the newspapers or listening to news bulletins in the closing months of 1971, the McGurk’s Bar massacre was undoubtedly part of a broader pattern of tit-for-tat attacks on pubs in Protestant and Catholic areas across Belfast. Patrons only narrowly escaped with their lives in an IRA attack on the Bluebell Bar, in the Protestant area of Sandy Row on 20 September. Two Protestant men, sixty-year-old Alexander Andrews and thirty-eight-year-old Ernest Bates, weren’t so lucky when an IRA bomb exploded in the Four Step Inn in the Protestant Shankill area on 29 September. Retaliation came just over a week later, with the UDA’s bombing of the Fiddler’s House Bar on the Falls Road on 9 October, which killed a forty-five-year-old Protestant, Winifred Maxwell. Some weeks after the attack, the IRA bombed the Red Lion Pub on the Ormeau Road on 2 November, which led to the deaths of three Protestants.13 A further attack on the Toddle Inn in York Street on 9 November heralded a new low in the armed conflict. By targeting McGurk’s Bar, the UVF was sending a message to republicans that any further attacks in the Shankill would meet with stiff opposition from loyalists.
In their targeting of premises frequented by civilians, paramilitary organisations on both sides were demonstrating a flagrant disregard for their communities, who were by now bearing the brunt of the violence. Predictably, the UVF attack on McGurk’s Bar invited swift retaliation from the IRA, which bombed the Balmoral Furniture Company on a busy Saturday on the Shankill Road a week later. Four civilians were killed instantly, including a seventeen-month-old baby and a two-year-old child. If the UVF had been seeking to increase the safety of Protestants by its actions, it failed miserably. More carnage was to follow as young people flocked to join paramilitary groupings.
***
Violence now escalated quickly across Northern Ireland. The reintroduction of internment without trial for terrorist suspects on 9 August 1971 was a strategic blunder, serving as a ‘recruiting sergeant’ for the IRA.14 Although the policy failed to decapitate the Provisional IRA, whose leaders had escaped the clutches of the Security Forces, it was based on reasonably good intelligence provided by RUC Special Branch. The military, which had been given the task of rounding up suspects, had a poor intelligence organisation and, consequently, relied disproportionately on the RUC, despite it having assumed responsibility for overseeing security policy at the operational level.15 Senior army commanders at their headquarters in Lisburn grew more and more concerned at the escalation of violence, and this made them prone to knee-jerk reactions.
The urgency to curtail disorder was felt most acutely in Londonderry, the second major city in Northern Ireland. On 28 January 1972, the RUC’s senior officer there attended a Security Forces planning meeting in the city that had been convened to deal with the possibility of a mass protest march by civil rights campaigners in defiance of a government ban.16 Although the RUC and army were jointly responsible for security in the city, the Army was to take the lead in dealing with the march when it took place on 30 January 1972. On the day, as anticipated, protestors defied the ban and left the Creggan estate for the Guildhall in the city centre. The military responded with aggressive tactics aimed at halting the march as it passed through the nationalist Bogside area. Poor tactical leadership by the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, led to him failing to comply with an order issued by his superior officer, Brigadier Pat MacLellan, and deploying a company of his soldiers into the Bogside area where they opened fire on protestors.17 Thirteen people were massacred, and another died of his wounds two weeks later. The day became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ and it transformed the political and military situation in Northern Ireland.
Meanwhile, in London, at the very highest levels, senior civil servants at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) began to scope out contingency plans for a united Ireland in the event that civil war broke out in the province. The Deputy Under Secretary of State at the MoD, Pat Nairne, sat down to write a letter to Sir Stewart Crawford at the FCO about what he judged to be ‘an extremely remote contingency’.18 Both men nonetheless gave serious thought to the unlikely sequences of events, should the worst happen, with the MoD tasking several staff officers to assess the effects it would have for defence. ‘The need no longer to garrison Ulster, nor to provide for its reinforcement would reduce overstretch in the army and increase the credibility of GB’s contribution to NATO,’ wrote Nairne. ‘On the other hand the probable loss of the five Irish regiments and the Ulster TAVR, and the reduction (perhaps loss) of the Irish recruiting intake would be of major concern to the army. It would be necessary to replace much, possibly all, of this loss within GB [Great Britain].’19 A full inventory of Britain’s national security assets was subsequently compiled and quietly filed away.
Across from the MoD building, in Number 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Ted Heath was facing a major fall out from the shootings on Bloody Sunday. Huge protests got underway in Dublin, where the British Embassy was promptly burnt to the ground by demonstrators. Across the world, international opinion now shifted to London’s handling of the security situation in Northern Ireland. Much would depend on what the British government did next.
***
Dublin, 13 March 1972
A few months before Bloody Sunday, in September 1971, Ted Heath had reached out to the leader of the Labour Opposition, Harold Wilson, to see if he could use his influence with the SDLP to ensure they participated in talks aimed at reshaping the political future of Northern Ireland.20 In the wake of Bloody Sunday, Wilson sought to extend his remit to try and persuade the IRA to resist the urge to use the massacre in Derry as a justification for a renewed campaign. He made contact with an Irish Labour Party TD, Dr John O’Connell, to scope out the opportunities of getting a message to the IRA leadership. O’Connell, a respected Dublin physician, sounded them out and reported back to Wilson that they wished to meet him. Losing no time, Wilson flew to Dublin for secret talks, accompanied by his chief spokesman on Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, and Labour’s Chief Press Secretary Joe Haines.21
The leaders Wilson had come to meet were the Provo top brass, Dáithí Ó Conaill, John Kelly and Joe Cahill. Ó Conaill was the Provo’s lead spokesman. A tough character, he had risen to prominence with the IRA in the 1950s, and remained so. He began the meeting by reiterating the IRA’s position, which appeared, at first glance, more flexible than it had been only a year earlier. Wilson’s own position had also softened, he told the IRA delegation. In a speech he gave in November 1971, the former Prime Minister set out his 15 Point Plan for Irish unity. ‘I said fifteen years. The way your friends are going on it will be a longer period. If it could be cut down to eight or ten years I would be delighted,’ he informed the IRA leaders. Wilson’s naïvety was clearly getting the better of him. He believed that he could persuade the IRA to abandon its violence, if the British government set out a concrete timetable for withdrawal. Wilson was also convinced that he could also persuade the Provos to turn to the SDLP for political guidance. The IRA rebuffed the idea of striking a deal with the SDLP. There was no love lost between them and SDLP figures like Gerry Fitt and Paddy Devlin, they said. The IRA commanders told Wilson that they believed the SDLP had lost touch with its support base. Happy to have the IRA defend them in 1969 against loyalist attacks, the SDLP leadership now came to utterly reject the violence. The IRA delegation nevertheless maintained the façade that they hadn’t the authority to speak on behalf of the rest of the army. They could, however, sound out the Labour leader on his own position, and report back.
Veteran Belfast IRA leader Joe Cahill, who had served a prison sentence for his role in the murder of an RUC officer in the 1940s, then proceeded to reiterate the IRA’s three demands of the British government. First, he informed the Labour Party delegation, the British Army should withdraw to its barracks. Second, Stormont should be prorogued. Lastly, Cahill demanded that the British announce a total amnesty for all of its political prisoners. ‘The three demands,’ Cahill told Wilson emphatically, ‘cannot be watered down.’
It was clear from the meeting between Wilson and the IRA leadership that they wanted the British government to get tough with the Unionist regime at Stormont, which had begun to stoke fears of a ‘Protestant backlash’ in the event of security powers being taken
