A Secret History of the IRA

by Ed Moloney

  These were noble sentiments, but the reality on the ground in the late eighteenth century was the reverse of what Tone wanted to happen. Ireland was beginning to divide very deeply on religious and sectarian grounds, nowhere more so than in the North. The cause was simple—land. Protestant planter tenant farmers in the North had enjoyed superior rights over native Catholics since the 1600s when the plantation settlement had accelerated. A practice known as the Ulster Custom gave them security of tenure as long as they kept up their rent payments, and it also entitled them, if they decided to quit the land, to receive compensation for improvements they had made to the land or property. They had an incentive to work and invest that was denied their Catholic countrymen, and the rewards made their sacrifice worthwhile. But in the early 1780s the English began to relax the penal laws, Catholics were allowed to hold leases on the same terms as Protestants, and the planters’ privileged lifestyle came under threat. Catholics, who were used to a lower standard of living, were also ready to pay higher rents, with the result that Protestant planters saw more and more of their farms falling into the hands of their native rivals.

  Around the mid-1780s the worm began to turn. The first secret Protestant societies appeared and announced that they were dedicated to preserving privilege and driving the Catholics out. The largest was the Peep O’Day Boys, so called because its members would appear at dawn to burn or intimidate Catholic families. This Protestant violence stimulated a Catholic response, and rival secret societies devoted to defending Catholics were formed. Inevitably they became known as Defenders, and as they toured the countryside raiding for arms and skirmishing with troops, they adopted a strategic dictum that would have been familiar to the Provisional IRA leadership: the best means of defense, they preached, was attack. Although their roots lay in what are now the Border counties between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, the Defender phenomenon spread throughout Ireland. The objectives of the Defenders varied from place to place; in the South discontent over high rents and low wages combined with an insurrectionary and defiant politics animated by events in America and France to swell their ranks. But the Defenders were less inspired by the idea of freeing Ireland from British rule and more by the hope that life in Ireland could be improved.

  In the North there was a sharp sectarian edge to the Defenders’ activities, and as Protestant anxiety over land losses intensified, clashes with the Peep O’Day Boys became more and more frequent and bloody. One confrontation was to have momentous consequences for Ireland’s history. In September 1795 just outside the city of Armagh, at a place called the Diamond, over twenty Defenders were killed in a pitched battle with a much smaller force of Peep O’Day Boys. The victorious Protestants then decided to re-form themselves into the Orange Society, later called the Orange Order, named after the Protestant hero King William of Orange, who had defeated the Catholic King James in the late 1690s and secured the Protestant crown and succession in England and Ireland.

  As the thoughts of the leaders of the United Irishmen moved increasingly to violent rebellion, they turned to the Defenders for the muscle they would need to take on the English redcoats, and the two groups coalesced in 1796. The ensuing rising in 1798 was brutally put down by Lord Cornwallis, who had just lost the American colonies and was determined not to suffer another humiliating defeat at the hands of impudent rebels. Too late to help his associates, Wolfe Tone returned to Ireland with a force of French troops but was captured, arrested, and sentenced to death. Determined to cheat the English hangman, Tone took his own life in prison. The 1798 rebellion went down as another glorious defeat, and Wolfe Tone became known as the founding father of Irish republicanism. His grave at Bodenstown, County Kildare, has become a place of pilgrimage for all shades of Irish republicanism. The Provisionals’ commemoration takes place each June, and the keynote speech is invariably used by the Army Council to spell out current IRA policy.

  Tone’s influence survived his death, and so too did that of the Defenders. The Defenders and the early recruits to the Provisional IRA two centuries later shared a number of important characteristics. In both organizations the prime motive for taking up arms was to defend their people from Protestant attack, not to free Ireland. The Defenders organized themselves to protect Catholic farms and land in rural Ulster; the early Provisionals did so to defend Catholic streets and ghettos in Belfast. Both believed that the best defense was attack, and both put the need for guns or other instruments of defense before political ideas.

  Both were reactive responses to the iniquities of British rule. In 1795, for instance, a Kildare schoolteacher, Laurence O’Connor, sentenced to death for administering a Defender oath, told his judge, “[P]rosecutions were not the means of bringing peace in the country but if the rich would alleviate the sufferings of the poor, they would hear no more of risings or Defenders and the country would rest in peace and harmony.”17 Two hundred and five years later Eamonn McDermott, an IRA Volunteer from Derry sentenced to life imprisonment in 1979 for killing a policeman, expressed not dissimilar sentiments: “Its a cliché now but the British Army created the IRA…. They brought the national question into it, before then it wasn’t really an issue. Republicans would argue that it was there from the start, but that’s a load of rubbish. Initially [we] were trying to reform the state; the national question and partition came later.”18 In their different ways both men were saying the same thing: if the British had behaved sensibly and fairly, they and their communities would probably have been content.

  AS CATHOLIC Belfast recovered from the shock and bloodshed of August 1969, the need for defense was uppermost in the minds of republicans in Ballymurphy, where in November 1969, after the death in a car accident of the local IRA commander, Liam McParland, Gerry Adams took charge. In those days the vast sprawling Ballymurphy housing project was divided by the Springfield Road, one of the city’s main arterial routes. The lower, southern side was Catholic, while the upper, northern side, New Barnsley, which dominated the rest of the district from the slopes of hills that overlook the city, was Protestant. Tension, suspicion, and fear were rife after the August riots, and barricades set up then by Catholics were still in place. Ballymurphy Catholics were worried that loyalists could direct sniper fire on them from the high ground of New Barnsley. Eager to acquire weapons of their own, locals turned to the as yet nonaligned IRA unit, as Adams later recalled: “Many people involved with the defence committees flocked to the IRA, which speedily mushroomed out of all proportion to its previous numbers.”19 There was little doubt that in Ballymurphy defense against loyalist attack was the main motive for those who joined the local unit, as one Volunteer explained: “It was a gut reaction. The Loyalists were attacking our ones and we knew that sooner or later it would come to the ’Murph. The Brits didn’t really figure in those days. They just didn’t belong in the fight.”20

  At its first meeting, in January 1970, the MacStiofain-led Army Council devised a three-stage strategy that initially placed the emphasis on the need to defend the Catholic areas of Belfast. “All our energies would be devoted to providing material, financial and training assistance for the Northern units,” MacStiofain later explained in his autobiography. “The objective was to ensure that if any area where such a unit existed came under attack, whether from Loyalist extremists or British forces, that unit would now be capable of adequate defensive action.”21

  As soon as possible thereafter, according to the MacStiofain plan, the IRA would go into a second phase, a mixture of defense and retaliation, the latter designed to deter loyalists from mounting attacks. When the IRA was strong enough and political circumstances suitable, the IRA would move into the third phase, an offensive war designed to bring Britain to the negotiating table to agree to the final withdrawal of its forces from Ireland. Within weeks the Army Council also approved the design for the new IRA’s icon, one that would symbolize the determination that the killings and burnings of August 1969 would never happen again; a phoenix rising from the ashes�
��meant to be the ashes of Bombay Street—soon adorned lapel badges and ties worn in bars and drinking clubs in West Belfast.

  The political circumstances quickly began to move in the Provisionals’ favor. The deployment of troops ended half a century of effective British non-engagement in Northern Ireland. The Harold Wilson cabinet in London realized it had no choice but to force the pace of political change. A reform program was announced. The B Specials, hated by the Catholics, would be disbanded and replaced by a militia to be drawn from both communities. It would be called the Ulster Defence Regiment. The RUC would be disarmed and reorganized in the hope of attracting more Catholic recruits. The allocation of public housing and other powers were taken away from Northern Ireland’s unionist-dominated local councils, while plans were laid to outlaw public expressions of sectarian hatred and to improve community relations. The British home secretary was given oversight of Northern Ireland, and that was a dark hint to Unionists that London could take away their powers entirely; if they didn’t clean up their act, their parliament at Stormont could be suspended and the days of exclusive Protestant rule brought to an end. Although the government of Major James Chichester-Clark had little choice but to accept Wilson’s diktat, the unionist grassroots were alarmed and restive. The disarming of the RUC had led to rioting on the Shankill Road, and three people were killed in gun battles between British troops and loyalist snipers. One of the fatalities was an RUC constable, the first police death of the Troubles. Early in 1970 the Reverend Ian Paisley, already a fairly reliable barometer of grassroots Protestant discontent, won Terence O’Neill’s old seat at Stormont in a by-election called after the unseated prime minister’s retirement from politics. Chichester-Clark was under constant attack from right-wingers on his backbenches, some motivated by hostility to the reform program, others by fear of losing their seats to Paisley supporters. Events on the streets also contributed to the sour unionist mood. In the wake of the August riots, the RUC had been expelled from nationalist areas in Belfast and Derry, and the British army had taken over control of law and order. The defense committees—in many cases controlled by either the Provisional or the Official IRA—banned the police from their areas and refused to dismantle the August barricades. Their behavior infuriated the unionists.

  There is little doubt that most Northern nationalists welcomed Britain’s reinvolvement in Irish affairs, especially since it came from a British Labour government, some of whose leaders were known to be sympathetic to the nationalist cause. To the discomfort of many early Provisional leaders, relations between Catholics and British soldiers were, if not friendly, then certainly not hostile, mirroring this new, hopeful mood.

  As unionist angst grew, the need to buttress Chichester-Clark against his right-wingers brought a change in British policy. The honeymoon between nationalists and the British began to end in Easter that year, when there were clashes between British troops and republicans at commemorations of the 1916 Rising in Armagh and Derry. But the worst trouble was in Ballymurphy in riots that finally forced republicans there to align with the Provisionals. As in other parts of West Belfast, day-to-day control of law and order in the estate was in the hands of the British army, at first the Royal Scots Regiment, which set up headquarters in a deserted school on the Springfield Road. To the astonishment of Ballymurphy Catholics, at the end of March the commander of the Royal Scots gave Orangemen from New Barnsley permission to parade down the Springfield Road past their estate. As outraged nationalists heard the flute-and-accordion bands striking up sectarian, anti-Catholic tunes, the first stones were thrown. This time the troops sided with the Orangemen. As Catholic rioters hurled rocks and gasoline bombs, the troops replied with CS gas, which seeped through the housing estate, disabling young and old, rioter and non-rioter indiscriminately. Military snatch squads charged the crowds to arrest and beat stone throwers. Ballymurphy nationalists contrasted this tough response with the more low-key and measured reply to loyalist rioters. Chichester-Clark’s critics had demanded that the British army remove its kid gloves in Catholic areas, and this had now happened.

  The Easter 1970 Ballymurphy disturbances were significant not just because they pushed the local unaligned IRA unit into the arms of the Provisionals but because, for a sizable section of Belfast Catholic opinion, they began to put British soldiers on the same side as the unionists and Protestants. It was this development, repeated elsewhere with increasing frequency and ferocity in the coming weeks and months, that transformed matters to the advantage of the Provisionals. And no one was better able to take advantage of this than Gerry Adams, the new commander of the Bally-murphy IRA.

  By the time of the Easter 1970 riots the Provisional IRA in the city had grown so quickly that it was obliged to reorganize. At that time the IRA operated at three levels. At the bottom were local defense committees, in effect vigilantes who patrolled areas at night to warn of loyalist incursions. Above them was the Auxiliary IRA, men whose job was to defend their own areas, should the loyalists attack. They were in practice part-time IRA members whose services could be called upon in an emergency and who, in the meantime, provided the IRA with ears and eyes. Above them was the full-time IRA unit or company, modeled on the British army’s structure. Each company was recruited from within its home area.

  With their ranks swollen by new recruits, the IRA expanded from one Belfast battalion to three, each with its own complement of companies. The First Battalion was based in Andersonstown and the Upper Falls Road area. The Second Battalion encompassed Ballymurphy and the Lower Falls Road area. The Third Battalion took in the rest of Catholic Belfast, principally the isolated and often besieged ghettos of Ardoyne in North Belfast, the Short Strand in East Belfast, and the Markets district in South-central Belfast.

  Nearly all Gerry Adams’s family went with the Provisionals. Only one sister, Margaret, whose husband was in the Official IRA, refused; the rest— father, mother, siblings—all gave their allegiance to the reborn phoenix. Adams was well placed to rise in the new movement. At the time of the split there were no more than forty to sixty IRA members in the whole of Belfast and even fewer of Gerry Adams’s youth and ability. The Provisional leadership in Belfast naturally turned to able republicans to show the way to the newcomers, among them Adams. Talent-spotted by the pre-split Belfast commander, Billy McMillen, the young Adams was already headed for leadership, but the Troubles gave him the opportunity to utilize his special skills with deadly effect. Other IRA leaders rose because of their record as “operators,” as gunmen and bombers. But not Adams. Although he was to dominate the IRA for the next thirty years, there is no evidence that he ever fired a shot in anger against the British or their local allies. “I have never met anyone who has ever been on an operation with him,” recalled one early colleague. “Usually you get to hear about people, that so-and-so is a nerveless operator or this one’s a wreck and so on, but never with Adams. He was never on a robbery, never on a gun crew, a bombing or anything.”22

  The key to his rise lay in other qualities, prime among them the skills of a ruthless general. The first opportunity to display his strategic dexterity came during the Easter riots of 1970. The new Provisional Belfast commander was Billy McKee, a confirmed bachelor and devout Catholic who had devoted his life to the republican cause. Like other conservative critics, he had quit the Goulding IRA in protest against its policies but rejoined when the riots of August 1969 broke out. He became the first commander of the Second Battalion and then, after the split, took over command of the entire Belfast Brigade.

  Deeply affected by the IRA’s failure to defend nationalist areas in August 1969, McKee was determined that the Provisionals would make up for that lapse. When the Ballymurphy riots erupted, he ordered an armed unit from D Coy in the Lower Falls Road to go to Ballymurphy and take on the British army. When Adams found out, he was furious and detained McKee’s men at gunpoint. “Adams put us all in this house and wouldn’t let us out,” recalled an IRA colleague who was impressed by this firs
t encounter with the Ballymurphy leader, “and there we sat with all our guns stacked against the wall. McKee wanted a gunfight, but Adams didn’t. Adams wanted ordinary people involved in the rioting as a way of radicalizing them. That impressed me. He seemed to be very competent and capable; he knew what he was talking about.”23 The rioting lasted for four days and affected thousands of West Belfast people. Had the IRA opened fire on the first day, the trouble would have possibly been over in a few hours and could have ended with the IRA’s defeat at the hands of superior British firepower and Ballymurphy’s substantial Catholic community rendered less angry, less willing to take up guns.

  Three months later the chance came to repeat the exercise. The months of June and July 1970 were to witness a series of historic blunders by the British military and the unionist government which catapulted the Provisionals into an organization large and strong enough to embark on the second and third stages of MacStiofain’s strategy. The riots of that summer also made the Ballymurphy IRA the most militant in Belfast and helped ensure that Gerry Adams would rise through the ranks.

  The spark that lit the fire came on June 18, when in Britain a general election ousted Harold Wilson’s Labour government and installed a Conservative administration led by Edward Heath. The result buoyed the unionists in Northern Ireland. Harold Wilson’s cabinet had been openly sympathetic to the civil rights agenda, whereas the British Tories had historical and cultural ties to unionism. Encouraged by the result, unionists began to press for harsher security measures, including internment, the measure that they believed had crushed the IRA during the 1956–62 campaign. But there were warning signals from the election as well. The Reverend Ian Paisley was elected to the Westminster parliament at the expense of a more moderate unionist, and there was a fear that mainstream unionism might lose control unless it was bolstered. It was in this atmosphere that Chichester-Clark secured the agreement of the British army commander in Northern Ireland, Lieutenant General Sir Ian Freeland, that a number of impending Orange parades would be allowed to go ahead. The unionist premier believed he could not survive much more grassroots antagonism, and the British, desperate to sustain Chichester-Clark, agreed.