Читать книгу Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace - Joshua Levine - Страница 6

The Wild Birds Protection Act, passed by the Northern Ireland Parliament in 1931, was a significant piece of legislation – for birds and for nationalists. For birds it created designated sanctuaries. For nationalists it was the only bill sponsored by their political party to become law between the creation of the state of Northern Ireland and the suspension of its Parliament in 1972. Northern Ireland was a strange democratic anomaly for the first fifty years of its existence, demonstrating more concern for the welfare of curlews than Catholics.

Throughout that half-century Northern Ireland was governed by a single party – the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). For almost all of that time the UUP had complete freedom to implement its policies. The Nationalist Party refused to participate in the 1921 Parliamentary election, believing the state to be illegitimate. This effectively left Catholics unrepresented, although four years later the party changed its policy and won a number of seats. Nevertheless, the Nationalist Party provided only slight opposition. It was disunited and ineffective, overwhelmed by the sheer determination of unionism to mould a state in its own image. As Britain looked the other way, unionists set about creating a democracy unlike any other in western Europe.

Fierce determination was not surprising among a Protestant people who had watched the extent of their authority steadily diminish on the island of Ireland. Brought up on folk memories of the siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne, events in which their ancestors had resisted Catholic challenges to their authority, they had lately watched their dominion shrink to just six of the nine counties of Ulster, while the Catholics received a Free State to the south.

In the first year and a half of its existence Northern Ireland was rocked by a level of bloodshed not to be repeated until the modern Troubles. Hundreds of people were killed, some by IRA incursions over the border, most by internal sectarian violence. The disorder added to unionists’ insecurities and hardened their attitudes. At political meetings they carried placards bearing such legends as ‘What We Have We Hold!’ and ‘No Surrender!’ They feared the Catholics in their midst, and they mistrusted the British government, which they believed would only act halfheartedly – if at all – to ensure their survival. In their suspicion and cautious aggression they were probably not very different from their ancestors who, hundreds of years earlier, had arrived in Ulster to stake their claim in the midst of a resentful enemy.

To ensure their survival, unionists introduced their own security measures. The mixed Royal Ulster Constabulary and the exclusively Protestant ‘B Special’ reserve were created to defend against insurrection, and the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act, 1922, was passed, giving the right to intern suspects without trial and allowing juryless courts to order the flogging of a prisoner. Over and above these powers, however, that Act – which remained in force until 1973 – gave the Home Affairs Minister the right to ‘make any regulation at all necessary to preserve law and order’. These were desperate measures introduced by desperate people.

When the Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble accepted his Nobel Prize for peace in 1998, he made a speech offering an insight into unionist thinking over the previous eighty years. ‘Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house,’ he said, ‘but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.’ It does not take much imagination to see why Protestants would have been happy to keep the house cold, even if some unionists still deny that the temperature was ever turned down. In his maiden speech to the House of Commons in 2001, Gregory Campbell, the Democratic Unionist Party member for Londonderry, said that ‘the acceptance of that premise has done untold harm in the past 30 years’.

Yet the Northern Ireland government did employ some very brazen political strategies to retain its mastery. In 1923 the system of proportional representation, which had been introduced by the British government throughout Ireland to safeguard the interests of minority communities, was abolished for local elections. Nationalists were swiftly relieved of their majorities in over half of the councils over which they had control. Unionists were so pleased with this outcome that proportional representation was subsequently abolished for Parliamentary elections as well.

One factor that helped the unionist cause was the fact that only the owners or tenants of a house had the right to vote in local elections. Sub-tenants, lodgers, and others did not. Not only that, but for every additional £10-a-year valuation of a house after the initial £10, additional voters could be appointed up to a maximum of six. This meant two things: first, that poorer people could not vote at all, and second, that wealthier people could vote several times. And of course the poorer people tended to be Catholic while the wealthier tended to be Protestant.

Another rotten measure was the system of gerrymandering in areas where unionists were outnumbered. This involved the reorganization of boundaries within districts. The most famous example of gerrymandering in Northern Ireland – although by no means the only one – occurred in Derry, where a predominantly Catholic populace would consistently find itself returning a Protestant-dominated council. In the build-up to the 1938 elections, the number of council wards in Derry was reduced from five to three. Almost the entire Catholic population of 9,500 voters found itself crammed into the South ward, which returned eight councillors, while 7,500 Protestant voters were divided between the North ward and the Waterside ward, which between them returned twelve councillors. At a 1936 public inquiry into the arrangement – whose findings were ultimately ignored by the Northern Ireland government – the Catholic barrister Cyril Nicholson asked the unionist councillor James Welch how the arrangement looked to him. ‘It looks a bit slightly out of proportion,’ Welch admitted.

Not only was gerrymandering a bit slightly out of proportion, but it laid the ground for future trouble. It encouraged the development of further segregation and all the disharmony this entailed. It also meant that when opportunities arose to build houses for Catholics within the ‘wrong’ ward, these opportunities were rejected, however badly the housing was needed. The need to maintain political control would always trump the desire to improve the conditions of ‘the other lot’.

So it was that unionism remained solid – even as trouble was being stored up. But it would be wrong to think that the standard of living of most unionists was good. For the gentry and the professional classes it might have been, but, for the working classes of both traditions, poverty was a reality. Unemployment was high, incomes were considerable lower than those in Britain, and the standard of housing and public amenities was poor. Many country farmhouses and town terrace houses had no mains water or provision for gas lighting until well into the twentieth century. Protestants, you might say, were second-class citizens, while Catholics were a class below that.

With regards to employment, though, it was better to be second- than third-class. Many firms employed almost exclusively Protestant workforces. An Englishman who came to Northern Ireland in the late Fifties to work as a personnel manager relates how a Ministry of Labour official taught him to distinguish Protestant names from Catholic names, and then advised him to select only the Protestants. Even within a mixed business certain jobs might be reserved for Protestants. I was told the story of a young Catholic, working in a shirt factory, who had taken his own life after being refused a position as a shirt cutter. Afterwards a friend remarked angrily, ‘He should have known he wasn’t ever going to be permitted to be a shirt cutter! Catholics don’t get those jobs!’

So far as many unionists were concerned, the fact that Catholics did not ‘get those jobs’ was not a matter of discrimination at all. It was simply the way things were. Many of the ‘unionist jobs’ had been done by the same families for many years and when a position became available a worker would recommend a friend or relative. There was no question of Catholics even applying for these jobs. The Harland and Wolff shipyard, whose huge yellow cranes still dominate the Belfast landscape, is a case in point. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Catholics were expelled from jobs in the yard during periods of sectarian unrest. Over time they stopped applying for those jobs, and they became the natural preserve of unionists without active bias having to be applied.

Harry Murray started work at Harland and Wolff in 1937. He described conditions in the yard to Bobbie Hanvey: ‘People used to earn their pay, or they didn’t get it, and if they didn’t earn it, they were sacked and that was it. That meant working in all sorts of weather, where it poured all day, you got wet right through to the skin. You sat in the open, taking your tea from an old can, out between boats in the cold and wet. You only got a half an hour break, and there wasn’t much to do other than religious services, or playing rubby-dub with dice. If you went out, you had no sickness pay, there was no holiday pay, just the wages you had.’

Murray explains how workers had to keep on the right side of the foremen: ‘The foremen were a queer lot. Hard. Some of them really took on the mantle of God. If they took a dislike to you, you were out for life. If they didn’t like your face, that was good enough to put you out. They seemed to be picked for their hardness, to be able to kick people up the backside. And there was a lot of things that went on that was very dishonest. One foreman used to get brought in butter, eggs, money, just so people could keep their job. In those days people were more humble than what they should have been because they were driven by management and by foremen. Even with getting the wages out of the shipyard, the wages weren’t great and if you were unemployed, it was ten times worse to survive.’

Having experienced such conditions, some Protestants feel frustration at being told that Catholics were discriminated against. They look back on their own lives and wonder how they can be considered fortunate. But, in a place as economically deprived as Northern Ireland, even assured basic housing or the guarantee of a lowly paid job in industry could amount to meagre privilege.

Higher up the ladder, the senior posts in the local authorities were filled almost exclusively by Protestants, as were the upper ranks of the civil service, and nearly all the judgeships. I was told of a Catholic lawyer who was passed over for a position as a judge because the incumbent Prime Minister had already nominated one Catholic judge for a judicial post ‘and couldn’t bring himself to nominate another’. The National Health Service was similarly blighted. A nurse at the Royal Victoria Hospital, which according to my tour guide had been a model of equality, remembers: ‘There was a vacancy for a sister. Someone said to matron that this very good staff nurse would make an excellent sister, and was told, “There can’t be two Catholic sisters in one department.”’ She also recalls a Catholic doctor who emigrated to Australia ‘because he wasn’t getting any promotion’.

Finding routes barred to them, Catholics often had to use their wits to create work for themselves. According to a retired civil servant, ‘The Protestant community relied on the thought that the government was their thing, and it would look after them. Employment in the old days was very much on the lines that “Willie” is retiring after many years working in the workshop, and he says he’s got a nephew, “Sammy”, who’s very much the man. But things were different in the Catholic community. For many years Catholics thought we’d better get on and do things for ourselves. And nowadays the Catholic working class is more up and doing than their Protestant equivalent.’

Some attitudes have clearly not changed a great deal over the centuries. In the seventeenth century the expression ‘nits make lice’ was used to justify the killings of Irish children by settlers. In the 1930s the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Sir James Craig, warned the Australian Prime Minister to watch the Catholics in his country. ‘They breed like bloody rabbits,’ he said. And in 2009 I was told a story about a recent Protestant wedding in Armagh. Several guests had been sitting in a limousine in formal dress, when a group of Catholics spotted them and started shouting abuse. A girl in the back of the car leant forward and said to the driver, ‘You’d better drive into them! They’ll just breed!’

These are variations on a theme – and they could be multiplied ad infinitum – but they reflect only one side of a mutual antipathy. Northern Ireland was built on sectarianism, both Orange and Green, with roots hundreds of years old. Sectarianism is the raw essence of today’s identities. Years ago it was expressed freely and without apology. Nowadays it is reserved for those who feel the same way, or else it is turned into a joke. Twice I was told the same joke, once by each side:

Q. How do you know ET’s a Catholic/Protestant?

A. Because he fucking looks like one.

Probably the most shocking joke I heard in Northern Ireland was repeated to me by a Catholic man who had heard it from one of the Shankill Butchers when they briefly shared a prison wing:

Butcher: What’s the difference between a Catholic and an onion?

Man: I don’t know.

Butcher: I cry when I slice up an onion.

While I was in Belfast I met a man named Joe Graham. He is a writer, historian, storyteller, and a veteran of the civil rights movement. He is, above all, an old-fashioned republican and political activist. I sat interviewing him, chain-smoking his cigarettes, in his tidy house in Andersonstown filled with Country and Western memorabilia that he picks up on trips to Nashville. The only part of the house that isn’t tidy is a cubby-hole beside his study which is crammed with shelves of books, audio tapes, and videos on Irish history, and equipment for the interviews he records himself. Graham is a friendly man in his mid-sixties with wavy grey hair. He has a huge physical presence, and the words ‘Belfast’ and ‘Ireland’ tattooed on his hands. While I could not mistake his allegiance, he had a knack for consistently scuppering my preconceptions – by suddenly telling me, for example, that in his younger days he modelled himself on the pop singer Tommy Steele.

Joe Graham is very good company, which was just as well because I arrived thinking that we would chat for an hour and eventually staggered out of his front door ten hours later. He began by sharing his memories of growing up in Ballymurphy, a housing estate in west Belfast, built after the war. Ballymurphy is now an urbanized republican area, but back then it was a mixed area on the edge of open country. Graham remembers: ‘We were the last houses before the countryside. The mountains came right down on us. The big mill dam. The water was crystal. Two rounds of bread, a milk bottle of cold tea, and away you went up into the mountains. All the local kids. Ten of you, you didn’t know who was who, running about, swimming. There was an old mill, and the part that housed the big wheel was the dungeon. It was a beautiful thing of childhood – but every now and again you’d get a reminder, and you were acute enough to take it.’

He describes a reminder: ‘One beautiful sunny morning when I was 11 I went up the street. All my mates were Protestant, because all our street was Protestant except us. So I went to wee Billy Smith’s house, and Mrs Smith said to me, “He’s away out, Joe, son.” I said, “Dead on.” The same thing happened at the next house. Then, at Jimmy Reilly’s house, I knocked on the back door: no answer. His Aunt Tilly was at work, but Jimmy and his wee sister should have been there. Where were they all? So I ran down the dividing fence to the garden next door. Just as I vaulted over the fence into that garden, I saw the curtains flicker in Jimmy’s bedroom. So I came back over the fence, climbed on top of the coal shed, leaned over and banged Jimmy’s bedroom window. He opened it – and it was all the boys sitting there, red, white, and blue everywhere. “What the fuck’s going on?” “Joe! Joe! Get off!” they said to me. So I jumped down and stood in the garden, until Jimmy came down. He said, “We’re going to let you in, but for God’s sake, don’t let my dad know.” “Why? What’s going on?” “We’re making flags!” There was a big football match at Windsor Park, the Six Counties versus England – so they were on a winner either way. I went up into the bedroom and there were thousands of these mini Union Jacks, and the boys were on a couple of pennies each to staple them together. But that wee Fenian bastard Graham wasn’t to be seen about the place. Hurtful. Because these were my best mates. Hurtful. But I helped them to staple these things. And then, in turn, I said, “Don’t tell my mummy and daddy I helped with these…” But it meant fuck all. Even now, it would mean fuck all. A man trying to make a few quid for his family selling Union Jacks? So what? But the sad thing was that in doing so, he hurt a child. He marked a child – and he did no good to the Protestant kids, because they – in adulthood – must feel guilty.’

For Graham the divide was often emphasized casually but firmly nonetheless. ‘I went to St John’s School. At the foot of the street there was a huge industrial complex belonging to James Mackie, who employed 99.9 per cent Protestants. You were playing on that street during lunch break and the workers were coming out to go to their dinner, you would get a cold, icy look, as if you weren’t there. Yet local people would rub your head fondly. “Hello, wee man. How you doing? Are you being good today?” There was that difference. That coldness from the other people. You were aware that this place was totally split.’

Graham, and others like him, could sometimes take advantage of the split. ‘We’d get up in the morning to buy pigs’ feet. We would hoof them and singe them, we would scrub them and cook them, and me and Paddy would sell them around the bars. But not on the Falls Road! These people had no work and the Catholics didn’t eat meat on Friday. So we went down the Shankill, the Old Lodge Road, Sandy Row, where all the Protestants who had shillings lived, and we sold the pigs’ feet in the bars down there. That was an education. To get a shilling for pigs’ feet, we had to go to these people.’

In 1953, the year of her coronation, the Queen visited Belfast. Graham can remember buses of unionists coming down to the Springfield Road, where a big banner was placed across the road and Union flags flew everywhere. ‘It was so British,’ says Graham, ‘you’d have thought you were in the Midlands.’ But for Graham’s family 1953 had a different significance: ‘It was the anniversary of the 1803 rebellion, and I watched my father going up the stairs with a long pole. He went into the girls’ bedroom and set it across the bed, and he opened a wee cubby-hole and he took out the national flag. It was the first time I’d been so close to the national flag, and he set about pinning it onto the pole. Then he got a cable and a lightbulb, and pinned it onto the top of the pole, and put it all out through the bedroom window. I thought it was a carnival thing – but within two hours, the cops were belting up the street in their sedans, demanding that he take it down. My father was a very sedate, serious countryman, and he said that the flag would be flying tonight, and it would be taken down tomorrow morning. By then the Protestants had all gathered, and some were standing in the garden. I’ll always remember the cop, a big, ginger-haired bastard, saying, “That’s a foreign flag! It’ll have to come down!” “Why does it have to come down?” “We’ve got reports that people are offended.” My father asked our neighbour Mrs Rossbottom, “Are you offended?” “Not at all, Jim!” But some of the Protestants started getting angry and shouting at the cop, and my father said, “Why are youse all offended? Have you come all the way from the Springfield Road to be offended?” In the end they left, and the flag flew. That was the first flag that flew in Ballymurphy – and it flew with the grace of the Protestant neighbours. There was no ill intent towards the house.’

Graham speaks of having an acute awareness of inequality as he was growing up: ‘We Catholics did get a raw deal by design. They planned it so, but in planning it, they made it “us and them”.’ It annoys him that today there are those who rewrite history to make out that things were fine before the Troubles started. ‘There was nothing bright and beautiful about being a Catholic living in these six counties. There were things that took away your heritage. Things like the Special Powers Act. We weren’t allowed to have a rebel song LP. It was confiscated, you were charged. You weren’t allowed to read certain newspapers; if you were caught in possession of the United Irishman – an eight-page newspaper – you could have got two years in prison. If you had a bit of money found in the house, money to buy a horse and cart to create a livelihood, had the peelers come in at any time and found that, that would have been confiscated. It could have been seen as having a political purpose. You couldn’t display the national flag – yet theirs could be thrust in our faces 24 hours a day.’

It is interesting to compare Joe Graham’s recollections with those of Gusty Spence, a one-time member of the UVF, who served a life sentence for the 1966 killing of Peter Ward, a Catholic barman. Spence subsequently repudiated violence to become a loyalist politician and advocate of the Good Friday Agreement. In an interview he gave to Bobbie Hanvey, he describes his youthful attitude to Catholics: ‘Catholics had horns and were in some way inferior to Protestants. We were always led to believe this. At the back of your mind, you knew that it was wrong – but at the same time you lived in that grime and squalor that we lived in, and it was good to feel superior, even at the expense of another human being.’

When he left school Spence started work in a linen mill, where he came into contact with Catholics for the first time. He met a Catholic boy named Jimmy, who talked to him about Irish history. Jimmy told him that the United Irishmen were Protestant. ‘I had no knowledge, and of course, I thought he was telling lies.’ The two young men used to go swimming together in a Catholic area: ‘Jimmy and I had something in common. We both had tattoos. He had a tricolour on his arm, and I had a Union Jack on my arm. Falls Road baths had good facilities for swimming and whenever I went there to swim with Jimmy I had to get a sticking plaster to cover over my Union Jack. So despite what people say about the good old days, about there being no problems, it’s a load of nonsense. We lived in an abnormal society. Jimmy had to teach me to say something about a Hail Mary, so as I could bluff my way through, otherwise I would have got a duffing up.’ A Protestant from Derry, about the same age as Spence, told me of a duffing-up he had received while dressed in his school uniform: ‘I was walking through some playing fields. Two chaps stepped in front of me, who I later found out were Catholic. One of them pointed to the other and said to me, “He wants a fight!” To which I replied, “Then why doesn’t he fight you?” To which they both landed punches on me…’

Spence knew that he would have to start work in the mill once he left school: ‘The family needed money desperately so there was no question of where you were going.’ He went down to the Labour Exchange with his birth certificate and school-leaving card and received a new set of cards. After presenting them at the mill he began work the next morning. ‘Someone referred to them as “dark Satanic mills”. I wouldn’t disagree with that description. I started work in the spinning room, which was a very, very hot place and a very wet place. You worked in your bare feet in filthy conditions, and there was no recourse to washing, so you returned home from work the same way as you went. The hours were eight o’clock in the morning to six o’clock at night and to twelve-fifteen on a Saturday. All you were supposed to do was keep your head down, keep your mouth closed and earn your sixteen and eight [£0.83] a week.’

However superior Spence might have been taught to feel, his home life hardly felt privileged. ‘My ma was a great pawner. All the women of her generation were great pawners because they didn’t have the course to anything else.’ He describes the Sunday School trip as the only light relief in a grey world. When his mother accompanied the group on one of those trips, she had to borrow a coat to make herself respectable: ‘If a woman had a coat, it was a big deal. I’m not overstating the case. Those things hurt. If people would only realize the indignities and the hurt that people felt at having to borrow some other woman’s coat.’

Spence regrets the fact that for a Protestant to criticize social conditions would – even today – be regarded as disloyalty. ‘You would be called a “closet republican” or a “card-carrying commie”. The continuance of the union would be our main philosophy. However, within that, why does one have to be anything peculiar to articulate a political philosophy?’

The answer lies in the need to express unity. Unionists were not really a homogenous people. They came from all classes of society and they attended a multitude of different churches, from Presbyterian to High Anglican. They had ranged their wagons in a circle to defend the status quo – and they could not encourage self-examination or internal dissent, for fear of showing weakness to the enemy. Safer to present a united front by placing emphasis on shared values, such as loyalty to the Crown and Protestant supremacy. As Sir Edward Carson, the early twentieth-century unionist leader, had once warned, if divisions within unionism ‘became wide and deep, Ulster would fall’.

This united front, and the interests of the Protestant people, have been historically guarded over by the Orange Order. Three hundred years old and named after William of Orange, the Protestant king who defeated the Catholic King James, the Orange Order was formed to unite Protestants against demands for an independent Ireland. Members come from all levels of society and from (currently) eighteen Protestant denominations. When members join, they receive an initiation which spells out the aim of the Order as ‘the mutual defence, support and protection of Irish Protestants’. It is also made clear: ‘You have promised…never to attend any act or ceremony of popish worship.’

The Order borrows freely from the ritual and terminology of freemasonry; members call one another brethren, they attend lodges, they take oaths, and they can attain the position of grand master. The brethren used to wear orange silk sashes, like the one worn by William III at the Boyne, but more recently they have come to wear orange collarettes and bowler hats. Bowlers are Edwardian symbols of respectability, harking back to the period when the Order began to wield its greatest influence. The early years of the twentieth century were a time when dire labour and housing conditions might have created social disorder, but the Orange Order, and its large numbers of working-class members, were concentrating on other issues: fear of Home Rule, and the desire to maintain supremacy. Almost every person of influence in Northern Ireland was a member. In 1932 Sir James Craig announced in Parliament that he was ‘an Orangeman first, and a politician and a member of this parliament afterwards’.

A very rare unionist politician who was not an Orangeman was Samuel Hall-Thompson, a minister of education responsible for post-war educational reforms. In 1949 a meeting was called by the Sandy Row Grand Orange Lodge to protest against his proposals concerning the payment of Catholic teachers. The Prime Minister attended and, under pressure, promised to revise the plans. He then sacked Hall-Thompson, who became a high-ranking victim of the Orange Order’s grass roots. In Britain the working classes came to voice their struggle through the trade unions. In Northern Ireland the trade union movement carried little weight. The unionist working class expressed itself through the Order, and the Order was not overtly class conscious. It is little wonder that in Gusty Spence’s experience it was ‘peculiar’ to articulate a political philosophy. Andy Tyrie, the one-time leader of the UDA, was once asked what he thought was the difference between Catholics and Protestants. The only difference, he replied, was that Protestants couldn’t complain.

However firmly unionists stood together, and however robustly the Northern Ireland government asserted its claim to be master of its own house, there was always one party with the capacity to undermine it: the British government. While Britain was allowing the province free rein, little complaint could be heard from Stormont. But in 1940 a proposal from Winston Churchill’s wartime government horrified unionists, and threatened to end the life of their young state. As Britain and her colonies stood alone against Hitler, and the people of Britain braced themselves for a German invasion, Churchill’s war cabinet offered Eire an undertaking towards a united Ireland, in return for Eire’s abandonment of wartime neutrality. The Northern Ireland cabinet reacted furiously at the perceived treachery. In the event Eire, already keener on reunification in theory than in practice, rejected Churchill’s offer. After only twenty years of existence, Northern Ireland had Eire to thank for its survival.

The incident seemed to confirm the unionists’ worst fears concerning Britain’s attitude to her loyal province. I considered the nature of Britain’s attitude as I wandered around the Stormont Parliament buildings. From the ceiling of Stormont’s Great Hall hangs a huge gold-plated chandelier, which had been a wedding present from the German Kaiser to his cousin King George V. This chandelier had spent a few years hanging in Windsor Castle until it was taken down at the start of the First World War, when German light fittings fell out of favour. Eighty years later an inventory at Windsor found the chandelier to be missing, but there was no record of where it had gone. Much has been said about Northern Ireland’s strategic and economic significance, but its use as Britannia’s informal dump has not been so well recorded.

While the British government had the power to destroy Northern Ireland, another organization had the desire to do so. From the time of the creation of the State until the advent of the modern Troubles, the IRA made sporadic attempts to shoot and bomb its way to a united Ireland, but the organization always remained small and received little support from the Catholic community. Joe Cahill joined the IRA in 1938 in west Belfast. He was one of several men convicted of the 1942 killing of a police officer, and was sentenced to death but later reprieved. Just one man, Tom Williams, was hanged for the murder. Cahill described his experiences to Bobbie Hanvey: ‘There were actually eight of us arrested on Easter Sunday 1942. Easter Sunday was a period when parades were banned. Our idea was to fire shots over security patrols in three areas, to draw all the security forces into those areas, leaving the other two areas free where parades could be held. So we fired shots over a patrol car. When that was finished, we retreated. There was a bit of a problem then; it just didn’t work out as we had planned, and we all finished up in a house. The house was surrounded, there was a bit of shooting, and a policeman was shot dead. We were all arrested and taken to the police headquarters, and brought before the court and charged with murder. We were remanded, and brought before the court on several different occasions right up to the High Court, which lasted three days. Eventually the jury came back in, and six of us were found guilty and sentenced to death.’

For four and a half weeks Cahill shared a condemned cell with Tom Williams. He describes the conditions: ‘It’s fair to say that the food was much better in the condemned cell. You got two bottles of stout a day, or a half and a whisky. You had hospital beds. And along with the two prisoners, there were three warders there, twenty-four hours a day; even when you were sleeping they were still there.’ Cahill already knew Williams; they had gone to dances together, and in prison they became closer still. They passed their days exercising in the yard and had access to chess, draughts, and cards. ‘It’s fair to say the day was fairly well spent. It normally started off with Mass, then in the evening we had devotions. We had two visits a day, there were so many relatives and people wanting to see us.’

Cahill describes the prospect of death: ‘I’m not being boastful about this, but once you made your peace with God, I think death is very easy to face. The only way I can equate it, is often I’ve heard people saying, “He died a lovely death” because they were prepared to die. Once you’re prepared to die, I think death is easy faced. That’s where religion plays a big part in my life.’

On a Sunday afternoon, all of the condemned were brought into the solicitor’s room. ‘The solicitor looked at the six of us. He says, “I have good news for everybody except Tom. The rest of you have been reprieved. Tom,” he says, “you’ll die.” And it was a shock to everybody. At this stage we didn’t expect to be reprieved; we thought we were all going to be executed because it was only three days away. There was a tremendous silence and the first one to break the silence was Tom Williams. He says, “This is how I wanted it from the start. Don’t grieve for me,” he says. “I’m happy to die.” And that was the saddest moment in my life. We were taken away from him and we were given a guarantee that we’d see him again before Wednesday. The authorities never kept their promise. We didn’t see him again. We were taken to the penal servitude wing. The last memory I have of Tom Williams was on the day of his execution. The chap in the cell above me rapped on the floor and he says, “Joe, jump up to your window.” I jumped up to the window and I looked out and I saw his funeral going to the back of the hospital for burial. That’s my last memory of Tom Williams.’

One man who volunteered to combat the IRA was Wallace Clark. Clark was a member of the B Specials, the largest of three arms of the Ulster Special Constabulary. He entered the constabulary in 1950, the third generation of his family to join, and became a District Commandant. The B Specials had a sinister reputation; they were greatly feared by Catholics. In an interview with Bobbie Hanvey, Clark challenges the reputation: ‘The general view of the Catholics was that the B Specials were heavily biased, tending to brutality, and did a lot of quiet killing – which is all untrue if you look at the statistics. But they were all so frightened of the Bs, which gave us a very strong moral position, in that a B man was very rarely attacked in his house. They were stewing in their own juice, they demonized the Bs so effectively. We did a lot of our work at night dressed in black or very dark green. That’s one reason it was so easy to demonize the B Specials. It created the “bogeymen” image.’

Clark explains why he joined: ‘I think sort of family pride, like it applied to a lot of men in the B Specials. It was public service, the country was under threat. I felt I could do my little bit in putting down terrorism.’ The B Specials were a part-time force. ‘They operated around home, they kept their rifles at home, their uniforms at home, and turned out to parade locally. Initially, we drilled a lot in Orange halls but not because of any tremendous connection with the Orange Order. We were sometimes accused of being run by the Orange Order, which was absolute bunkum. The Orange Order hadn’t the organization or structure to run a force like the B Specials.’

As a commandant, Clark had eight sub-district commandants under his command, each of whom commanded about thirty men. ‘With that organization, and with the rifles at home, we could put down twenty-four roadblocks within ten minutes of getting the alarm. Because the men could turn out quickly. We had these funny old uniforms with a stand-up collar, and you could pull it over your pyjamas, and you could pull on your black trousers. We patrolled the roads, and guarded the checkpoints, or key points at times of high tension. We had two categories – “drill category” when the IRA weren’t in the active stage of warfare, and “patrol category”, when we were turned out every night, walked along the roads, checked cars, and had a good look at enemy movements. We could switch from drill category to patrol category within twenty-four hours.’

In 1956 the IRA began a border campaign – Operation Harvest – with the intention of forcing British troops out of Ireland. At this time the IRA was only a shadow of what it was to become. Internment was introduced in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and within two years the campaign had ground to a near stop. According to Clark: ‘The IRA lost that campaign and they made a formal declaration of defeat in February 1962. They weren’t very effective, and they weren’t getting popular support. They were limited in the amount of weapons and ammunition they had, and I never like to underrate my enemies, because there are plenty of clever and brave men in the IRA, but it didn’t show in that campaign. They missed lots of opportunities where they could have done a great deal more damage. The funny thing was, you’d mix with IRA men locally. You’d go down to the post office, and see fellows who had been IRA-active, and I would have no objection to having a chat with them.’

The most famous IRA operation of the campaign was the unsuccessful attack on Brookeborough RUC barracks, carried out on New Year’s Eve 1956. Two IRA men were killed during the attack, which quickly entered the annals of romantic republicanism; thousands of mourners attended the funerals of the two dead southern volunteers, and Dominic Behan wrote the song ‘The Patriot Game’ about one of them, Fergal O’Hanlon from Monaghan.

Paddy O’Regan, an IRA volunteer, was wounded in the leg during the attack by two bullets from a Bren gun fired by a police sergeant. He considers that Operation Harvest was ‘an honourable campaign in as far as we could make it, and I suppose that was reflected in the fact that there were very few people killed on either side’. The IRA had a policy of non-sectarianism at the time: ‘We were instructed not to attack the RUC because they were a police force, but they were given a number of days to stand aside, and when they did not, they became targets. On the other hand, the B Special constables were looked on as a Protestant sectarian force, so we were told that we were not to attack them at all.’

The IRA’s next campaign would prove to be a much longer and more bitter affair, with far fewer rules of engagement.