History of England 1-6

Until 1969, there had been only the Official IRA. Its leadership, however, increasingly drew away from Irish nationalism and towards theoretical Marxism. Both bullet and ballot were considered bourgeois distractions. Its stated goal now was to ‘educate’ the workers of Northern Ireland, Catholic and Protestant, to the point where they would, of their own volition, throw off their economic oppressors. However, Macstiofain and other romantic nationalists hungered for flesh. The result was a split from which arose the Provisional IRA, formed to protect and avenge Catholic communities, fight the army and subvert British rule. Its time soon came. The honeymoon of the British army and the Catholic population had long soured when, in the summer of 1970, a detachment of troops entered the Falls Road in search of a cache of weapons. When they re-emerged it was to a street filled with men and women in a mood of raging protest. After all that had been endured, this was too much. The troops came under attack and soon had to call for reinforcements. The best they could achieve was a stalemate. On 3 July 1970, a curfew was imposed on the Falls Road. The Troubles had taken wing.

The English were for the most part indifferent. Given that the Province was a problem that would not go away, would it not be sensible to send it away? Why not withdraw from Northern Ireland altogether? After all, the terrorists had struck only those people across the sea, and misery and violence were felt by many to be the birthright of the Irishman. Let him get on with what he knew best, as long as he didn’t bring his baggage over here. But then in 1971, the IRA detonated a bomb at the military camp in Aldershot. Five people were killed, all of them civilians. Among the dead were two elderly cleaning ladies and a Catholic priest.

With Belfast soon subject to a bombing campaign, with almost daily reports of murder, and children dismembered by shrapnel, Brian Faulkner, the Northern Irish prime minister and a bastion of the Unionist establishment, begged Heath for powers of internment. On 5 August, Heath granted them, with the proviso that such internment must not target the Catholic community alone. On 9 August, the army burst into the homes of almost four hundred Catholic families, destroying sacred statues and tearing up family photographs all on the basis of useless intelligence. Many of those ensnared had little or no connection with militant republicanism and, of those that did, one had last been active during the Easter Rising. The IRA leadership was quite untouched, and now had a host of new volunteers.

As if all this were insufficient to crack the last foundations of trust, there was also the nature of internment itself. The notorious five techniques of interrogation were used, which included subjecting the internees to ‘white noise’ and sleep deprivation. Beatings and forced confessions were commonplace. Such techniques seemed only to vindicate the IRA’s central premise that this was indeed a war against imperialism. Internment was a disaster, not least because, in defiance of stated government policy, the vast majority of suspects were Catholic. It scarcely helped that this debacle was presided over by Reginald Maudling, a minister temperamentally and morally unfit for the task in hand.

With internment exposed as a moral and political failure, social cohesion in a state of haemorrhage and the two communities terrified of one another, another option began to drift into political discourse. It needed only a crisis for it to take flesh. Derry (or Londonderry, as the British called it) was the Province’s second city, and for months the army had attempted to ensure order there with the minimum of intervention. However, sniper attacks upon soldiers were a weekly occurrence, and the Protestants had begun calling for a curfew. By August 1972, civil rights marches had been banned. One group, peaceable in intent, decided to call one regardless. Paratroopers were sent in with orders to halt or at least redirect the march. Nervous, resentful and with a tradition of toughness to defend, they were not perhaps the ideal choice.