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Between the IRA and the UVF

Tahere appeared, in June 1973, a booklet by ‘P. Ó Néill’, the nom-de-plume which adorns authorized statements from the Provisional IRA. It gives a version of the origins of the Provisionals which the latter have cultivated ever since the split of 1969. Referring to the riots of August 1969, the author states that although it must have been clear from 1966 onwards ‘to anyone with a modicum of sense that major violence on the nationalist areas was at hand’, when it actually occurred, ‘the victims to their horror found themselves without protection from the one source they hitherto trusted – the Irish Republican Army’.1 But was Belfast in these years caught between aggressive loyalists and ineffectual Republicans?

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‘P. Ó Néill’ blamed ‘the policy pursued by the then leadership [of the IRA], or a majority of them, throughout the mid-sixties’ for leaving the ‘nationalist areas’, supposedly, without defenders. ‘[F]ormer members of the Communist Party of Great Britain who came back to Ireland with the intention of setting up an ultra-left wing front based on the Republican Movement’ had, it was alleged, ‘diverted the movement to political and social agitation to the almost total exclusion of the traditional military role’.2 There is something to this account: the Republican movement did move to the left. As the new IRA Chief-of-Staff, Cathal Goulding, recalled in an interview with an Irish journalist in early 1972, if the border campaign had failed due to the lack of popular support, the reason for that lack of support was because people did not understand what the IRA meant by its ultimate objective of ‘freedom’. ‘Freedom’, he explained, had to relate to the needs of ordinary people. ‘To do this we had to involve ourselves in their everyday struggles for existence. In housing, land, trade unions, unemployment …’ It might take ten years of agitation along these lines before there was even the basis of a revolutionary movement and the IRA ‘wasn’t geared to this type of action at that time. Most of the people in the Movement were geared to a physical force campaign … [P]olitical agitation wasn’t as exciting I suppose.’3 (Goulding’s last comment is a useful reminder that people participated in the IRA for social as well as political reasons.)4

This did not mean that the IRA was opposed to the use of physical force. Goulding himself declared on 15 August 1965: ‘There will be a fight, there must be a fight. It will have to be a fight on many fronts. We have only to look around us to see that we will have to fight on the military front, the economic front and the cultural front.’ The IRA’s Adjutant-General, Séamus Costello, was even more explicit in a speech on 19 June 1966: ‘to imagine that we can establish a Republic solely by constitutional means’, he said:

is utter folly. The lesson of history shows that in the final analysis the Robber Baron must be disestablished by the same methods that he used to enrich himself and retain his ill gotten gains, namely force of arms. To this end we must organise, train. And maintain a disciplined armed force which will always be available to strike at the opportune moment.5

The Irish police report from which these quotations are taken identified twelve different training camps in 1965 and eleven in 1966 at which IRA members received instruction in the use of various weapons. Six of those in 1965 and seven in 1966 were attended by members from Northern Ireland and in six of them the training officer was identified as coming from Belfast. These camps were in addition to other meetings and exercises conducted by the organization.6

As Goulding implied in his interview, there was opposition to the new, more political approach of the IRA after the end of the border campaign. One of the leading opponents was Seán Mac Stíofáin, a London-born member of the Army Council who had been in jail with Goulding following an arms raid on a British public school in 1953, and who later became the first Chief-of-Staff of the Provisional IRA. In his memoirs, Mac Stíofáin complained about the excessive attention paid by the Republican movement to ‘agitation on social and economic issues’ when ‘the main objective [was] to free Ireland from British rule’. ‘Some of the older Republicans’, Mac Stíofáin wrote, ‘who had been with the movement for years and still had years of service to contribute to it, began to drop away in disgust and protest’. If the Irish police report cited above is to be believed, however, this did not prevent a year-on-year increase in the strength of the IRA from 657 at the end of December 1962 to 1,039 at the end of October 1966.7

Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill caused a sensation in January 1965 by welcoming his opposite number in the Republic of Ireland, Seán Lemass, on an official visit to Stormont. No such visit had occurred since partition, more than forty years before. Lemass, who had been a member of the IRA during the War of Independence and the Civil War, reportedly told O’Neill, ‘I shall get into terrible trouble for this’, whereupon O’Neill replied, ‘No, Mr Lemass … it is I who will get into trouble for this’.8 The Ulsterman was right.

Although public opinion in Northern Ireland generally welcomed his effort to improve relations with the Republic of Ireland, there were rumblings of discontent within his own party and also the powerful Orange Order, the body to which virtually all Unionist politicians belonged, which enjoyed a statutory role in the counsels of the Unionist Party and which organized regular marches commemorating Ulster’s Protestant heritage. This discontent was due not only to the Prime Minister’s failure to consult his Cabinet colleagues before issuing the invitation to Lemass, but also to the very fact that the meeting took place at all. Ian Paisley, unsurprisingly, was full of righteous indignation and it was in this context that he uttered his famous remarks equating O’Neill’s bridge building with treachery.9

Ten months later, on 21 October 1965, the IRA made a dramatic reappearance in Belfast. A group of men wearing masks and carrying hurley sticks broke up a British Army Kinema Corporation film show at Saint Gabriel’s Intermediate Boys’ School on the Crumlin Road in the north-west of the city, injuring two members of the unit involved and damaging their screen and projector. The IRA admitted responsibility in a statement issued four days later, explaining that ‘the Belfast unit of the IRA now give notice that this immoral proselytism of Irish youths will be stamped out by whatever means deemed necessary’.10

Two days after this statement, O’Neill called a Stormont election for 25 November 1965, although there is no reason to suppose there was any connection between the two events. His principal objective seems to have been to undermine support for the NILP, particularly in Belfast. If this was so, the tactic worked. Even though the Unionist vote in Belfast fell from 67,350 in 1962 to 62,646 in 1965, the NILP vote fell even further, from 60,170 to 43,363. More importantly, the Unionists gained two seats at the expense of the NILP, reducing the latter’s representation at Stormont to two.11

This was a heavy blow to the one party which enjoyed a degree of cross-community support. The parish chronicle of St Matthew’s church in the Catholic enclave of the Short Strand in east Belfast describes how one of the two remaining NILP MPs only held on to his seat as a result of Catholic votes. The Unionists, the author wrote, ‘tried their utmost’ to win the Pottinger constituency in which the Short Strand was located. The party selected a popular milkman and supposedly liberal candidate in the shape of Jack Bannister, who had contributed to Catholic charities and who, together with his Unionist councillor wife, had been photographed alongside the two parish priests for the nationalist Irish News. But the priests did not wish it to seem as though they had been ‘bought over by Bannister’s largesse’ and therefore ‘felt compelled to vote Labour’, as did ‘all the Catholics who cared to vote at all’. There was therefore ‘no truth in the Unionist assertion that they got Catholic votes in this election – certainly not in Pottinger. History was made in that the Unionists sought Catholic votes’.12

In the meantime, the O’Neill Government had been informed on 9 November 1965 that the IRA was plotting a new campaign in Northern Ireland, ‘the most sinister aspect of which was a threat to the lives of members of the Cabinet and … Special Branch’. Ministers were ‘painfully conscious’ that if the news leaked out it would be represented as an election stunt. Some fifty members of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) – the notorious B-Specials, the all-Protestant police reserve – had been mobilized in order to support the RUC in providing adequate protection for ministers as well as for the former Prime Minister, Viscount Brookeborough, and for the Speaker. The placing of guards at ministers’ homes came to the attention of the media and the government was forced to issue a statement.13

On 17 November 1965, five young men in a parked car close to the official residence of the General Officer Commanding (GOC) British troops in Northern Ireland on the outskirts of Belfast were arrested. They were wearing ‘semi-military dress’ and a bayonet and a pair of handcuffs were discovered in the car. Although they initially gave their names and addresses to the police, ‘on a command being given in Irish by the person who appeared to be the leader they ceased to answer any further questions’. They were later charged under the Special Powers Acts of being in possession of an offensive weapon and records of police movements and of being members of an illegal organization. On 3 December all five were sentenced to a year in jail. They refused to utter a word during the run-up to and throughout the course of their trial.14

A public statement by the Minister of Home Affairs, Brian McConnell, on 7 December 1965 referred to ‘information which has been received’, indicating that the IRA was about to resume its subversive activities and that attacks would be made against selected persons as well as against property and public services. It concluded that the arrest and conviction of the five young men, together with the incident at St Gabriel’s School, ‘were the first overt activities by the I.R.A. for some years’.15

An even more alarming message was delivered by the Inspector-General of the RUC, Sir Arthur Kennedy, to the GOC Northern Ireland, Lieutenant-General Sir Desmond Fitzpatrick, on 4 February 1966. He told Fitzpatrick ‘that he had received information from two sources within the last 24 hours that the IRA intend forthwith to initiate incidents on a gradually increasing scale’. These incidents would be modelled on those carried out by EOKA in Cyprus in the 1950s and would consist of attacks on individuals rather than the sabotage of installations. The RUC was forming ‘special mobile squads armed with light automatic weapons’ to meet the threat. The GOC admitted that ‘all this may sound alarmist’, but there was no doubt that the Inspector-General was taking the threat ‘very seriously’ and MI5 was being kept informed.16

Kennedy continued to sound the tocsin. On 22 February 1966, he gave a top secret update of his earlier warning to the GOC. The IRA’s intention, he argued, was ‘to set extremists on both sides at each other’s throats and thus bring about a situation in which sectarian riots will precede other acts of violence and sabotage in Northern Ireland’. There was good reason to believe that the campaign would begin in Belfast. Indeed, a number of recent petrol bombings and slogan paintings in the city (which he listed) suggested that the first shots had been figuratively fired already. Such provocative incidents, he believed, would continue until Easter when it was hoped that a Protestant extremist backlash against the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916 would in turn necessitate intervention by the RUC and the British army.

At this point, the Inspector-General continued, ‘members of the IRA will close with the police and military in hand to hand combat and will shoot and also seize any weapons they can’. As the situation developed, further IRA units would infiltrate across the border in order to exploit the situation to the full. Power supplies might be interfered with and while only small arms and petrol bombs would be used in Belfast, heavier weapons would be employed to attack military and police installations elsewhere. The RUC would be ‘stretched to full capacity’ and it was therefore essential that ‘strong military forces be available to come to the aid of the civil power’, if this proved necessary.17

Another anxiety was the Republican movement’s plan for a so-called ‘Freedom Train’ which would transport ‘a large number of Republicans and sympathisers’ from south of the border to attend the Easter Rising commemorations in Belfast on 17 April 1966. ‘The influx of these supporters of the Irish Republican Army into Northern Ireland at this time’, the RUC felt, ‘will no doubt create a great deal of tension’. Indeed, it had been intimated by ‘various sources’ that these people were coming to Belfast ‘with the express purpose of causing disturbances by roaming through various parts of the City flaunting tricolours’ and that efforts would be made ‘to create incidents in which retaliatory action can be taken against the police’. Unless ‘wiser counsels’ prevailed, it was claimed, all the signs were that the IRA were ‘poised to open a campaign of violence within the next month or two and that every effort will be made to create major trouble in Belfast, which fortunately remained quiet during the last [IRA] campaign’.18

The Northern Irish Government’s anxieties were communicated to Whitehall. The Vice-Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Geoffrey Baker, decided to visit Northern Ireland himself on 30–31 March 1966 to assess the situation at first hand. He reported on his return that there was ‘a very real likelihood of trouble, of two main kinds’. The first consisted of IRA violence on the EOKA model, with attacks on key individuals, the police and the military, together with action against police stations and military establishments, especially armouries. The second was sectarian violence, ‘most probably in Belfast’, which could lead to ‘communal rioting of a particularly virulent sort’. The most likely date for the outbreak of trouble was the weekend of 16–17 April and the Inspector-General intended to take precautionary measures on 14 April, which would include searches and the arrest and interrogation of known IRA leaders. The Inspector-General had made it clear that any trouble over the weekend in question would not be ‘a one-shot affair’, but would mark the beginning of an indefinite campaign. Baker noted that, throughout his discussions, he was impressed ‘by the Inspector-General’s sober, balanced and “down-to-earth” approach’ and that ‘his conclusions had obviously been formed on a basis 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

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