by Peter Taylor
The problem for Oatley, given the strictures under which he operated, was how to begin and then conduct a dialogue with the IRA leadership without doing so directly. If at some stage there were to be negotiations, the ground had to be prepared. Perhaps Oatley took his inspiration from the ancient black and white film that had bored ‘Det’ recruits rigid.
The person in Derry and I constructed a situation where we had, in effect, a hollow bamboo ‘pipe’ leading from me, held by him and winding up at the other end with Ruairi O’Bradaigh. It existed with O’Bradaigh’s agreement but down which neither of us was saying anything. What we were in fact able to do was to blow gently down the ‘pipe’ and the person at the other end would be able to feel the draught and blow back. So we knew that we were there. This seemed to me to be not much more than a slight bending of the Secretary of State’s rules. So I went to my boss, Frank Cooper, and said, ‘Look, I haven’t really stepped very far out of line. I’ve got this bamboo “pipe” and I haven’t said anything down it yet but I know that if I do say anything, it will be heard at the other end. And in any case, it’s quite a nice “pipe” so can we, perhaps, put a bit of material down it to see if we can develop a relationship?’
Cooper agreed.
So then, over the next few months we found very, very minor things to talk about down this ‘pipe’ and it developed into an exercise which enabled O’Bradaigh and, to some extent, O’Connell to feel that they were in contact with a part of the British Government which might, at some stage, help them to move in a political direction.
All the indications were that the Provisionals were interested in going down that road. O’Bradaigh believed that the UWC strike marked a watershed. ‘It threw British policy totally into the melting pot. It swept the decks clean,’ he told me. ‘It was back to the drawing board. The word coming through was that every solution was up for consideration.’6 That was certainly the message that O’Bradaigh believed he was getting down the ‘pipe’ from Oatley via the Contact in Derry. What precisely it meant was as yet unclear but it was enough to encourage O’Bradaigh and O’Connell, the Provisionals’ ‘doves’, to want to find out more. Some of their more militaristic colleagues in the IRA leadership, the ‘hawks’, were sceptical about the enterprise but agreed that the process of exploration should be allowed to go ahead.
Both ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ realized that although the IRA was nowhere near the brink of defeat, its operations, particularly those in Belfast, were being severely curtailed by the increasingly successful activities of the ‘Det’, Special Branch and other agencies. In the three months following the end of the strike – June, July and August 1974 – the IRA killed nine soldiers, only three of them in Belfast, each shot by a sniper. A policeman was also shot dead in the city and two others were killed elsewhere. In September 1974, no soldier or policeman died anywhere in the province. The ‘Brits’, at least those at the sharp end out on the ground, believed they were winning the ‘war’. ‘Alan’ of the ‘Det’, who had helped trigger the arrest of Hughes and Adams, had no doubt that this was the case.
Our operations, combined with the political will behind them and the much, much more professional ‘green’ army had, between them, brought the IRA to its knees. I am convinced that we could have changed the course of history had the political will remained there. IRA activity could have been stopped completely in the two cities. It probably wouldn’t have stopped punishment beatings or knee-cappings but we could certainly have stopped major bombing operations and shoots against the security forces in Belfast and in Londonderry too. It was not the case in the border area.
‘Paul’ of Special Branch, who had arrested Brendan Hughes at Myrtlefield Park, held a more sophisticated view of what ‘winning’ actually meant.
It was my assessment at the time that we had them. We had them really at that point where we wanted them. Those at the very top of the organization were fully aware that they didn’t have any room to manoeuvre and little room to carry on a campaign for much longer. I think many of the IRA leaders at that time, not all of them but many, thought that there was a fair chance that the campaign would come to an end within a fairly short period of time. I don’t think any of them, at that point, felt it was going to go on for another twenty years.
Did you think you had won?
Yes. At that time all of us, I think, within the Special Branch and associated departments and within the army intelligence set-up that was operating with us [i.e. 14 Intelligence Company] would be fairly certain that we had. But ‘winning’ wasn’t really part of the strategy. It was getting them into a position to call the campaign off.
Even Brendan Hughes did not dispute the analysis. For a former IRA commander of his standing to make such an admission is remarkable. The IRA rarely publicly admits its setbacks and tends to dismiss such comments as ‘Brit’ propaganda designed to undermine morale. Hughes’s assessment of the state of the IRA at the time carries both weight and authority.
I think for the first time since the early 1970s, the police and the military machine were actually working and the IRA was under severe pressure. When they raided the house in Myrtlefield Park, I certainly saw a great deal of confidence and a great deal of cockiness there. And the tabloid papers in England were involved in this as well in a psychological type of way, saying that the IRA was being defeated, ‘dumps’ were being found, there were well-placed informers and the military machine was getting on top.
When I asked him if he thought the IRA was losing, he said he thought that it was. Billy McKee confirmed Hughes’s analysis. When he came out of gaol on 4 September 1974, four months after Hughes went in, he was appalled at the condition of the Belfast IRA he returned to. ‘It was in a very poor state, a very poor state indeed,’ he told me. ‘There were only a handful of men in each area and weaponry was very poor.’ With Brendan Hughes, Ivor Bell and Gerry Adams all locked up, McKee became commander of the Belfast Brigade once again.
But if the IRA was going to talk, it intended to do so from a position of strength and planned to strike where it hit the enemy hardest and generated the biggest headlines – in England. Although no doubt the decision was made on tactical grounds, the pressure the IRA was under on its own home ground probably reinforced it. The IRA intended to show the ‘Brits’ it was far from down and out, and in the autumn of 1974, it did so to horrendous effect. Its offensive began at the height of the British General Election campaign through which Harold Wilson was hoping to win the overall majority that had eluded him the previous February. Ireland was not an election issue, it seldom was in British elections, but the ‘Provos’ intended to make it one. On 5 October, the IRA struck at what they claimed were ‘military’ targets: two pubs in Guildford, the Horse and Groom and the Seven Stars, that were frequented by off-duty soldiers from nearby training camps. Four soldiers, who were sitting in an alcove where a nitroglycerine bomb had been placed, were killed in the blast.7 Two of them were women. A civilian also died and fifty-four people were injured.
Five days later Wilson retained the tenancy of Downing Street with the overall majority he had been looking for, although it was only three. In Northern Ireland anti-Sunningdale unionists swept the board, and the new party in favour of compromise formed by Brian Faulkner, the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (UPNI), attracted only 3 per cent of the vote. The omens for agreement on Rees’s planned Constitutional Convention did not look good.
With a still potentially unstable Government in power at Westminster with a knife-edge majority, the IRA kept up the pressure in England. On 7 November, it bombed the King’s Arms pub in Woolwich, killing a soldier and fatally wounding a part-time barman who later died from his injuries. Twenty-six people, including five soldiers, were injured.8 The same day, it killed two soldiers in Northern Ireland in a landmine attack near Stewartstown.
Three men – Gerard Conlon, Paul Hill and Patrick Armstrong – and a woman, Carole Richardson, were arrested, interrogated, tried and gaoled for the Guildfo
rd and Woolwich bombs. They became known as the ‘Guildford Four’. Fourteen years later, the Court of Appeal ordered their release on the grounds that the confessions extracted during interrogation by the police were fabricated. Paul Hill was implicated in another case and remained in prison for another five years until his conviction for Guildford and Woolwich was also quashed. A further seven people who had also been arrested and sentenced for making the Guildford bombs were finally released in 1991 after they, too, had been cleared by the Court of Appeal. They were known as the ‘Maguire Seven’ after the family name and had been convicted on unreliable forensic evidence. One of them, a brother-in-law, Patrick Giuseppe Conlon, died in gaol and never tasted freedom.9
But the most shocking IRA attack of all, not only in 1974 but any time, came two weeks after Woolwich on 21 November when bombs exploded at two pubs in Birmingham, the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town. A warning was given but only minutes before the bombs ripped through the pubs, killing twenty-one people and injuring 182. The nation was shocked and outraged at slaughter on such a scale, and a tide of anti-Irish feeling came dangerously close to sweeping the country. The Irish community in England was as appalled as its English neighbours and horrified at what was being done in its name. Birmingham, like ‘Bloody Friday’, was almost certainly a catastrophic mistake that made a mockery of the IRA’s claim to attack only military targets and not civilians.
Two days later the IRA issued a statement in Dublin. ‘It has never been and is not the policy of the IRA to bomb non-military targets without giving adequate warning to ensure the safety of civilians,’ it said as it disclaimed involvement in Birmingham. Try as they might, the Provisional IRA could not hide its responsibility for the carnage. Billy McKee, now commanding the Belfast Brigade, was genuinely shocked by Birmingham. He had not been aware of the specific operation as the ‘mainland’ campaign was planned in Dublin by the IRA’s ‘England’ department. McKee had supported bombing across the water but had always insisted that civilian casualties must be avoided at all costs. ‘I was shocked over the civilian loss of life,’ he told me. ‘I never approved of civilian loss of life. I didn’t mind our own people and the ‘Brits’, the security forces, going down but I didn’t agree with ordinary civilian people losing their lives. At the time there was no report coming in to us about who was responsible [for Birmingham] and I think it was about a month later that I found out that it was our own people who had carried it out.’ I then asked him directly, ‘Who bombed Birmingham?’ ‘The IRA,’ he said.
A few hours after the bombs exploded, five men were arrested as they were about to board the Heysham–Belfast ferry and a sixth man was arrested in Birmingham. They became known as the ‘Birmingham Six’. Three days later they were charged in connection with the explosions. I asked Billy McKee if the six men arrested were involved with the bombs. ‘No,’ he said.
The people who were arrested were completely innocent people. Completely innocent. Some of them weren’t even known to the IRA. When their names came out, nobody seemed to know them, except an odd person from Belfast. They might have bought fundraising tickets or something like that for prisoners’ dependants. I think one of them even said he wasn’t a republican. I don’t know if any of them were republicans or not.
The Birmingham Six – William Power, Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Joseph Hill, Robert Gerald Hunter, Noel Richard McIlkenny and John Walker – were interrogated, found guilty of murder in front of Mr Justice Bridge and sentenced to life imprisonment. The finding was based on forensic evidence and confessions made during interrogation. As they were sentenced on 15 August 1975, there were no defiant shouts of ‘Up the IRA’ or clenched-fist salutes, as was common when members of the IRA were sent down. The Six went to serve their life sentences in silence.10 They were finally released on 14 March 1991 (following their second appeal in three years after serving sixteen years in gaol), when it was decided that the evidence against them was unsafe. New tests on police documents had suggested that the police may have forged their notes and given false evidence. There had also been claims of ill-treatment during interrogation. It was the third case in eighteen months in which Irish people had been victims of miscarriages of justice.11
The wrongful convictions of the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four (quashed 1989), the Maguire Seven (quashed 1991) and Judith Ward (quashed 1992) were an indelible stain on a system of justice that had long been regarded as one of the finest in the world. It brought to mind Lord Gardiner’s damning conclusion at the end of his minority report on the use of the Five Techniques in 1971 when he stated that the practices were ‘alien to the traditions of what I believe still to be the greatest democracy in the world’. This string of wrongful convictions might merit a similar sentiment. The fact that they happened was probably a reflection of the understandable hysteria of the time caused by the wave of IRA bombs in 1974 and the pressure on the authorities to produce swift results. There is no doubt that in an attempt to bring the guilty to justice some of the rules were bent as they had been before in relation to Northern Ireland and would soon be again.
Four days after the Birmingham bombings, as the public demanded action, Harold Wilson’s new Labour Government introduced the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), under which suspects could be held without charge and interrogated for up to seven days, and ‘exclusion orders’ could be served on individuals suspected of terrorist connections, expelling them from mainland Britain and preventing them from returning. Introducing the legislation in the House of Commons, the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, made no apology. ‘These powers are draconian,’ he said. ‘In combination they are unprecedented in peacetime. I believe they are fully justified to meet the clear and present danger.’12 However draconian the Act may have been, the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (MPSB) regarded it as an essential weapon in their anti-terrorist armoury. ‘Without it, we would have had one arm up our back,’ one of its senior officers told me. ‘Exclusion Orders played a significant role in the 1970s and 1980s because they took out of our system those whom intelligence indicated were terrorists. It gave us the power to detain and question people on suspicion and at ports of entry, which were the vital pinch-points. It also gave Special Branch officers stationed there the potential to recognize and turn sources.’ To the police and Roy Jenkins, a reputedly liberal Home Secretary, the attenuation of personal freedom was justified by the end of defeating terrorism. By the mid-seventies, the ‘war’ in Ireland had caused mayhem in England, infected the criminal justice system and jeopardized the civil rights that British citizens could no longer take for granted.
Chapter Fifteen
Structures of Disengagement
December 1974–December 1975
On 10 December 1974, a fortnight after the Birmingham bombs, an extraordinary secret meeting took place between eight Protestant clergymen mainly from the North and prominent figures in the leadership of the Republican Movement, including three senior IRA men who, on 31 October 1973, had made a dramatic escape from Dublin’s Mountjoy gaol in a helicopter. The meeting took place in Smyth’s Hotel in the village of Feakle in County Clare. One of the architects of the encounter was the Reverend William Arlow, Assistant Secretary of the Irish Council of Churches, who wanted to convince the IRA that its campaign was counter-productive because every killing made it less likely than ever that Protestants would one day agree to join a united Ireland.
The Reverend Arlow and his colleagues had some hard men, and one very hard woman, to convince. At the talks, the Sinn Fein wing of the Republican Movement was represented by its President, Ruairi O’Bradaigh, its vice-President, Maire Drumm, who was to be shot dead by loyalists in 1976, and Seamus Loughran, Sinn Fein’s Belfast organizer. The IRA’s wing was represented by Billy McKee, David O’Connell and the three helicopter escapees from Mountjoy gaol, J.B. O’Hagan, Seamus Twomey and Kevin Mallon, all of whom were still on the run. The clergymen were surprised at how civilized and polite their interlocutors turned out to be, as Mc
Kee remembered. ‘I think they were expecting men coming in with trenchcoats and rifles over their shoulders and bayonets by their sides. But it wasn’t like that. It was a very cordial meeting and very, very good.’ The feeling was reciprocated by Dr Arthur Butler, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Connor. ‘We were all most impressed by their attitude, with their fair-mindedness, and we were so pleased to find that they were talking seriously and deeply and with great conviction and had listened very carefully to what we had to say,’ he said.1
