of reliable information, cross-checked and carefully weighed against a background of wide experience of the IRA problem over a number of years’.19 Prompt action was taken as a result of the VCGS’s visit. An extra battalion of troops (the 3rd Royal Green Jackets) was sent to Northern Ireland to reinforce the existing garrison ‘ostensibly for training purposes’, but in reality to come to the aid of the civil power if necessary. A special communications link was established between Northern Ireland and Britain and a senior MI5 officer was sent to Belfast for the period 15–20 April.20
Depending on which way one looks at it the outcome was either a damp squib or a triumph of foresight and preparation, for there was no serious trouble over the weekend of 16–17 April. Indeed, the RUC’s ‘Security Intelligence Review’ for the month recorded only seventeen ‘minor incidents’ during the entire month. The MI5 officer who had been in Belfast over the weekend in question wrote in his report that, as late as 15 April, the RUC had believed it was the IRA’s intention to exploit the celebrations ‘in order to shoot members of the Crown forces’ and that it was only thwarted by three factors. The first was the restraint of the authorities themselves, who assisted rather than obstructed the nationalist parade and who decided – contrary to the Inspector-General’s previously stated intention21 – not to make precautionary arrests. The second was the closing of the border on the night of 16–17 April. The third was ‘the high order of police work’ embodied in their ‘courteous firmness’ and skill in handling rival demonstrations, their deployment of reserves, their excellent communications and ‘the individual efficiency and high morale of officers and men’, all of which ‘combined … to frustrate the IRA plan’.22
But was there an ‘IRA plan’ in the first place? It seems unlikely. The Republican Publicity Bureau in Dublin had issued a denial on 22 February 1966.23 At the end of the previous year, Roy Johnston, the IRA’s Education Officer, told C. Desmond Greaves, the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Irish expert, that ‘there is no truth in the six-county rumour that a further disturbance is to be expected’, adding that ‘if the IRA didn’t exist, the six-county government would have to invent it’.24 If these denials may be discounted as self-serving, it is also worth noting that two leading southern members of the IRA’s Army Council, Mac Stíofáin and Ruarí Ó Brádaigh, were publicly advertised as speaking at rallies in Northern Ireland on 17 April 1966.25 Unless this was part of some elaborate deception, it would surely have been unwise to have these two men away from headquarters and within the grasp of the RUC on the very day on which a military campaign was to be launched. Finally, none of the scholarly studies of the Republican movement during this period provide any evidence to support a claim that the IRA was planning major military action at this time.26
The most that the IRA probably hoped for was what actually happened. Billy McMillen later claimed that the Belfast IRA saw the 1966 Easter Rising commemorations ‘as a golden opportunity to drive a coach and four horses through the notorious flags and emblems Act. From January until April the whole resources and energy of the Belfast movement were devoted to preparations for the celebrations.’ Although he argued that ‘no great material benefit accrued to the IRA’ as a result of the parade, it must have been gratifying to be able to claim that 12,000 took part in it and 400,000 had watched,27 while even O’Neill conceded in his memoirs that ‘the Catholic streets in Belfast became and remained a forest of Irish Republican flags for the duration of the celebrations’.28
II
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