One Man's Terrorist Read online

  The 1969 election marked the beginning of John Hume’s political career: the DCAC leader took Derry’s Foyle seat as an independent, beating off competition from Eamonn McCann. But Hume and his supporters were struggling to retain the initiative on the ground, and republicans had begun to organize local defence committees. The focus of discontent shifted from issues like the franchise to the conduct of the security forces. When rioting broke out after an abortive march in April, RUC officers crashed into a private home in the Bogside and assaulted the residents, one of whom, Samuel Devenny, later died of a heart attack. At a cabinet meeting that week, Chichester-Clark expressed the hope that Devenny’s death ‘would have a sobering effect generally’.63 But the mood among Derry’s Catholic population predictably hardened.

  As the loyalist marching season approached, many local nationalists were determined to prevent the RUC from entering the Bogside again. In the same month, Derry’s republican activists held an Easter march that attracted 5,000 people, well in excess of their usual support base, to hear the young radical Johnnie White speak alongside a veteran traditionalist, Seán Keenan.64 NICRA and People’s Democracy responded to the trouble in Derry by calling protests in other parts of Northern Ireland. Rioting broke out on the Falls Road in Belfast, and local IRA units planted incendiary devices in the city’s post offices.

  The Stormont election and the mounting sectarian polarization raised some fundamental questions for the People’s Democracy activists. Their candidates had performed reasonably well, in view of their youth and inexperience: if McCann’s vote in Foyle was included in the total, PD’s slate averaged about a quarter of the vote in the seats they contested. In South Down they came close to unseating the Nationalist incumbent. The greatest triumph of the student left came two months later, in a by-election for Mid-Ulster that saw Bernadette Devlin take a seat at Westminster as a civil rights candidate.

  Devlin had joined People’s Democracy as a psychology student at Queen’s and quickly became one of its most prominent figures, running against James Chichester-Clark in the Stormont election. After her victory in Mid-Ulster, journalists rushed to profile a remarkably eloquent young woman who clearly had more in common with the campus protesters making headlines throughout the West than with the great majority of her fellow MPs. A British publisher commissioned Devlin to write a memoir, and campaigners in the US invited her on a speaking tour to promote the civil rights cause. Eamonn McCann accompanied Devlin on the tour, and they raised hackles among conservative Irish Americans by linking the struggle for equality in Northern Ireland with the black freedom movement that had inspired it.65

  However, by the time PD’s leading members sat down to discuss their ideas with Anthony Barnett of the New Left Review, days after Devlin’s victory, they were starting to worry about their inability to reach beyond the nationalist population. Despite their proclamations of non-sectarian intent, there had been no meaningful support for People’s Democracy candidates from Protestant workers. Eamonn McCann railed against the sectarian attitudes that he saw among the Catholic working class: ‘Everyone applauds loudly when one says in a speech that we are not sectarian, we are fighting for the rights of all Irish workers, but really that’s because they see this as the new way of getting at the Protestants.’ Michael Farrell disputed McCann’s analysis, suggesting that it had been ‘very much conditioned by Derry’: things were different, he believed, in other parts of Northern Ireland.66 Circumstances in McCann’s home town were certainly quite unlike those in Belfast, where Farrell was based: close to the border, with an overwhelming Catholic majority, its inhabitants could afford to indulge in communal triumphalism to a much greater extent. But there could be no denying the failure of the civil rights movement to displace traditional sectarian identities.

  As Northern Ireland slid towards conflict in the summer of 1969, McCann drafted a leaflet on behalf of Derry’s Labour group, bemoaning the return of old political habits: ‘Once upon a time we all talked about the non-sectarian nature of the Civil Rights movement. Now we are planning to seal off the Catholic area of Derry on the Twelfth of August. We are accepting, deepening and physically drawing the line between Catholic and Protestant working-class people.’67

  Under any circumstances, the odds would have been heavily stacked against the class-based approach favoured by McCann and his comrades. But any window of opportunity that might have existed was rapidly closing. August 1969 marked the real turning point, the moment that brought two new forces into the political equation: the British Army and the Provisional IRA.

  As the Apprentice Boys prepared to march in Derry on 12 August, Harold Wilson’s home secretary James Callaghan warned his colleagues that the RUC might not be able to cope. The Irish foreign minister, Patrick Hillery, urged the British government to impose a ban on the parade, but Callaghan chose to leave the decision with Stormont.68 In anticipation of trouble during the marching season, local republicans had set up the Derry Citizens’ Defence Association (DCDA), a coalition that also included some of the city’s Labour radicals. They asked the Apprentice Boys to call off their parade, but the loyalists were determined to go ahead. The DCDA then opted not to make the ‘heroic effort’, in the words of Niall Ó Dochartaigh, that would have been required to prevent clashes with the police, and began preparing for a confrontation. Derry’s supply of milk bottles went missing overnight.69

  When local youths threw stones at the marchers, RUC officers charged into the Bogside, to be met with a hail of petrol bombs from the top of Rossville Flats. The DCDA threw up barricades and put out a call for protests to take the heat off Derry. Clashes in Belfast between nationalists and the RUC led to the deployment of armoured cars fitted with heavy machine guns in a densely populated area.

  Many people in Belfast’s Protestant ghettoes feared that a republican insurrection was imminent, and rioting now erupted along the main communal fault lines. By the time Wilson sent in British troops at Chichester-Clark’s request, ten people were dead and almost 2,000 families – 80 per cent of them Catholic – had been evicted from their homes. The refusal of the authorities in London and Belfast to ban the Apprentice Boys parade had ended in a predictable disaster. The left-wing radicals who have been accused of taking Northern Ireland past the point of no return were in no position to influence decision-making at the highest levels when it really mattered. Now, the eruption of sectarian conflict would extinguish their hopes for a new age in the politics of Northern Ireland.

  4

  Law and Disorder

  Out of the Ashes

  In December 1969, IRA members gathered in secret for an Army Convention, the movement’s highest decision-making body. The ostensible purpose of the meeting was to discuss a motion calling for republicans to take their seats in Stormont, Westminster and Dublin’s Leinster House.1 But the summer’s dramatic events cast a heavy shadow over the debate. After leading a rearguard action against the new policy, Seán Mac Stíofáin and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh broke away to form a rival organization, accusing the IRA leadership of rigging the vote and betraying fundamental principles.

  The new group called itself the Provisional Army Council and laid exclusive claim to the republican tradition. By the time that claim was fully established, the movement led by Mac Stíofáin and Ó Brádaigh had become known as the Provisionals, or ‘Provos’ for short. Cathal Goulding’s faction went down in history as the Officials.

  For many traditional republicans, the dropping of abstention was reason enough for a split with Goulding.2 However, the Provisionals also accused the Official IRA of neglecting its duty to protect northern Catholics from attack. In the immediate wake of the violence in Belfast, this argument carried a tremendous emotional charge and supplied the Provos with their foundation myth.

  Ruairí Ó Brádaigh claimed that Goulding had opposed the defence of nationalist areas because it conflicted with the movement’s desire to promote working-class unity across the sectarian divide.3 However, there is little evidence t
hat the republican leadership had any principled objection to the defence of Catholic neighbourhoods. According to Gerry Adams, the two Belfast IRA commanders who were closest to Goulding, Billy McMillen and Jim Sullivan, moved quickly to organize ‘defensive operations for nationalist areas’ as best they could when the violence erupted in August 1969.4

  The truth was more complicated than Provisional rhetoric suggested. Military operations of any kind required weapons. The IRA had not been making any substantial preparations for a new offensive campaign, and in any case it did not have the cash needed to purchase arms. By Goulding’s account, traditional sources of funding in Irish-America had dried up after Operation Harvest, because supporters would only contribute if the IRA was visibly engaged in military action.5

  Billy McMillen reported that the Belfast Brigade had already come under pressure to use its weapons earlier in the year: ‘This we were reluctant to do as we realized that the meagre armaments at our disposal were hopelessly inadequate to meet the requirements of the situation.’6 By one estimate, the IRA was able to put together a grand total of ninety-six weapons to be sent north after the August violence, from pistols and shotguns to automatic rifles.7

  McMillen gave a second reason for the IRA’s reluctance to bring out its guns in the early summer: ‘The use of firearms by us would only serve to justify the use of greater force against the people by the forces of the Establishment and increase the danger of sectarian pogroms.’8 This consideration also weighed upon the republican leadership. The use of live ammunition by IRA Volunteers might simply have precipitated greater violence, making things worse for the people republicans were hoping to defend.

  Goulding believed that this had been the case in Derry, where the RUC relied on CS gas and water cannon against the stones and petrol bombs of the Bogsiders. If the IRA had brought guns into the equation, the police would have responded in kind, with disastrous results.9 In Belfast, he argued, the RUC’s behaviour had left republicans with no choice: ‘The only defence was an armed defence.’10 However, Gerry Adams recalled opposing the use of weapons there when McMillen summoned him to an emergency meeting, on much the same grounds that Goulding cited for Derry: ‘Any attempt to militarize the situation, to bring the IRA into it and to engage the RUC on their own terms would take it out of the hands of the people and bring the entire situation down to a gunfight, which the RUC would surely win. Anyway the discussion was to some degree academic, since the Belfast IRA had hardly any weapons.’11

  There was another factor that contributed to the IRA’s limited response in August. Cathal Goulding, Seán Garland and Roy Johnston were all Dubliners, while Tomás Mac Giolla had made his home there and Seamus Costello’s Wicklow base was a short distance from the southern capital. It was hardly surprising that Dublin often loomed larger than Belfast in the thinking of Goulding’s leadership team. One symptom of that was their insistence on pressing ahead with the debate over abstention immediately after the crisis in the North. It was tactically unwise to conduct the vote at such a fraught moment, but leading southern activists like Costello were impatient for the policy to be changed as soon as possible.

  Seán Mac Stíofáin made great play of the fact that Goulding could not be located for some time when the violence erupted in Belfast, because he was helping a British TV crew film a documentary about the IRA.12 That would hardly have been the case if Goulding had anticipated what was going to happen, which suggests a good deal of naivety on his part about the danger of sectarian conflict. Mac Stíofáin naturally gave himself the best lines in his account of these exchanges, but his own priority appears not to have been the defence of Catholic areas as such. Right from the start, the Provisional leader wanted to exploit the crisis triggered by the civil rights protests to launch an offensive campaign against British rule.13

  Whether or not the accusations levelled at Cathal Goulding were justified, they certainly helped the Provos to carve out a foothold in Belfast, which would be vital for any fresh insurgency. A group of northern veterans, most of whom had drifted away from Goulding’s movement in the preceding years, joined the Provisional IRA as soon as it was founded. One of those veterans, Billy McKee, took charge of the Belfast Brigade. McKee won over some of the city’s younger activists, including Martin Meehan in Ardoyne and Ballymurphy’s Gerry Adams, who hesitated for a while before lining up with the Provos. The defection of Adams came as a bitter disappointment to Billy McMillen, who saw him as one of the brightest talents in the movement.14

  While the question of armed struggle was fundamental to the split between Official and Provisional IRAs, it was not a straightforward division between ‘soldiers’ and ‘politicians’. A number of leading Officials saw no contradiction between political engagement and the use of force. Seamus Costello and Belfast’s Joe McCann were two prime examples. Some of those who joined the Provos had a similar attitude. Looking back on the period, Gerry Adams spoke with palpable enthusiasm about his own experience of agitational work in the late 1960s alongside Belfast republicans such as McCann.15 Adams opted for the new movement, not because he rejected ‘politics’ as such, but because he believed there would have to be a military struggle against British rule and saw it as a better bet from that perspective.16

  The adherence of men like Adams, who believed that armed struggle should be combined with political action, later proved to be of great importance for the evolution of the Provisionals. But in the short term, many Provos were suspicious of such arguments, which they associated with their estranged comrades in the Official IRA.17 Seán Mac Stíofáin expressed this militarist outlook with characteristic bluntness: ‘The Officials say unless you have mass involvement of the people you haven’t got a revolution. We say, the armed struggle comes first and then you politicize.’18

  The new Provisional mouthpiece, An Phoblacht, claimed that ‘Red infiltrators’ had forced out ‘traditional and militant republicans’ before proceeding to brainwash the movement’s young supporters with their doctrine.19 As evidence of this conspiracy, the Provos pointed to a proposal to establish a National Liberation Front (NLF) in alliance with the Communist Party. Mac Stíofáin described the NLF concept as one of the main factors contributing to the split.20

  Much of the hostile commentary focused on Roy Johnston, a convenient lightning rod for criticism since Goulding had appointed him as the IRA’s director of education despite his lack of a military record. Johnston had indeed been a member of the communist Irish Workers’ Party before he joined the republican movement, and his ideas owed much to the historian Desmond Greaves – not only a communist, but a British one to boot.21 However, the lurid claims made by An Phoblacht wildly overstated the case.

  If Johnston had wanted to guide republicans further to the left, he was pushing at an open door. Goulding and his comrades were already moving in that direction by the mid 1960s, and they had a strong indigenous heritage to draw upon, from James Connolly to the Republican Congress. Moreover, there was a perfectly rational basis for the alliance proposal. Small as their organization was, the Irish communists still had more experience of trade union work than republicans, and their modest but tangible support base among Belfast’s Protestant working class was not something that the IRA could boast.

  Indeed, far from using their ‘infiltrators’ to impose the NLF on republicans, the communists turned out to be the ones who were hesitant about a formalized relationship, fearing it might jeopardize their standing among Protestant workers.22 In any case, the version of left-wing politics favoured by the Officials at the time did not stem from Soviet orthodoxy. Tomás Mac Giolla argued for a non-aligned policy in world affairs – ‘we condemn equally American interference in Vietnam and Russian interference in Czechoslovakia’ – and stressed that the system his movement wanted to build ‘will not be totalitarian, will not be bureaucratic in any way’.23

  Facing a barrage of criticism, the Officials gave as good as they got. Refusing to dignify their rivals with the name ‘IRA’, they deno
unced the ‘Provisional Alliance’ as a tool of right-wing politicians in the South, and published a detailed summary of contacts between the IRA and the Irish government in support of this charge.24 According to this account, Fianna Fáil representatives had approached the republican movement and offered to supply money and weapons for the defence of Catholics in the North. This offer came with political conditions attached: the IRA would have to cease its agitation south of the border and form a separate northern command. Fianna Fáil’s intervention had, the Officials insisted, been crucial in paving the way for the split.25

  The controversy had a sensational impact on politics in the South: the Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Jack Lynch sacked two members of his cabinet, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, who then stood trial for conspiracy to import weapons in 1970, only to be acquitted by the jury. There is no doubt that people acting on behalf of the Irish government made promises of money to IRA leaders. The only question is how far knowledge of the scheme reached up the chain of command, and to what extent Lynch himself was implicated.26 But that doesn’t mean an initiative from this quarter supplied the motivation for a split. Mac Stíofáin and his allies already wanted to break with Goulding over abstention. The August violence gave the dissidents a rallying cry and the chance to win over republicans in Belfast. Their new movement had strong roots in the austere republican orthodoxy that had taken shape after the defeats of the 1920s. It was the interaction between that orthodoxy and conditions in the northern Catholic ghettoes that created the Provos, not the machinations of Fianna Fáil.