The Northern Ireland Troubles in Britain

Impacts, engagements, legacies and memories

Graham Dawson, Jo Dover, Stephen Hopkins

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526108500
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This ground-breaking book provides the first comprehensive investigation of the history and memory of the Northern Ireland Troubles in Britain. It examines the impacts of the conflict upon individual lives, political and social relationships, communities and culture in Britain, and explores how the people of Britain (including its Irish communities) have responded to, and engaged with the conflict, in the context of contested political narratives produced by the State and its opponents. Setting an agenda for further research and public debate, the book demonstrates that 'unfinished business' from the conflicted past persists unaddressed in Britain, and advocates the importance of acknowledging legacies, understanding histories and engaging with memories in the context of peace-building and reconciliation.

Part I

Perspectives from the British State, politics and the military

1

‘The truth, the whole truth…’: some British political and military memoirs of the Troubles

John Newsinger

That the peace in Northern Ireland remained fragile twenty years after the IRA’s cease-fire of 1994 was demonstrated in a number of ways on 30 April 2014. That day Prime Minister David Cameron entertained the eight Democratic Unionist MPs at 10 Downing Street, courting their support in case of a hung Parliament after the 2015 general election. By an astonishing coincidence, Sinn Féin’s President, Gerry Adams, was arrested that very same day. Adams was subsequently released from police custody after being questioned for four days concerning the murder of Jean McConville and his alleged membership of the IRA. And this coincided quite nicely with the decision of the Secretary of State, Theresa Villiers, not to order an inquiry into the Ballymurphy shootings of 9–11 August 1971, the ‘Belfast Bloody Sunday’ as it is sometimes known, which saw ten civilians shot dead by members of the Parachute Regiment.¹ Among the dead were a Catholic priest, Father Hugh Mullan, and mother of eight Jean Connolly. The lack of British press and television coverage of this denial of justice to the families of these victims was in stark contrast to the British media’s saturation coverage of Adams’ arrest. And, of course, any increase in tension takes place in the context of deteriorating social and economic circumstances that potentially provide the ideal backdrop for a renewal of conflict. The Cameron government’s apparent willingness to ‘play the Orange card’, as it has been described, raised real fears that peace would actually be put at risk for parliamentary advantage.²

In such circumstances, the need for continued attention to Northern Ireland affairs is obvious. One particularly fruitful area of academic study is the memoir literature that the years of conflict generated. There have been many memoirs written by British politicians from both the Conservative and Labour parties that discuss their involvement in Northern Ireland affairs. Inevitably, these are self-serving to say the least, but nevertheless they are useful for the insight they provide into the way that these men and women justify the decisions they were a party to. They are a guide to the public attitudes adopted by the political class and to how these change over time according to circumstances. One interesting example of this is the way that attitudes towards Ian Paisley change in Labour politicians’ memoirs from the hostility of the early years of the conflict to the sometimes positively friendly attitudes of the peace process period.

Another significant body of memoir literature is the military memoir. This genre was given a huge boost by the Falklands War, which seems to have expanded the audience for such books dramatically, a situation that still continues today. To a considerable extent military memoirs dealing with the war in Northern Ireland piggy-backed on this development; indeed, in many memoirs Northern Ireland is merely one campaign among many. Nevertheless, the military memoir literature is of considerable interest for what it reveals regarding how soldiers were ‘conditioned’, how they were prepared for war, and how inappropriate this preparation was for the situation in Northern Ireland. The popularity of soldiers’ tales is, of course, an interesting cultural phenomenon in its own right.

The war

A number of preliminary points are worth making concerning the development, progress and conclusion of the conflict in Northern Ireland. First of all, it seems clear that the unionist response to the civil rights movement made some sort of IRA campaign inevitable. What was certainly not inevitable, however, was the character of that campaign, its protracted nature, the level of violence and the number of casualties on all sides. Indeed, a very strong case can be made that the thirty years’ war in Northern Ireland was very much the result of Conservative policies in the province, together with the conduct of the British Army. Attempts to contain the conflict and undermine the increasing support for physical-force republicanism were effectively abandoned once the Conservatives took office in 1970. The unionists were given carte blanche to crush Catholic resistance, with the Army being used to prop up Orange rule. The consequences were disastrous. The Falls Road curfew (July 1970), the introduction of internment (August 1971), the Ballymurphy shootings, Bloody Sunday (January 1972) and a host of small-scale everyday episodes successfully alienated the Catholic population, providing the IRA with a wide-enough support base to sustain a protracted campaign.³ According to Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Gerry Adams no less, had actually told Blair ‘about how Bloody Sunday had turned his community definitively against the army. And he believed internment had helped create the modern IRA.’⁴ Even with a more conciliatory approach to the Catholic community, there would have been an IRA campaign, but it would have been possible to contain it to something comparable to the dimensions of the 1950s IRA campaign, rather than its escalating in the way that it did.

The failure of a military solution led to recognition at Westminster of the need for a political settlement. The problem that successive British governments faced was how to conciliate the nationalist minority in the face of unionist intransigence. William Whitelaw’s attempt at establishing a power-sharing executive in 1974 was overwhelmingly rejected by Protestants and, once Labour had taken power, was brought down by the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) general strike. Harold Wilson’s Labour government retreated from the attempt at a political settlement. Instead, the British moved away from a counter-insurgency response to the IRA and instead adopted an internal security approach, the cornerstones of which were police primacy and criminalisation. This new approach, which became increasingly sophisticated over time, was to successfully put the IRA on the defensive.

It is important to recognise that alongside the security forces’ campaign against the IRA there was a parallel loyalist paramilitary murder campaign that between 1972 and 1976 was responsible for the deaths of at least 500 people, overwhelmingly Catholic civilians without any IRA affiliation, often killed after horrific torture. This continued at a lower level throughout the Troubles, although by 1992 and 1993 the loyalists were actually killing more people than was the IRA. The part that loyalist murder gangs played in wearing down the IRA and its supporters in the Catholic community is not given enough attention in most military histories of the conflict. The extent of the collusion between these gangs and elements within the security forces is still not fully known and probably never will be.⁵

Instead of building on the successes of the Labour government, the Thatcher government precipitated the hunger-strike crisis that gave the IRA a massive boost in terms of popular support within the Catholic community and abroad. While this episode certainly strengthened Thatcher’s position at home, in Northern Ireland it gave the republicans renewed hope of success and arguably prolonged the conflict by a decade. The disastrous consequences of Thatcher’s mishandling of the hunger strikes actually forced her hitherto hard-line pro-unionist government into seeking a political settlement. Continued security force successes, together with the activities of the loyalist murder gangs, persuaded the republicans to take advantage of this. The road to the Good Friday Agreement was opened up.

Soldiers’ stories

The subject of military memoirs is one of considerable interest, although serious academic discussion is still in its early stages. All that space permits here is a look at what a number of memoirs tell us about the part the military played in the alienation of the Catholic community during the early years of the conflict. We shall look at three memoirs: A. F. N. Clarke’s Contact, first published in 1983 and recently reissued in a new edition, Harry McCallion’s Killing Zone, published in 1995 and Michael Asher’s Shoot to Kill, published in 1990. All three writers were former members of the Parachute Regiment. Memoir literature is not a reliable source, inevitably self-centred, dependent on memory, susceptible to falsehood and prone to exaggeration. Nevertheless, these memoirs taken together do tell us something convincing about the culture of the Paras and about their conduct in Northern Ireland. These were ‘shock’ troops trained for bloody combat with other soldiers. Their capacity for unrestrained violence was a positive virtue, something to be celebrated, part of their group culture. Serious questions are raised by these memoirs about the advisability of using troops imbued with their particular ethos in operations involving interaction with civilians.

A. F. N. Clarke’s Contact is a justly acclaimed account by a junior officer of two tours in Northern Ireland that was made into a very powerful, award-winning BBC film. He emphasises the extent to which the Paras were concerned about their ‘reputation’, the importance of getting across to a hostile population the idea that ‘we don’t seem to have hang-ups about using force of the most vicious kind whenever possible’. Indeed, he provides plenty of evidence to validate this reputation. He writes of men ‘praying for a contact … for the opportunity to shoot at anything on the street, pump lead into any living thing and watch the blood flow’. He saw men ‘putting more powder into baton rounds to give them more poke; some insert pins and broken razor blades into the rubber rounds’. He even saw ‘buckshee rounds’ that had had ‘the heads filed down for a dum-dum effect’. The Paras had been trained ‘to the ultimate in death-dealing’. He writes of the arrival of a new squad in the province: ‘Death in the eyes. Blood-lust. Training paying off. Not training. Conditioning. Twenty-five controlled thugs.’⁶ There is a grim inevitability about the Ballymurphy shootings and Bloody Sunday.

Harry McCallion’s Killing Zone is primarily concerned with his time in the Special Air Service (SAS), but he also recounts his experiences as a Para. The regiment was, he observes, a ‘hard place’. During training, or conditioning as Clarke terms it, he hesitated over finishing off a ‘wounded terrorist’ and was rewarded with a kick ‘in the ribs so hard I was bruised for weeks’. The result of this conditioning was that many Paras ‘would have made the SS [SchutzStaffel] look like boy scouts’ and he was personally ‘even more brutal than most’. Even allowing for exaggeration, this certainly helps to explain the alienation of the Catholic population and the rise of the IRA. One particular episode he describes superbly captures the part the military played in IRA recruitment: in August 1971 his battalion killed its first man outside the Springfield Road Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) station. A van had backfired and, mistaking the noise for gunfire, the duty sergeant fired two shots into the vehicle, killing the driver, Harry Thornton. This trigger-happy response provoked a riot. What was not known at the time, however, was that one of the Paras procured a piece of the dead man’s skull ‘and used it as an ash tray’.⁷ If this had become public in the immediate aftermath of the incident, one suspects that the outbreak of rioting might well have assumed insurrectionary proportions. McCallion’s 1995 revelation provoked no outcry, no outraged Daily Mail or Daily Express headlines condemning this barbarism. What, one is entitled to wonder, would be the response, even today, if an IRA memoir were to admit to a volunteer’s having used a piece of a British soldier’s skull as an ash tray?

The third memoir, Michael Asher’s Shoot to Kill, is the most thoughtful and interesting. Since leaving the military, Asher has established a substantial reputation as an explorer and writer. He is the author of a number of novels, travel books, biographies and military histories. His book The Regiment is one of the best histories of the SAS and he also researched and wrote an important book, The Real Bravo Two Zero, on the Bravo Two Zero patrol during the Gulf War. This volume subjected the two bestselling accounts by the pseudonymous Andy McNab and Chris Ryan, Bravo Two Zero and The One That Got Away, respectively, to critica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Northern Ireland Troubles in Britain: impacts,engagements, legacies and memories: Graham Dawson and Stephen Hopkins
• Part I: Perspectives from the British State, politics and the military
• Part II: Anti-state activisms
• Part III: Culture and the representation of the Troubles
• Part IV: Memory, peace building and ‘dealing with the past’
• Index