A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  And there was resistance to the Johnston agenda. The IRA had always distrusted outsiders, especially those preaching foreign ideas. Most of its members were God-fearing, Mass-attending Catholics who had been reared in an Ireland thoroughly dominated by a deeply conservative Catholic Church. It was, though, the manner in which Goulding pursued the Johnston-Coughlan strategy that finally fractured the IRA as much as the ideology he and his supporters espoused. He made two fatal errors. First, he tried to push his ideas onto the IRA at too early a stage. Not only did he not have enough support before he moved; he had failed to isolate his opponents first. Gerry Adams would never make this basic error. Goulding moved too early, and when he met failure his frustration grew and propelled him into confrontation with his opponents. That was his second mistake— and Adams learned from that too.

  Having decided upon a strategy of open confrontation, Goulding set the stage for a series of damaging rows within the IRA during the mid-1960s that were destined to end in a damaging and, as it turned out, bloody split. The battles were fought at IRA Conventions and at Sinn Fein’s annual conferences as Goulding and his allies attempted to push through the Johnston-Coughlan agenda, only to find their way blocked by traditionalists and conservatives. Rebellious branches, particularly in rural areas, were expelled, as at one stage was the entire branch of the women’s IRA, the Cumann na mBan. Frustrated at failure, Goulding turned to tactics that sometimes verged on the ludicrous. At one point he expanded the Army Council from seven to twenty members in a bid to secure a majority for his policy. The normally highly secretive body, which went to great lengths to hide its meetings from the authorities, was now so large that it almost had to hire a hall for its gatherings.

  Of the Council’s usual seven members, Goulding could count on the support of only three. On his side were Sean Garland, a fellow Dublin republican and a hard-line Johnston supporter, and the quixotic County Wicklow republican Seamus Costello. Opposing him were Ruairi O Bradaigh (Rory O’Brady), a County Roscommon schoolteacher who had been chief of staff when the Border Campaign ended in 1962; Daithi O Conaill, who had been badly wounded in County Tyrone during the campaign; and Sean MacStiofain, Goulding’s IRA comrade on the ill-fated Felsted arms raid in 1953 and the IRA’s then director of intelligence. Between them, holding the balance of power and uncertain as to his sympathies, was Tomas MacGiolla, the lofty president of Sinn Fein who doubled as chairman of the Army Council. He did not finally throw in his lot with Goulding until the summer of 1969.

  Goulding and his allies resorted increasingly to the tactic of purging their enemies. Senior Northern IRA figures were forced out or left in disgust at the tactics being used against their friends. Among them were men who would play key roles in the formation of the rival Provisional IRA a few years later, characters like Jimmy Steele, who had spent twenty years in jail for IRA activity, and Sean Keenan from Derry, a republican stalwart for years. With other Belfast men who had left or were eased out during this period—people like Joe Cahill, Jimmy Drumm, Billy McKee, the Kellys of North Belfast, the Hannaways, and Seamus Twomey—they were to form the core of a bitter opposition just biding their time to strike back at Goulding. If Adams learned another lesson from all this, it was to divide and discredit opponents lest they unite against him.

  It was into this maelstrom of conflicting political ideas and personalities that Gerry Adams plunged when he joined the Belfast IRA’s D Company, although for a while it did not impinge much on his life. As he was to say himself many years later, all this ferment was “going on, if you like, above my head.”17 He was only sixteen when he joined the republican movement, and the debate within it was taking place far away, at leadership level and mostly in Dublin, where the IRA policymakers were based. But within four or five years events were to force Adams to take sides in their quarrel, and that decision would have unforeseeable consequences for Anglo-Irish politics.

  The failure of the Border Campaign had set the scene for the tragedy that has always befallen Irish republicanism in the aftermath of defeat, when the ambitions of those who were convinced that fresh directions had to be taken clashed with the stubborn belief of others that change and compromise were indistinguishable and that deviating from principle meant devaluing the sacrifices of dead comrades. And so it was as the 1960s unfolded; the IRA was on the verge of another rupture.

  IDEOLOGICAL, generational, and personality differences had set the scene for internal republican division, but they were not the only factors at work. Beyond the control of the IRA’s leaders, beyond the control even of its unionist governors, social and economic change was remolding Northern Ireland and in the process creating the circumstances that would bring political instability. Two factors in particular destabilized Northern Ireland in the 1960s and helped plunge it into the most violent and sustained conflict in Irish history.

  The first and most damaging development was the furious reaction within unionism to the moderate reformism of Prime Minister Terence O’Neill. This took three forms. Some within O’Neill’s Ulster Unionist Party saw his modernizing policies as a threat to the union with Britain and argued that softening hostility to nationalists was a fatal weakness, while others saw the turbulence as providing the opportunity to snatch the prime minister’s crown from his head.

  The second group coalesced around the powerful, hectoring frame of the Reverend Ian Paisley, a young Protestant street preacher with political ambitions who combined a fundamentalist biblical view of the world and a hatred for the Roman Catholic Church with a fiery opposition to all things ecumenical, religious, and political. Paisley’s oratorical skills made him a formidable opponent. He could sway a mob with a few well-chosen words. He also represented a virulent strain within unionism that could trace its roots back over a hundred years, to Belfast street preachers who would regularly incite crowds to riot, burn, and kill their Catholic neighbors.

  Paisley’s violent rhetoric had a similar effect in the Belfast of the 1960s. On the Shankill Road in North Belfast, one of the city’s toughest loyalist areas, a group of men led by a former British soldier called Gusty Spence met to form a paramilitary group they called the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), after the huge private Protestant army that early unionist leaders like Edward Carson had mobilized in 1912 to resist Home Rule. Convinced that the IRA was planning a new violent campaign to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, in 1966, and inspired by Paisley’s oratory, Spence’s UVF launched a pre-emptive strike.

  They aimed to kill IRA leaders but, like their counterparts when the Troubles intensified, were content to accept any Catholic target. By the summer of 1966 they had killed three times. One victim was a seventy-seven-year-old Protestant widow who died when a gasoline bomb intended for a Catholic-owned pub engulfed her house instead. Another was a tipsy twenty-eight-year-old Catholic pedestrian shot dead on the street; like so many of the victims of the oncoming Troubles, he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The third was an eighteen-year-old Catholic barman, Peter Ward, who had the misfortune of choosing a Shankill Road bar frequented by Spence and his colleagues for an after-work drink with friends. The deaths were the peals of thunder that foretold the impending storm.

  Unionist and Protestant reaction was mirrored by Catholic and nationalist assertiveness. By the early and mid-1960s that new mood, fueled by a growing educated and frustrated middle class, took two forms. On the one hand Catholics began to participate in a state that they had initially boycotted. The first sign of this came in 1965 when, in response to the O’Neill-Lemass meetings, the Northern Nationalist Party entered the Stormont parliament for the first time since 1930 and became the official opposition, a step that signified recognition to the Northern Ireland state.

  The other sign of the new mood was an increasing willingness of Catholics to stand up and demand their rights. Although Catholic and nationalist politics had been characterized for many years by meekness in the face of unionist strength, some in that community were well
aware that they were the victims of discrimination in jobs and public housing. In the 1960s they set about compiling the evidence. The Campaign for Social Justice was started by a County Tyrone doctor and his former teacher wife, Con and Patricia McCluskey. Their research showed that Catholics were hugely underrepresented in places like the central and local government civil service. Soon the idea was mooted of setting up a civil rights body based on the NAACP in the United States, which had fought for the rights of blacks.

  In 1967 the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was formally launched at a public meeting in Belfast and drew up a list of reforms. Its most important demand was for the scrapping of a rule that restricted to property owners the right to vote in elections to the local councils. The rules gave some businessmen, most of them unionists, up to six votes, while thousands of working-class Catholics, who did not own their homes, were disenfranchised. The councils exercised considerable power. Not only did they give employment, but they were responsible for building public housing projects. That meant they could decide who, Protestant or Catholic, got decent public housing.

  NICRA also sought the scrapping of gerrymandered electoral wards that, in places like Derry, Northern Ireland’s second city, gave unionists control over the local council even though the Protestants who voted for them were in a minority. The disbanding of the B Specials and the removal of the Special Powers Act, the law that gave the unionist government unprecedented powers and a points list for public housing, completed the roll call of reforms demanded. Significantly none of NICRA’s demands touched directly on the existence of the Border. Composed of a mixture of liberal and radical opinion, NICRA’s leadership had a simple attitude: if Nationalists were obliged to be British citizens, then they should have British rights.

  These stirrings soon showed themselves on the streets. In June 1968 republicans in Caledon, County Tyrone, organized a sit-in at a house allocated by the local council to the unmarried secretary of a local unionist politician, and they demanded that poorly housed Catholic families take precedence. The protest drew wider publicity when a Nationalist MP at Stormont, Austin Currie, joined the sit-in. Two months later NICRA helped organize a protest march from the nearby nationalist village of Coalisland to Dungannon, Tyrone’s largest town, where protesters found their way blocked by a flag-waving crowd of Paisley supporters.

  Standing up to demand community rights also meant that nationalists were more and more ready to resort to physical force to defend themselves. The early part of the 1960s had seen two examples of this. In October 1964 the lower part of the Falls Road, the main Catholic artery leading into Belfast city center, was convulsed by a two-day battle when, after threats from Paisley, the RUC invaded the area to remove an Irish tricolor from the offices in Divis Street of the Sinn Fein candidate in the Westminster general election. The trouble resulted in fifty civilian and over twenty RUC injuries. Eighteen months later, in June 1966, a month after Spence’s UVF started to kill, Catholics again fought hand-to-hand battles with the police when Paisley brought a mob through the nationalist Markets area en route to a city center protest against ecumenical Protestants. The tinder was in place and was dry; it needed but a spark to set it ablaze.

  The spark came on October 5, 1968, when a poorly attended civil rights march in Derry was batoned off the streets by a force of RUC officers who appeared to have lost all control of their emotions. Derry had been chosen for protest because it was in nationalist eyes the capital city of injustice. Not only were the majority Catholics prevented from taking control of their city, but years of unionist rule had condemned them to appalling housing conditions and disproportionately high unemployment.

  The unionist government reacted with alarm to the proposed civil rights march. In the eyes of its hard-line supporters, the walled city had been the symbol of Protestant supremacy over nationalist Ireland ever since its inhabitants had withstood a terrible siege in 1688 and helped the Protestant King William of Orange defeat the Catholic usurper, King James II. Its official name was Londonderry, after the City of London companies that had financed its reconstruction as a planter city. In celebration of its heroic resistance during the siege, unionists christened Derry “the Maiden City,” and any violation of its walls had to be resisted. The civil rights marchers wanted to parade right into the walled center, and unionists saw that as a bid to ravage the maiden. After an obscure and unheard-of loyalist group threatened a counterprotest, the unionist home affairs minister, William Craig, promptly banned the march.

  The marchers assembled and found themselves blocked on all sides by riot police who laid into the crowd with batons flying. Eighty-eight demonstrators were injured and thirty-six arrested. Two British Labour MPs had turned up as observers, guests of West Belfast’s Republican Labour MP, Gerry Fitt, who was himself batoned around the head. Later the police turned a water cannon on dispersing protesters, in a violent scene reminiscent of police brutality in Alabama just five years earlier. The whole scene was captured by a camera crew from RTE, whose film was also screened on British TV and around the world. So was an interview with a blood-bespattered Fitt. These scenes seemed more appropriate in South Africa, but Northern Ireland was British and such things were not supposed to happen in Britain. Derry on October 5 sent a shock wave through both Ireland and Britain at the realization that “John Bull’s Other Island,” a headline borrowed from Shaw by one London newspaper to describe Northern Ireland, was a political slum.

  It rapidly became an unstable slum as well, as events took on their own momentum. The nationalist pressure intensified in November after a repeat march in Derry brought fifteen thousand onto the streets and the RUC, hopelessly outnumbered, allowed the protest through. That in turn fueled more unionist anger at Terence O’Neill, and the crowds attending Paisley’s rallies grew. As NICRA held more marches and mobilized protests throughout the North, the British Labour government applied pressure on O’Neill to move faster and further to satisfy nationalist demands for change. The government in London led by Harold Wilson had been horrified and alarmed by the events of October 5, and the British prime minister demanded action from the unionists. At the end of the month O’Neill relented and announced a package of reforms and followed this up with a televised appeal for a break in the civil rights agitation.

  NICRA obliged, but a small left-wing, radical student group, the People’s Democracy (PD) based at Queen’s University in Belfast, responded to O’Neill’s package with scorn and announced plans for a seventy-five-mile trek between Belfast and Derry to start on New Year’s Day 1969 to protest about the inadequacy and slowness of change. The route would go through some tough unionist areas, and trouble was inevitable. On January 4, as the march reached the outskirts of Derry, Paisleyite supporters ambushed the marchers with stones and cudgels. In response fierce bloody rioting between nationalists and the RUC broke out in the Bogside, the main Catholic area of Derry, in reality a slum that nestled at the foot of Derry’s walls.

  As unionist discontent grew, O’Neill’s cabinet colleagues deserted him one by one, and in February he called a sudden and unexpected election to the Stormont parliament, hoping it would strengthen his hand—but if anything the result strengthened his opponents while bringing more able nationalists into political life. In March bombs exploded at an electricity substation and punctured a pipeline that supplied Belfast with most of its water. The bombs were really the work of loyalists, but at the time most people assumed a resurgent IRA had planted them. The subterfuge worked, and O’Neill was undermined even further.

  In April the radicalization of nationalists continued apace when the student civil rights leader Bernadette Devlin was elected to Westminster in a by-election in Mid-Ulster, overcoming Catholic divisions to capture the seat. Unlike the republicans, she had no qualms about taking her House of Commons seat to highlight her community’s grievances, although her appetite for parliamentary politics quickly waned. In the same month O’Neill’s cousin Major James Chichester-Clark, a
fellow Anglo-Irish aristocrat, quit his cabinet in protest of the prime minister’s policies, and an exhausted O’Neill surrendered and resigned. Chichester-Clark, whose ancestors had planted Ulster in the seventeenth century, promptly succeeded him as prime minister.

  The fire was well alight, and soon the explosion came. During July so-called loyalist vigilante groups appeared on the streets in Belfast. They claimed that their role was to defend Protestant areas, but in reality they were there to attack Catholic districts. One group in particular, the Shankill Defence Association, led by an ally of Paisley, was involved in vicious clashes with Catholics in North Belfast, as were RUC riot squads. Reports of Catholics being intimidated into leaving their homes began to circulate.

  The focus switched back to Derry when the Apprentice Boys, an offshoot of the Orange Order, made it clear they would go ahead with that year’s annual march on August 12 despite predictions of disaster. The march duly went ahead and calamity came in its wake. After skirmishes on the edge of the Catholic Bogside, ferocious rioting broke out between nationalists and the RUC. The rioters repulsed wave after wave of baton-wielding policemen with rocks and gasoline bombs, but soon the RUC turned to CS gas and flooded the narrow streets of the Bogside with acrid clouds that choked indiscriminately. Chichester-Clark mobilized the B Specials while the Irish prime minister, Jack Lynch, warned that his government would not “stand by” and watch as nationalists were attacked. Northern Ireland was moving rapidly toward the edge of civil war, and it looked as if the conflict might engulf the whole island. By August 14 the police were exhausted, and the Stormont government was forced to request military assistance from Britain. That day the first contingents of British soldiers took to the streets of Derry. Thirty years would pass before they left.