One Man's Terrorist Read online

  However, communal divisions stood obstinately in the way of that prospect. A briefing prepared for Edward Heath in March 1972 set out the essence of the problem. Heath had seen a news report claiming that the Official IRA was ‘working on schemes to promote industrial action in Northern Ireland along lines followed in the recent miners’ strike’, which he considered ‘very important’. Civil servants assured the prime minister that there was no need to be concerned: ‘Protestant workers would regard picketing in support of an IRA-inspired strike as a challenge and would accordingly be more determined to work.’ There might be some areas with a predominantly Catholic workforce, such as Belfast’s deep-sea port, where industrial action was more likely to succeed. Even there, it should prove easier to contain than a strike in Britain.8

  If NICRA was in decline and the trade unions ill-equipped to perform the role assigned to them by the Officials, there was still another vehicle for the movement’s ambitions. Its political wing, the Republican Clubs, had their first real outing in the council elections of 1973, pledging not to take their seats until internment ended. Ten candidates were successful, with support coming almost entirely from nationalist voters.9 The United Irishman hailed the result as ‘ample evidence that there is clear support for the Movement’s national and social policies throughout the Six Counties’, but complained that enthusiasm in the ranks was limited: ‘Some areas played little or no part in the campaign although the decision to contest was arrived at nationally. This displays a total misunderstanding of the opportunity the elections provided to publicize Republican policy, and is dangerously close to elitism.’10

  In truth, while the election results offered a base that could be built upon, it was hardly an electrifying performance. The Clubs were certainly in no position to challenge the SDLP, by now a well-established party with several high-profile representatives, some of whom had a leftish tinge to their politics. The Officials had a long slog ahead if they expected to become a serious political force.

  Seamus Costello now formed an alliance with Seán Garland to try and overturn the movement’s reformist strategy. Both men were staunchly committed to the idea of a left-wing, politicized republicanism, but feared that the emphasis on civil rights was becoming a distraction from the struggle against British rule. The arguments of Gerry Foley, an Irish-American Trotskyist who had befriended several leading Officials, influenced their critique of the established line. Foley welcomed the OIRA ceasefire, arguing that a military campaign would serve only to divide and isolate the nationalist population, but dismissed the idea of gradual democratic reform as a utopian folly.11 A document circulated by Garland and Costello at the end of 1972 argued for a change of focus, and met with approval from both wings of the movement.12 The main resolution from that year’s party conference demanded that the British government ‘commit themselves to a total withdrawal of their military and political control from the Six Counties at an early specified date’.13

  When William Whitelaw published a white paper on the future of Northern Ireland in March 1973, the Officials insisted that ‘any solution which advocates the continuation of a Six or Nine County Ulster state, whether it has constitutional links with Britain or not, must be rejected.’14 This baldly contradicted what Tomás Mac Giolla had said at Carrickmore a few months earlier. Mac Giolla and Garland brought the movement’s new policy with them to the World Congress of Peace Forces held in Moscow that November.15 According to Gerry Foley, Garland returned from the conference believing that Soviet aid could give the Officials a vital boost, having been ‘most influenced by discussions he had with representatives of guerrilla movements in Africa’.16 In the following years, Soviet-style Marxism gradually supplanted the eclectic left-wing ideology of the early 70s, to the dismay of those Officials who wanted a more independent line.

  For its part, People’s Democracy could only hope to make an impression on the political scene by linking up with other forces. The Northern Resistance Movement was defunct by the end of 1972, but PD kept on trying to draw the Provos into broad alliances that could revive the campaign of civil resistance. The group had decided that the priority for socialists was to destroy the ‘Orange State’ and drive Britain from the island for good. It abandoned talk of uniting the working class across sectarian boundaries, believing that partition would have to be ended before such unity could materialize. Since the Provisional IRA was the main force challenging British rule, its campaign should be supported wholeheartedly: ‘There can be no progress made until the age-old problem of the domination and exploitation of Ireland by British imperialism is settled. We therefore support the war of resistance against British control in the North and have agitated and will continue to agitate to back up that war.’17

  PD still insisted that armed struggle would have to be accompanied by political action. An opportunity to promote that vision arose in the summer of 1973, when the courts imprisoned Michael Farrell and his comrade Tony Canavan for organizing an illegal march in Belfast.18 Farrell and Canavan began a hunger strike to demand special-category status after their transfer to Crumlin Road jail. The fast galvanized the formation of a new alliance, the Political Hostages Release Committee (PHRC), which attracted support from both republican factions.

  A campaign of protest culminated in the release of the two men after thirty-four days without food. The Provisional mouthpiece Republican News praised Farrell as a ‘fearless opponent of the Unionist regime and British interference in Irish affairs’, and suggested that further victories could be won by combining ‘mass popular action with the military campaign’.19 Gerry Adams later identified the PHRC as ‘the principal anti-Unionist political success in 1973’.20

  However, the unity it had forged proved to be ephemeral. A rally hosted by NICRA in West Belfast to mark the second anniversary of internment ended in a messy dispute over speaking rights.21 The Republican Clubs and the Communist Party pulled out of the PHRC soon after this very public row, which underlined the fragmentation of political forces since the high point of civil resistance. A few months later, the Provos finished off the alliance by announcing their own departure, adding some choice words about People’s Democracy for good measure: ‘Sinn Féin will not allow itself to be used to support the meandering politics of PD nor will it allow pseudo-revolutionaries to bathe in the glory of Ireland’s recent dead.’22 Republican News combined faint praise for PD, whose members had ‘played their part in organizing the people against jackboot policies’, with a blunt statement of essentials: ‘When the People’s Democracy decide to couple use of the typewriter with use of the gun, as Connolly did, then they can jettison the label of armchair revolutionaries.’23

  Not everyone was so dismissive. Kieran Conway, the IRA’s director of intelligence in the mid 70s, recalled a conversation with its chief of staff Seamus Twomey. Conway argued that Sinn Féin was a dud party that should be scrapped altogether, ‘to make room for an organization like the Northern Resistance Movement, which included Michael Farrell and others whose politics and ability I admired’. Far from being shocked, Twomey found the suggestion ‘hilarious’, and promised to tell the Sinn Féin leaders what Conway thought of them.24 One leading Provisional, Jim Gibney, later described People’s Democracy as ‘the recognized political leadership of what we loosely called the anti-imperialist movement’, at a time when the Provos concentrated exclusively on armed struggle. According to Gibney, it was PD’s role that inspired republicans to start cultivating their own team of political spokesmen.25 But this change of focus still lay some years in the future.

  Ulster Will Fight

  The main political action during this period was taking place elsewhere. When the SDLP leadership met William Whitelaw in December 1972, they pressed for joint sovereignty between London and Dublin and the formation of a new police force acceptable to nationalists.26 But the party soon accepted Whitelaw’s much less ambitious blueprint for the restoration of devolved government in Northern Ireland. There would be elections for a new r
egional assembly, held under proportional representation, with the aim of setting up a power-sharing government as soon as possible. Brian Faulkner’s Ulster Unionist Party also decided to embrace this political framework, as did the bi-confessional Alliance. Elections in June 1973 delivered a working majority for those who were prepared to cooperate with Whitelaw’s scheme, although Faulkner had to face a substantial rejectionist bloc on the Unionist side composed of UUP dissidents, Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, and a new movement led by William Craig called Vanguard.

  Craig came to the fore as the champion of the Unionist Right after Stormont’s fall. While Ian Paisley flirted with the idea of full integration between Northern Ireland and Britain, Vanguard put the question of Ulster independence on the table. A paper drafted for Craig by a Canadian academic demanded that the region be given its full share of the UK’s national assets, ‘right down to a sector of British territory in the Antarctic’.27 In March 1972, a rally staged by Vanguard in Belfast drew a crowd of 60,000 people, including a phalanx of uniformed paramilitaries. Craig told his audience to ‘build up dossiers on the men and women who are the enemies of Northern Ireland because one day, if the politicians fail, it will be our job to liquidate the enemy’.28 The Vanguard leader had a similar message when he addressed the right-wing Monday Club at Westminster later that year: ‘I am prepared to kill and those behind me will have my full support.’29

  Brian Faulkner derided Craig’s rallies as ‘comic-opera parades’ that were ‘part menacing, part ridiculous’.30 But there was nothing comical about the loyalist assassination campaign spearheaded by the UVF and its larger rival, the Ulster Defence Association. From 1972 to 1976, loyalist paramilitaries killed 567 people, the vast majority of whom were Catholic civilians.31 The UDA’s front-group, the Ulster Freedom Fighters, presented such attacks as collective punishment for the actions of the IRA: ‘We would appeal to the RC populace: throw these gangsters out of your midst. Until you do this, you must bear the agony.’32 Ignoring such clear statements, RUC spokesmen persisted in referring to the sectarian killings as ‘motiveless murders’.

  The British authorities applied a different standard to loyalist paramilitary groups than they did to the IRA. The UDA remained a legal organization until 1992, and the Army permitted UDA members to join its locally recruited force, the Ulster Defence Regiment.33 Facing a European court challenge, spokesmen for the Army and RUC acknowledged the discrepancy and sought to justify it, claiming that the loyalist groups were not disciplined, structured organizations like the IRA. There was ample evidence in their possession to contradict that view.34 The permissive attitude towards the loyalist paramilitaries made it easier for them to frustrate the British government’s most ambitious plan to stabilize the region.

  By the end of 1973, Brian Faulkner had agreed to a deal on power-sharing with the SDLP that was sponsored by the two governments. Under the terms of the Sunningdale Agreement, as it became known, Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom for as long as a majority wished. A cross-border Council of Ireland satisfied the SDLP’s call for an ‘Irish dimension’. The new government would have six ministers from Brian Faulkner’s party, four from the SDLP and one from the Alliance. On the security front, internment remained in place, and SDLP politicians who had previously supported the rent-and-rates strike now urged council tenants to pay their arrears and bring the campaign of civil disobedience to an end.

  Unsurprisingly, the Provos rejected Sunningdale out of hand and vowed to fight on to victory. Unionist hardliners concentrated their fire on the Council of Ireland, presenting it as a Trojan horse for Irish unity: one anti-agreement poster parodied a tourist campaign with the slogan ‘Dublin is just a Sunningdale away’. Supported by a narrow majority of unionists at best, Brian Faulkner needed a fair wind if he was to survive for long. But he had to face a sudden test of strength in February 1974 when Edward Heath called a snap UK general election, which brought Harold Wilson’s Labour Party to power.

  To compound Faulkner’s difficulties, he lost control of the UUP apparatus to opponents of Sunningdale and had to establish a new party on the hoof. Anti-agreement Unionists agreed a common platform and trounced their opponents, winning all but one of Northern Ireland’s eleven seats. Faulkner and his cabinet still tried to keep the show on the road, hoping that opposition to Sunningdale would recede before the next Assembly election. A loyalist umbrella group called the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) threatened to launch a campaign of mass resistance if Faulkner did not resign. On 14 May, it called an open-ended general strike in a bid to make Northern Ireland ungovernable. The loyalist paramilitaries backed up that call by constructing barricades to block the flow of traffic. Three days later, the UVF took its war south of the border with bomb attacks in Dublin and Monaghan that claimed the lives of thirty-three civilians. After a fortnight of disruption, with the UWC leadership having effectively usurped Faulkner’s prerogatives, he threw in the towel and the power-sharing experiment collapsed.

  The failure of Sunningdale threw the whole political landscape into confusion. The British government wanted to restore Stormont on a more inclusive footing, but that plan now lay in tatters, with the parties willing to support it thoroughly demoralized. Unionist opponents of power-sharing had won a major victory, yet their ultimate goal – a return to straight majority rule – could only be secured with the consent of politicians at Westminster, who had every reason to reject such a quixotic enterprise. In 1975, Harold Wilson’s government ordered elections for a Northern Ireland Convention that resulted in a thumping majority for the rejectionist front led by Craig, Paisley and the new Ulster Unionist chief, Harry West.

  Craig tentatively suggested that the SDLP might be invited to join a coalition with Unionist parties until stability had returned. This version of power-sharing would have been voluntary, with no Council of Ireland to accompany it, but it was still too much for Craig’s allies to accept and he found himself ostracized.35 The majority report demanded a return to the old Stormont regime. To no one’s great surprise, Wilson and his colleagues rejected that option and disbanded the convention. Unionism had shown that it could veto British government policy, only to find itself vetoed in turn.

  The Provos shed no tears for Sunningdale, but still had to face some difficult questions of their own. By the end of 1974, the conflict in the North had lasted for twice as long as the War of Independence and claimed many more lives, yet victory remained elusive. The Birmingham pub bombings in November 1974, which killed twenty-one people, reinforced the sense of an IRA campaign that was directionless and spiralling out of control. For many years the IRA leadership denied responsibility for the bombings, although they knew that one of the organization’s British-based units was to blame.36

  The downfall of Seán Mac Stíofáin, after an abortive hunger strike in prison, removed one of the main barriers to a ceasefire on the Provisional side. When representatives of the British government suggested that they were willing to discuss ‘structures of disengagement’, the Provisionals seized the opportunity to declare a second truce in February 1975.37 In hindsight, their decision looks rather naive, and the new IRA leaders who took the helm after the ceasefire broke down certainly presented it in that light. However, there was a space of rhetorical ambiguity at the time that made it seem like a gamble worth taking.38

  For politicians in London and Belfast alike, ‘disengagement’ could refer to the idea of independence for Northern Ireland, rather than a thirty-two-county republic. The Provisionals believed that Unionist intransigence might provoke the British government into pulling the plug altogether after the failure of Sunningdale. This was by no means inconceivable: the Irish foreign minister, Garret FitzGerald, was so apprehensive about Harold Wilson’s intentions that he asked Henry Kissinger to lobby against British withdrawal.39

  As talk of a truce intensified in late 1974, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh tried to reach out to unionists, presenting the Éire Nua programme, with its blueprint
for a federal Ireland, as a guarantee of their rights: ‘There would be a nine-county Ulster in which they would have 57 per cent of the population and a two-tier system of policing.’40 He hoped that the gap between this vision and Vanguard’s idea of an independent Ulster could be bridged once Britain declared its intention to pull out. Ó Brádaigh also suggested that withdrawal could take place over a period of time: ‘No one is saying they should pull out this year or next year or anything like that.’41

  Despite the truce, or perhaps because of it, 1975 proved to be one of the bloodiest years of the entire conflict. The loyalist groups worried about the prospect of a British ‘sell-out’, and stepped up their assassination campaign against Catholic civilians. In 1975, for the first time since the conflict began, loyalist paramilitaries were as lethal as their republican counterparts. Many of these killings were especially gruesome, such as those carried out by the Shankill Butchers, a gang of UVF members whose exploits left the Catholics of Belfast in a state of terror. The Provos responded in kind, bombing Protestant bars and shooting civilians at random, in what was unquestionably the most sectarian phase in the movement’s history.42

  Allegations of security-force collusion with loyalist paramilitaries were common coin for nationalists at the time.43 Official reports published in recent years have shown that those suspicions were entirely justified. One such report found ‘indisputable evidence’ of widespread collusion in the 1970s that ‘should have rung alarm bells all the way to the top of Government’.44 Several RUC officers eventually stood trial for their role in a sectarian attack, with ballistic evidence linking the weapons they had used to the Glennane Gang, a loyalist militia responsible for more than a hundred deaths. Lord Lowry, Northern Ireland’s most senior judge, handed down suspended sentences to all but one officer, who had already been convicted of murder. Lowry described the defendants from the bench as ‘misguided but above all unfortunate men’ who were motivated chiefly by ‘the feeling that more than ordinary police work was needed and was justified to rid the land of the pestilence which has been in existence’.45