holding aloft a white handkerchief as he had cautiously made his way to the aid of a fatally wounded man. He was killed by a shot in the back of the head.
On the day of the funerals, my friend and I stood silently together in the cold rain that swept over Derry as cortège after cortège slowly made their way towards the cemetery gates. We were numb, confused and increasingly angry.
Over thirty years later, I would sit in the public gallery at Central Hall in Westminster, as ‘Soldier F’ of the Parachute Regiment in 1972 admitted under cross-examination that in addition to three other people he had also killed Mr McGuigan. Memories of that tragic day still give rise to anger and outrage within me.
Bloody Sunday was a bitter experience, especially after the whitewash of the Widgery Tribunal. The atmosphere began to change dramatically as a direct consequence. Boys that I played football with were making other choices. The IRA had many willing recruits thereafter and, well, honestly, I considered making that choice too.
The Creggan Estate in Derry was to become a Republican stronghold, but in my childhood it was not a rabid anti-British or anti-English environment. So the big question is why and how it became so? And it was not because my community was born with a genetic defect that made us prone to violence.
Following unrelenting street disturbances in August 1969, the British Army was ordered into the streets of Belfast and Derry. In the early days they engaged in various community liaison projects. It was not unusual for local soccer clubs to line out against regimental teams. I also recall on one occasion a British Army band, I think, Royal Marines, coming to our school. We gave them a rapturous welcome, preferring their percussion and brass to English, French and Maths. In May 1970 our school was the first in Northern Ireland to be offered an Adventure Training Course by the army with ten places at Magilligan Camp, about 25-miles from Derry, which included rock climbing, hill-walking, canoeing, orienteering and expedition work. Magilligan Camp was later to become a detention centre for internees in August 1971 and the theatre for an ominous encounter between unarmed Civil Rights [Association] demonstrators and 1 Para the week before Bloody Sunday 1972.
The Falls Road Curfew, the introduction of internment without trial, and especially Bloody Sunday were to have powerful, cumulative and long-lasting repercussions over the following three decades. At the time, anger, alienation and abhorrence drove a wedge between the British army and the Nationalist Catholic community, who felt that ‘the Paratroopers murdered 14 civilians on Bloody Sunday, but the Widgery Report (a British inquiry into the Bloody Sunday shootings) murdered the truth’. Trust and faith in the British army was lost, and for the Catholic community alienation became habitual and the State proved unsympathetic. Prior to these events, the Provisional IRA had nominal support, minimal backing and negligible encouragement. Afterwards, however, attitudes hardened and entrenchment followed.
CHAPTER 4
The Provisional IRA Emerges
The danger now was that PIRA’s campaign of terror could lead to a backlash and ultimately civil war, first in Northern Ireland but then spilling across the border, engulfing the entire island and population. As it stood, the situation in Northern Ireland was already very dangerous. Different groups of Republicans and Loyalists, all unlawful organisations, raised stark issues for the Republic. The security of the State was threatened by these small unrepresentative self-appointed groups without any mandate from the electorate. They had taken it upon themselves to conduct their campaigns and counter-campaigns of violence, causing death and destruction. They were attempting to dictate to the democratically elected government representatives of Irish society what policy to pursue. By organising themselves into private armies, their use of physical force, intimidation and coercion caused the State to have to actively defend democracy or succumb to their anarchy.
Half a century of discrimination in the North had given rise to the Civil Rights Movement, the response to which was violent counter-demonstration and mob attacks into Catholic areas of Derry and Belfast. Many one-time residents sought security and shelter elsewhere in the North and some across the border in the Republic. Barricaded ‘no go’ areas sprang up, and to begin with the communities were organised by local defence committees. However, the IRA, once long gone, began to re-emerge as the ‘old-timers’ within the organisation were quick to recognise the potential that the crisis offered, especially with the appearance of British troops on the streets. These ‘69-ers’ saw the opportunity to reinvent themselves and initiate a new campaign. It was a moment to be seized upon and they grasped it wholeheartedly.
The Provisional IRA’s strategy was to target the Stormont regime and force the British protecting power to use its own troops in counter-insurgency operations. The measures taken by the British troops would then operate to keep the political temperature of the dissident community at a level favourable to the Provisional IRA.
Catholic Nationalists, already externally under siege, were now to come under the internal influence of the Provisional IRA. Catholic youths were vulnerable to Provisional IRA propaganda, and were ripe for radicalisation. The veteran IRA recruiters gave Catholic youths a ‘cause’ in defence of their own areas. Unfortunately, the uncompromising Unionists and the British army played right into the narrative in a way unimagined by their recruiters. Young men and women were driven into PIRA and sympathy was generated for them and their military across the Catholic communities.
Now community-based with widespread support, PIRA generated a reputation that ensured even those opposed to them would not cross them. The lack of real access to Catholic communities made it difficult for the RUC Special Branch to identify members. Rotation of British army units unskilled in counter-terrorism made the army a very blunt instrument. Those who called for stronger military action, the commitment of more troops, internment without trial, curfews and the like, ought to have borne in mind that they were behaving as the Provisional IRA’s strategy called for them to behave.
These measures brought mounting costs: moral, military, political and psychological; and it was these, not the insurgent operation itself, which was expected in due course to modify the political will of the protecting power – the British. Thus, every measure of military escalation was, in a sense, a success for those who provoked it – PIRA.
The Provisional IRA was highly organised. Overall charge was executed by the seven member Army Council, an army executive which in turn was elected by the General Army Convention (GAC). Made up of delegates from the brigades, the GAC met infrequently and the Army Council was considered by republicans to be the de jour government of Ireland. The Chief-of-Staff (appointed by the Army Council) was supported by General Headquarters (GHQ) staff, comprising of a Director of each department: Intelligence, Operations, Training, Engineering, Finance, Security, Publicity, Research and the all-important Quartermaster.
Territorially, there were two commands: Northern and Southern. The ‘War Zone’, Northern Command, comprised eleven counties (the Six Counties and five border counties) and Quartermastering Support. Southern Command was comprised of the remaining twenty-one counties, and was involved with all the provisioning, supplying and logistical facilitation of operations, both in the War Zone, England and Europe. Training, bomb-making, financing, weapon importation, storage and transportation and anything else in producing the capacity to sustain the ‘cause’.
There were a number of consciously constructed operational phases and evolving game plans which gave the Provisional IRA purpose, direction and momentum over the years of the Troubles:
• Defence (‘Area Defence’)
• Offence (‘One Big Push’)
• The ‘Long War’
• Bombs, Bullets and Ballot Boxes
• Dirty War
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