by Peter Taylor
‘Frank’ spent a year recovering in hospital. By then, his first marriage was already in trouble due to his absence from home and the pressures of working undercover in Northern Ireland. Divorce followed. ‘Frank’ then married again. He finally left the army and tried to find a regular job that would suit his talents and experience but, like so many former members of Special Forces, found himself unable to do so. One of his former ‘Det’ colleagues, he says, is now stacking supermarket shelves. He did bodyguard duties for a while but it wasn’t what he really wanted. Frustration grew and the ghosts of Ireland would not go away. ‘After what I’d been through, I treated all my enemies as the IRA,’ he says. Breaking point came when he suspected his new wife of having an affair with one of her colleagues. ‘Frank’ went into ‘operating mode’ and placed both under surveillance as ‘targets’, using the training and techniques he’d been taught in the ‘Det’. When he went away and left his wife alone, he bugged the house to see what she might be up to. In the end, he feared that he might do to his wife’s suspected lover what he’d done to the IRA. ‘It was a touch and go situation,’ he remembers. ‘It could have gone either way.’ One weekend, after a blazing confrontation with his wife, he went to an army medical centre and asked for help. He talked for more than three hours to an army psychiatrist who realized that ‘Frank’ had come to him just in time. Together, they worked on his problem and, after many months of counselling, the psychiatrist finally helped put ‘Frank’ together again.
In wars like the Falklands or the Gulf, ‘Frank’s’ breakdown would probably be known as post traumatic stress disorder. The stress that soldiers in Northern Ireland have suffered, in particular in the ‘Det’ and SAS, have not been considered in the same league. ‘The problem is they build you up and fine-tune you into a killing machine – and then they drop you.’ Fortunately, ‘Frank’ was caught before he fell. But he has no regrets. ‘When the time came to leave the army, I was mortified. To this day I’ve never handed in my ID card. I would have carried on and on if I’d been able to. But then there comes a time when you realize your eyes aren’t quite as good as they were and you probably wouldn’t be able to fit into those jeans any more.’
Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Ireland does not go away. ‘Frank’, like most soldiers, feels intense bitterness about the direction of the peace process – especially about the way that prisoners have been released without the IRA handing over a single weapon. ‘Terrorists we spent years putting behind bars are now out. The IRA is now back up to strength and fully armed. If they get a bit sad and throw their teddy bear in the corner, they can pick up their Armalites and AK 47s and pick up where they left off. There’s got to be a peaceful solution but there can’t be as long as they still have the tools of violence.’ To ‘Frank’ and most of his colleagues, opening up dumps to independent inspection isn’t the same as handing in weapons. Still, ‘Frank’ takes comfort from the fact that, despite almost three years of the IRA’s cease-fire, 14 Intelligence Company has not let down its guard. ‘The “Det” is still active,’ he says with pride, ‘still very, very busy.’
Chapter One
Into the Mire
1920–1969
For almost half a century since the partition of Ireland in 1921 and the establishment of the British statelet in the North known as Ulster, successive governments at Westminster had largely ignored the province, hoping to keep at bay the euphemistically named ‘Troubles’ out of which the new state had been born. Northern Ireland was a British province both in name and reality, in some respects not unlike those countless outposts of empire ruled by the Crown in days when most of the globe was coloured pink. It had a Governor General, complete with uniform, ceremonial and personal residence at Hillsborough Castle; its own parliament with upper and lower chambers housed in a magnificent neo-classical building at Stormont in Belfast’s leafy suburbs; its own Government, Cabinet and Prime Minister – a mini-Westminster down to Speaker’s mace and Hansard parliamentary record; its own police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), backed by an armed paramilitary wing of volunteers known as the ‘B’ Specials to defend the state from subversion; and a British army garrison for years nostalgically known to its occupants as ‘Sleepy Hollow’ – a prime location for hunting, shooting and fishing. But there was one crucial difference. This province was on Britain’s doorstep, separated from the mother country at its narrowest point by twenty-five miles of Irish sea. Northern Ireland was so near and yet so far that, to most of the English, it was like a foreign country. A friend once confessed that when he first went there in the 1960s and left Belfast’s Aldergrove airport in a hire car, he wondered whether he should drive on the right.
I must confess that in those early days, my own knowledge and understanding of the complex and violent history that had given birth to this part of the United Kingdom was no greater than that of most of the British public. I remember as a young journalist being despatched to Londonderry – or Derry as it is more generally known – on Sunday 30 January 1972 to cover the aftermath of the day that became infamous as ‘Bloody Sunday’. I’d never been to any part of Ireland before, North or South, and had little idea where Derry was.
I was working for Thames Television’s This Week programme at the time and we had been hoping to cover the civil rights march planned for that day with three camera crews as it was clear that the march was likely to be anything but peaceful, given the pitch at which emotions on all sides were running. The trade union that held much of ITV in its grip at the time demanded exorbitant ‘danger money’ from Thames, the company that made This Week, which Thames refused to pay. The crews were grounded and our three cameras were not there to record what happened that afternoon when, in highly controversial circumstances, soldiers of the Parachute Regiment shot dead thirteen unarmed Catholics who had been taking part in the march. When I heard the five o’clock news that Sunday afternoon, my emotions were a mixture of shock and anger: shock at the number of deaths, although few details were available at the time, and anger that an industrial dispute between union and company had prevented us from being there to record what had happened. I immediately rushed to the airport and met up with a camera crew. Now there was no dispute about danger money.
I got to Derry that night, feeling nervous, apprehensive and bereft of any historical bearing. Up to that point, I’d shut my eyes to the Irish problem, the only consolation being that I knew I wasn’t alone in doing so. Early the following morning I walked into the Bogside, the nationalist area of the city that had been the scene of the shooting, and saw blood still fresh on the ground and hastily gathered flowers marking the spot where the dead had fallen. The air was eerily still and there was no one around. I started knocking on doors with some trepidation to find eyewitnesses to what had happened, expecting to have the door slammed in my face or be abused because I was a ‘Brit’. I was astonished that neither happened. I was given tea and baps and biscuits by families grateful that a ‘Brit’ wanted to hear their account of what had happened. I found and interviewed a former British soldier, Jack Chapman, a Welshman living in the Bogside, the balcony of whose flat had afforded a grandstand view of what had happened. I thought it would have been difficult to find a more objective witness to an event that seems to throw objectivity to the winds. Jack had no doubt that the Paras had shot down his neighbours in cold blood. I was shocked to hear what he said and by his vivid description of ‘bodies being thrown into the back of army vehicles like sheep’.
Although admittedly not knowing the full circumstances at the time, I felt guilty about what ‘our’ soldiers appeared to have done, and about my ignorance of the historical circumstances that had led not just to ‘Bloody Sunday’ but to the re-emergence of the age-old conflict. I decided it was time to do something about it.
As Easter 1972 approached and the fall-out from ‘Bloody Sunday’ continued to dominate the headlines, I hit upon what I thought was a bright idea. At the weekly meeting of the This Wee
k team, I suggested that one way of trying to help our audience understand the seemingly intractable problem was to take someone there who held the widespread view that Northern Ireland was more trouble than it was worth and that we should withdraw the troops and let the Irish sort it out. I thought that by engaging this person on the ground we would thereby engage the audience and perhaps at the end of the programme leave both parties the wiser for it. My suggestion was received with more merriment than journalistic enthusiasm. My editor, John Edwards, who was always game for trying something new, said if I could find my ‘typical Brit’, be he a bus driver, coal miner or whatever, I could do it.
I went North and in the end found a bus driver from Hull and his wife, called Tom and Doris. Tom was a television natural with opinions on anything and everything, not least Northern Ireland. The furthest Doris had travelled from her native Hull was a day trip to York, about an hour’s drive away. I interviewed Tom in his bus depot surrounded by his mates. He was all for bringing the troops home and ‘letting the buggers sort it out’ and most of those around him agreed. We called the film ‘Busman’s Holiday’.
Tom and Doris had seen endless violence on the television news and been uncomprehending of it, knowing that it was taking place in a part of the United Kingdom but not really believing it. The only thing that brought it home was news of British soldiers being killed but, as far as they were concerned, they were dying in foreign fields. I remember driving into Belfast with them for the first time and sighting our first soldier. Doris was amazed and pointed him out to Tom saying, open-mouthed, ‘Look, Tom, there’s a soldier – and look he’s got a gun!’ They were amazed too when they walked through the city centre and saw Boots and Marks and Spencer. ‘It’s just like Hull,’ Tom said. When a small bomb went off and left a shop front in ruins, Tom could not believe it. ‘If that happened at home,’ he said, ‘the Hull Daily Mail would be running the story for weeks!’ Gradually, as we introduced Tom and Doris to all shades of nationalist and unionist opinion, they began to understand the situation, although they could never accept a republican’s insistence that Northern Ireland was part of Ireland and not the United Kingdom.1 After a week, we returned to England and Tom and Doris went back to Hull, still confused, but certainly much the wiser. ‘We can’t just abandon them,’ Tom concluded, ‘we’ve got to stick it out.’ That was almost thirty years ago and that’s what the ‘Brits’ have done.
What is remarkable is that British ignorance of Northern Ireland in those early days extended to the highest levels of government. Junior civil servants who later became the senior mandarins, the Permanent Under Secretaries (PUSs), who had to devise policies and stratagems to deal with the escalating crisis, admit their own lack of knowledge when they occupied the lower rungs of the Whitehall ladder. In the late 1960s, Sir Brian Cubbon was Principal Private Secretary to the Home Secretary, whose department, the Home Office, had responsibility for Northern Ireland at the time. ‘The Northern Ireland unit was very much a backwater,’ he told me. ‘Going back to the thirties, forties, fifties and early sixties, it just wasn’t in the frame. It was a tiny bit of one of forty divisions in the Home Office and that unit also dealt with the Channel Islands – which were rather more hospitable – and other issues such as local authority bylaws. It was a very minor issue indeed. There was always a Northern Ireland civil servant sitting in the division as the liaison officer for the Northern Ireland Government so it was a very cosy relationship.’ Ian Burns was Private Secretary at the Home Office in 1969. ‘One of the problems was that one didn’t know a lot about Northern Ireland and therefore you weren’t in a position to form a judgment about it. There was a Government there – it was Her Majesty’s Government – and there was a Governor. You assumed that matters were all right unless anyone told you otherwise. As a fairly junior civil servant I had no reason to think that the state of affairs was wrong in Northern Ireland any more than it was wrong in the Isle of Man.’ Sir Frank Cooper, who was a Deputy Under Secretary at the Ministry of Defence between 1968 and 1970, echoed the sentiments.
There was amazingly little knowledge in the rest of the UK of what Northern Ireland was like and there had been very little contact between the province and the mainland for many years past. It was a strange environment and although the army had a General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland [GOC], quite frankly it was regarded as a pleasant place to live and enjoy the delights of the countryside. But it was this terrible lack of knowledge which I found the most frightening thing of all at that time.
Did you lack knowledge of Ireland?
Oh yes. I don’t know anybody who knew a great deal about Ireland. The Home Office knew virtually nothing and the British Government knew virtually nothing.
One of the lessons Sir Frank said he’d learned with hindsight was that to intervene in a place like Northern Ireland that had been given a large degree of self-government was a recipe for trouble. The problem was that although the province was effectively self-governing except for foreign policy and external affairs, the governing class, from the Cabinet and civil service to the judiciary and police force, was almost entirely drawn from the Protestant/unionist side of Northern Ireland’s bitterly divided community. The province consisted of roughly a million Protestant unionists fiercely wedded to maintaining the union with Great Britain and half a million Roman Catholic nationalists, most of whom owed their allegiance to the Government of the Irish Republic.
The state of Northern Ireland had been founded by the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, a settlement designed to resolve the Irish Question once and for all. The Question – to whom did the island belong? – had bedevilled relations between England and Ireland since the twelfth century when King Henry II began the process of conquest and subjugation. As the centuries went by, the Question became more acute as successive English kings and queens ruled over their westerly neighbour with less than benevolent intent, crushing local resistance with a savagery that simply fuelled resistance to what most native Irish saw as the foreign invader. Since Ireland was also the back door to England through which her Spanish and French enemies sought to attack, the English Crown had powerful strategic interests for holding Ireland in the tightest of grips.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, these strategic considerations made the Irish Question even more complicated. The Protestant King James I encouraged thousands of hardy Scottish Presbyterian settlers to make new lives in the north-east corner of Ireland in the ancient province of Ulster. The purpose of what became known as the ‘plantation’ of Ulster was to make the most troublesome corner of England’s realm secure for the Crown. In setting up the colony, these Protestant settlers displaced most of the Catholic native inhabitants and took much of the best land, fuelling still further the resentment that already existed. Many of the million Protestants living in Northern Ireland today are descended from those who founded and defended England’s Protestant colony in Ireland. This is primarily why the problem of Northern Ireland exists four centuries on: two communities, one Catholic and one Protestant, with different national identities, owing allegiance to two different states, both living in the same corner of the same island. Had the plantation of Ulster never happened, the Irish Question would have been solved years ago. Britain maintains her rule in the North primarily for two reasons: she feels she cannot betray a million of her fellow citizens who wish to remain part of the United Kingdom; and she fears that if she were to withdraw against the wishes of the Protestant majority, the long-uttered threat of armed resistance by so called ‘loyalists’ would become reality and civil war would follow, a bloody legacy as Britain left the province.
Ever since the conflict erupted once more in 1969, successive British governments have argued their case at the bar of both domestic and international public opinion that British policy is determined by the fact that in a democracy the wishes of the majority must prevail and in the case of Northern Ireland that majority is Protestant in faith and unionist in persuasion. But there i
s a central fallacy to that argument which is the result of history, not political inclination. Before the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, all thirty-two counties of Ireland were under British rule that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had fought a determined campaign to break. The IRA sought to achieve the Irish Republic, a ‘sovereign, independent, Irish state … established by Irishmen in arms’, which Patrick Pearse, the leader of a small band of Irish rebels, had proclaimed outside the Post Office in Dublin at Easter 1916 after a suicidal rising against the British.2
With the Great War raging and thousands of Irish soldiers in the British front line, support for the rising was minimal. Dubliners spat at the rebels as British soldiers led them away. But when the British executed Pearse and the leaders of the rebellion for treason, in William Butler Yeats’s immortal words, ‘a terrible beauty’ was born.3 Support for the rebels soared as did support for the cause of Irish national independence for which they had shed their blood. Sinn Fein, the tiny Irish republican political party of which few had heard at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 and which was to become the IRA’s political wing, was the beneficiary. In the British general election of December 1918, a month after the ending of hostilities in Europe, Sinn Fein swept to a stunning victory across the whole of Ireland. Of the 105 Irish seats that constituted the country’s political representation at Westminster, Sinn Fein won seventy-three, legitimizing its claim to represent the majority of people on the island of Ireland. Thus the seeds of partition were sown. The party’s MPs refused to take their seats at Westminster on the grounds that it was a ‘foreign’ parliament and gathered in the Mansion House in Dublin, proclaiming themselves to be the legitimate government of the Irish people.
