but there were no front lines and on any given day the ‘battlefield’ might be a street, a housing estate or a rural lane. The Provisional IRA could launch an assault, an ambush, a sniper attack, or a bomb explosion, then blend into the background by turning into an alleyway or a building, switching instantly from active hostility to just another person walking down the street – invisible and unknown.
For the British soldiers living conditions were poor, cramped makeshift barracks located in old factories and school buildings. These too were subject to attack, and there were daily hardships and dangerous demands on the individual soldier. Almost every day of a British soldier’s deployment to Northern Ireland was challenging, with high levels of street violence, riots, bombings and shootings, fatalities and being wounded not uncommon.
During the first six months of 1971, the idealists dedicated themselves to a desperate and deadly cause and the urban guerrilla offensive of the Provisional IRA concentrated heavily on ‘British’ economic targets as well as British troops. With the British army directed to pursue a military victory and the nationalists prepared to fight them, Northern Ireland was bloody, violent and politically stagnant. Through Stormont’s lack of reform and inaction towards equality, feelings of frustration, despair and grievance flourished in young Catholics, leading many in the community to join the IRA, which they saw as the only remaining option to change society in Northern Ireland. British politicians claimed that Northern Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom, while the Irish asserted that a small island, geographically, if not historically, ought to be an undivided state.
***
When he stepped off the aircraft at RAF Aldergrove in November 1972, Edward Heath was the first British Prime Minister in fifty years to visit Northern Ireland. The British were absentee power holders, but the authority they exercised in Northern Ireland, via the British army, was a power without responsibility. Brian Faulkner, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and head of the province’s security committee, claimed that Belfast was as British as Bristol or Birmingham. Faulkner pushed for tough action against the ‘thugs and murderers’ of the Provisional IRA, and despite the misgivings of the General Officer Commanding of the British army in Northern Ireland, Lieutenant-General Harry Tuzo, who cautioned against it, Faulkner was granted authority to introduce internment without trial in August 1971.
Between 4 am and 7 am on 9 August 1971, ‘Operation Demetrius’ was executed and thousands of British soldiers, accompanied by RUC Special Branch detectives, swooped on addresses throughout the North, raiding houses and making arrests. Of the 342 individuals initially detained, 104 were released and the remaining 238 were jailed in Crumlin Road Prison in Belfast or on the Prison Ship Maidstone. Front doors were splintered, men and youths dragged from their beds, screaming wives, mothers and children roughly manhandled. It was an ill-conceived policy, poorly executed and one-sided. Few senior Official or Provisional IRA men were rounded up, since the RUC was operating with out-dated lists of suspected IRA members and many young members were unknown to them. Strikingly, no similar attempt was made to arrest Loyalist activists. Undertaken with the aim of smashing the newly emerging IRA, instead it imposed the gunmen on the people within nationalist ‘no-go’ areas. Riots and disturbances followed and thirteen people died on the first day of Internment. Overall, twenty-four people were killed in three days. Many refugees fled to camps south of the border and by mid-August an estimated 6,000 people had sought refuge in the South. Lieutenant Colonel Diarmuid O’Donoghue (Retd.) recalls:
When the Troubles started, I was holidaying in the ‘Long Strand’ near Rosscarbery, Co. Cork and a Garda arrived to say he had been contacted by my then Company Commander, Michael Minihan, and I was to report immediately to my unit in Dublin. Thereafter, I served six months in Castleblayney in Co. Monaghan. On this later occasion, whilst serving in Gormanstown Camp, I was catering officer for an FCÁ Camp and on the eve of its conclusion I was looking forward to once again holidaying in West Cork. However, suddenly the gates of the camp opened and refugees from the North – women and children for the most part – six abreast, came streaming into the camp. It seemed like hundreds of homeless, tired, distressed and worried people presented seeking shelter, security and sanctuary. I can honestly say we did our best for them. It was to be three further weeks before I managed to go on holiday.
Internment failed to achieve the propaganda aims of the authorities, and furthermore a number of detainees were mistreated. The fourteen ‘hooded men’, as they were to become known, experienced ‘Five Techniques’ used on them during interrogation, including hooding, sleep deprivation, white noise, starvation, standing for hours spread-eagled against a wall leaning on their fingertips, all the while accompanied by continual harassment, blows, insults and questioning. Some were forced to run the gauntlet between lines of baton-wielding soldiers and a few were taken up blindfolded in a helicopter (actually hovering only a few feet off the ground) and told they were going to be thrown out. In 1976, the Irish Government took the issue to the European Commission of Human Rights and in 1978 the European Court of Human Rights found the British Government guilty of using inhumane and degrading treatment. In Northern Ireland, the consequence of internment was to escalate the chaos and the level of conflict.
Brian Faulkner’s aim of using internment to end the violence by flushing out the gunmen did not work. On the contrary, the Provisionals’ benefitted from internment, rather than being crushed by it. The use of the British army as part of a policy prioritising a security approach over that of political reform, to nullify the fledgling Provisional IRA, backfired badly. Internationally too, the television images of the Troubles were of explosions, streets full of broken bricks and bottles, and burnt-out barricades; footage of rioting crowds, yelling and cursing in the midst of swirling clouds of CS gas as soldiers charged from behind a barrage of baton rounds, were all illustrative of a worsening situation. From July 1971 to year’s end saw a sharp increase in Provisional IRA activity. There were increased killings (140 people died in the four months after internment) and increased bombings as the Provisional IRA stepped up both the intensity and extent of its campaign, accelerating its policy of escalation.
On Sunday 30 January 1972, soldiers of 1 Para (1st Battalion, Paratroop Regiment) under Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford entered the Bogside area of Derry to police a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march and by the day’s end had shot twenty-seven unarmed people, fourteen of them fatally. The procession was near the Rossville flats when the army’s ‘arrest operation’ was mounted. It was one of the British army’s most controversial operations ever undertaken, and has since become known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. Outweighing any previous blunders, it was as inexplicable as it was incomprehensible, even for Northern Ireland. Overwhelming in its enormity, Bloody Sunday left the nationalists overwrought and inflamed and incited an already incendiary situation. Causing widespread shock and anger, 15-year-old Don Mullan, who was part of the rally on the day, described the situation as he saw it:
I participated in the civil rights march that day, my first ever, and was standing only 2-feet away from 17-year-old Michael Kelly when he was fatally shot. I can still hear him gasp as a ricochet bullet punctured his flesh. An instant later, confusion and terror reigned as a rubble barricade began to stir dust as bullets thundered into it. I am still unable to recall accurately the events of those horrific moments of my adolescence. I [remember] people to my right crying out and falling close to me at the barricade. Then suddenly, the wall of an apartment above my head burst, showering those below with brick and mortar. A primeval instinct took possession of me and unashamedly I started running home to safety. ‘Son, what’s happening?’ a woman’s voice called. ‘There must be at least six dead,’ I shouted back. Her face registered disbelief, but I did not stop to convince her.
The following day, my best friend called for me and we retraced our steps. I remember pointing to the bullet marks on the wall above where I had been the previous afternoon. We looked with incredulity at the bloodstains on the pavements and by the barricade. Across the road in a first-storey apartment, one window had six bullet holes with cracks spreading out like webs. The blue and white Civil Rights banner that had led our procession the previous day was now heavily stained with the
