prospect that the situation in Northern Ireland might at least become – or seem to become – more manageable and tolerable. During the seventies and long afterwards, the latter kind of ‘progress’ in Ulster was assessed according to the casualty figures and whether they constituted, in Maudling’s infamous but coldly realistic phrase, ‘an acceptable level of violence’. In 1970, 16 civilians were killed; in 1971, 61 civilians and 43 soldiers; in 1972, 223 and 103 respectively; in 1973, 128 and 58; in 1974, 145 and 28; in 1975, 196 and 14; in 1976, 223 and 14; in 1977, 59 and 15; in 1978, 43 and 14; in 1979, 48 and 38.
The trouble with following such statistics closely, apart from the false dawns, disappointments and sense of grim stasis they could prompt, was the political leverage it gave to successful acts of violence. Throughout the Heath government, the amount of time devoted by the House of Commons to Northern Ireland rose and fell almost precisely in proportion with the death rate in the conflict. Whatever non-violent strategies the armed protagonists in Ulster, including the British, developed during the seventies, the use of force remained a key tactic and became an increasingly entrenched habit. In 1972, after the failure of the talks with the British, Mac Stíofáin decided to ‘intensify’ the IRA campaign in the province. The following year, after a rash of arrests of IRA members, with the British making damaging use of disillusioned IRA members as informers, the Provisionals responded by reopening an old front in the armed struggle: taking the war to England.
In 1978, the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow published a study of attitudes in Britain, Ireland and Ulster since the late sixties to the conflict in the province. The study’s most interesting and unpredictable results came from Britain. It found that during the first, supposedly momentous weeks of the British military intervention in Northern Ireland in 1969, the public at home had remained largely unmoved. That September, a survey by National Opinion Polls saw the Ulster crisis ranked last by voters when they were given a list of ten problems facing the Wilson government. Two years of bloodshed later, the profile of the crisis had risen sharply – a November 1971 Gallup poll ranked it Britain’s second most serious problem – but it had not overtaken public anxieties about the economy. During 1972, as the violence reached a peak, Ulster began to recede as an issue in Gallup’s monthly polls. ‘March 1973’, noted the University of Strathclyde study, ‘was the last month in which as many as ten per cent of Britons thought it the country’s most important problem.’
In Britain in the seventies, there was increasingly strong competition for that honour, but the studied indifference of the British public to the war in Ulster became a frustration, and then a motivation, for the IRA. In 1974, David O’Connell, a member of its ruling Army Council with a reputation for keen political thinking and for helping to invent the car bomb, gave an interview to the respected British current-affairs programme Weekend World. Interviews with IRA members were rare – after this one there would be no more on British television until 1983 – and it quickly became obvious why. With his side parting, smart jacket and striped tie, the middle-aged O’Connell looked like a country bank manager – eerily out of time, like the young IRA gunmen on the Creggan who still wore tight Mod suits and Chelsea boots in the era of flares and platforms. But he spoke from the start with a barely contained anger that was as compelling as it was almost unwatchable. Sweat shone on his bony forehead. One of his blue-grey eyes twitched. One of his hands made a fist.
‘Let me make this point,’ he said at the interview’s climax. ‘For five years the British government has had its forces waging a campaign of terror. For five years … [the counter-insurgency] theory of leaning on the people, of squeezing the people has been done in the north of Ireland. What have we got from the British public? Total indifference. They can wash their hands.’ He jabbed a finger up
and down: ‘The British government and the British people must realize that … they will suffer the consequences.’
Four days after the interview was broadcast, two pubs in the centre of Birmingham were bombed by the IRA and twenty-one people were killed. It was the worst attack in a campaign by the IRA’s ‘England’ department that would continue until the end of the decade and far beyond. During the mid-seventies alone, it included attacks on the Tower of London and an army recruiting centre in Whitehall; on the Old Bailey and Euston station; on a coach on the M62 and pubs in Guildford; on restaurants in Mayfair and Westminster; on a hotel near Oxford Street and on the Park Lane Hilton; and on Heath’s home in London, where a bomb thrown from a car onto a first-floor balcony in front of his favourite desk missed him by five minutes. He had stayed for tea with friends for slightly longer than planned after conducting his traditional Christmas carol concert in Broadstairs.
For over twelve months during 1974 and 1975, a four-man IRA unit, which would become notorious as the Balcombe Street Gang, averaged more than a shooting or a bombing a week in the capital. The effectiveness of these and other England department operations was as variable as their targets: sometimes property; sometimes military personnel; sometimes politicians, with or without Ulster connections; sometimes random civilians; and sometimes an indiscriminate mixture of several of these categories. The deadliness of these attacks depended partly on the IRA leadership’s own shifting conception of the ‘acceptable level of violence’. The warnings the Provisionals offered beforehand were equally unpredictable. Car bombs could be announced as much as an hour before detonation, with the locations of the devices given, right down to the registration numbers of the vehicles; or sometimes no warning was given at all.
Britain had not experienced political violence on anything approaching this scale since the IRA campaign during the Second World War. Since then, changes in the population had made Irish terrorism in Britain potentially more destabilizing. Post-war Britain had been built in large part with labour imported from a stagnating Ulster and an Irish Republic that was still an economic backwater. By the start of the seventies, there were over a million Irish-born people in Britain, with half a million in London and almost a thousand still arriving each week from the Republic. Unsurprisingly, some retained their old political convictions. In Kilburn in north London, then a poor, close-packed Irish quarter of republican pubs and after-hours rebel songs that was not utterly different in atmosphere from west Belfast, there were marches against internment involving demonstrators wearing Sinn Féin armbands and paramilitary berets. The Provisionals had a local branch. In 1971, an alarmed Catholic priest in London told the BBC programme Panorama, ‘Every Irishman is a potential IRA man.’
In Liverpool, the same programme found four councillors belonging to the city’s Protestant Party who said they were ‘prepared to go to Northern Ireland and fight’. In Scotland, where the connections to Ulster through geography, immigration and religion were even tighter, and where weapons and safe houses had been provided for Irish nationalists during the war against the British half a century earlier, IRA and UDA graffiti began to appear on housing estates in the most sectarian areas. The Protestant Orange Order, which had been declining in Scotland during the sixties, revived as the Ulster crisis deepened, and developed a militant fringe which favoured smuggling guns across to Belfast. The old republican channels between Glasgow and Derry were also quietly reopened.
And yet, for all the divisive potential of the Ulster issue in Britain in the seventies, and despite the IRA’s ‘mainland’ campaign, most Britons were not affected by the conflict in the politically decisive way that O’Connell and his fellow IRA strategists had hoped. Only the Birmingham pub bombings reversed Northern Ireland’s drift down Gallup’s monthly rankings of the most pressing British political issues, and then only briefly. Two months after the killings, those surveyed considered Ulster even less of a priority than they had done before.
In fact, a minority of Britons, unacknowledged by O’Connell, had long opposed the presence of British soldiers in Northern Ireland. In 1969, the radical London newspaper Red Mole had passed on advice about how to cope with tear gas – ‘breathe through a handkerchief soaked in vinegar … short even breaths … do not rub the eyes … do not drink for at least 3 hrs (if gassed)’ – to Catholics confronting troops in Derry. By 1971, marches in London against the Ulster deployment were attracting support from an eclectic range of leftish political groups – ‘Gay Liberation Front Supports Battle for Freedom in Ireland’, read one placard – as well as traditional republican sources. John Lennon took part in one march, holding a copy of Red Mole with the headline ‘For the IRA – Against British Imperialism’. The following year, he wrote ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’: ‘… The cries of thirteen martyrs/Filled the Free Derry air …’ A few months later, Paul McCartney released a single titled ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’. Banned by the BBC, it reached a respectable Number 16 in the charts.
In 1973, the Troops Out Movement was founded at a meeting of 400 self-described ‘trade unionists, housewives, students and ex-soldiers’ in Fulham Town Hall. It leafleted and petitioned, set up branches and sent delegations to Northern Ireland. Support arrived from left-wing Labour MPs, and there were melodramatic public meetings about the wider significance of events in Ulster, with themes such as ‘The British Army in Ireland and its Projected Role in Britain’. In addition, Troops Out helped pioneer a new kind of eclectic, coalition-based, left-wing politics, which would become increasingly important in Britain from the mid-seventies onwards.
But Northern Ireland was not Vietnam. Without young Britons being conscripted to fight there, and with the period’s profusion of other radical causes competing with it for attention, it was difficult for Troops Out to become a mass movement or acquire real leverage in Parliament. Instead, it won a paper victory. As Ulster lost its purchase in Britain as a major political issue from 1974 onwards, so the opinion polls began to show that the public wanted, as the Troops Out slogan put it, ‘our boys to be brought home’. In 1969, support for the military intervention in Ulster had been recorded at 61 per cent, with 29 per cent against; by 1974, the position had been almost completely reversed: only 32 per cent favoured keeping the soldiers there, with 59 per cent favouring withdrawal. This balance of opinion remained roughly constant until well into the late seventies. Yet over the same period, and sometimes in the same polls, equally high levels of British support were recorded for an army crackdown in Ulster, and also for the notion that a military withdrawal would bring chaos and civil war.
In this fog of erratic and contradictory opinions the University of Strathclyde detected an exasperation – ‘British public opinion appears to endorse a “tough” Ulster policy for its own sake, regardless of the consequences, good, bad, or nil’ – and a deepening weariness – ‘It appears that political killings in Northern Ireland, whether they involve British soldiers or Ulstermen, have become “boring”.’ The study cited one further set of poll figures in conclusion. Between 1969 and 1976, the proportion of Britons who supported a united Ireland fell from 43 per cent to 38 per cent, almost precisely matching the figure for ‘don’t know’.
For centuries, most Britons had managed not to think too much about events across the Irish Sea. The way the Ulster conflict was covered during the seventies often reinforced that reflex. Irish jokes were a British light-entertainment staple and Irish joke books were best-sellers, but Irish history rarely featured on British television, despite its growing relevance. At the BBC from 1971 onwards, proposed programmes about Ulster were, uniquely, always ‘referred upwards’ to senior management for approval. BBC chairmen received unsubtle advice from government ministers and right-wing newspapers about how Northern Ireland should be covered, although it is not clear whether that advice was always needed: ‘Between the British army and the gunmen, the BBC is not and cannot be impartial,’ wrote the corporation’s chairman Lord Hill in 1971. Factual and fictional work
s alike were doctored or banned outright. The most notorious example of the latter was Article 5, a drama about British interrogations in Northern Ireland made for the prestigious ‘Play for Today’ series in 1975. The controller of BBC2 stopped its transmission on the distinctly contradictory grounds that ‘The play would have caused such offence to viewers that its impact would have been dulled and its message negated.’ Article 5 has never been broadcast or even made available to researchers since.
In Northern Ireland, meanwhile, a large army information – and disinformation – office strongly influenced what was reported. ‘Most journalists … are almost completely dependent on this information service,’ wrote the Guardian correspondent Simon Hoggart, who had just finished his time in Ulster, in an article for New Society magazine in 1973. When something newsworthy happened, he went on, ‘The first account [in the press] is always the unchecked word of the soldier on the spot.’ The conscientious or truly independent journalist, and there were always some, would find the time to investigate further. But as the seventies went on, the focus of British Ulster coverage was increasingly the plume of smoke on the horizon: the act of violence – or in fact, even narrower than that, its aftermath – presented without context or causes or consequences.
In the tabloids, such reporting often had an apocalyptic tone. In 1971, the Sun reported that the IRA was sending into battle ‘bombthrowing eight-year-olds’. The following year, the Daily Mirror said the IRA had ‘hired assassins from behind the Iron Curtain to gun down British troops’. In 1976, the Daily Express alleged that millions of pounds of British social-security benefits were being diverted to the IRA by Irish immigrants. In 1977, the Mirror warned:
