Soldiering Against Subversion. Dan Harvey
the Provisional IRA saw the attack wither. It was PIRA’s first major action and an enormous propaganda victory; successfully defending a vulnerable Catholic enclave from an armed, aggressive loyalist mob. The following day, loyalists expelled 500 Catholic workmen from the nearby Harland & Wolff shipyard and the months of June and July 1970 were to witness a series of blunders by the British military, mostly at the behest of the Unionist regime in Stormont, with an all too willing and emergent Provisional IRA capitalising on the mistakes and plunging Northern Ireland into three decades of armed conflict.
The insensitivity of The Falls Curfew was one such event that played directly into the Provisional’s hands. On 2 July 1970, an arms find in a house on Balkan Street and the resultant repercussions over the following three days were to see a turning point in the initial rapport between the Catholic community and the British army. Following a tip off, a British army patrol of five or six vehicles was despatched to the Lower Falls area, where a quantity of arms and ammunition was discovered in a house on Balkan Street. As the British troops started to withdraw, they came under attack from local youths who pelted them with bottles and stones. With the British platoon besieged in the middle of The Falls, reinforcements were sent only to be cut off by rapidly constructed barricades and suddenly an entire company was stranded in the same area. In turn, two companies were despatched to their rescue and they were forced to fire CS gas at the rioting crowds. By late afternoon, the Falls was in chaos as more troops were sent in to rescue the rescuers.
The residents claimed the unfolding of the confrontation was more systemic than reactionary, and that after days and nights of rioting and gunfire the army imposed an illegal curfew on the Lower Falls area of Belfast, putting the area in lockdown as an extended cordon line perimeter surrounded and enclosed the Catholic nationalist area for 36 hours. In conducting searches, residents complained bitterly that the army had been abusive and it was believed they caused unnecessary damage: ransacking homes, ripping up floorboards, breaking furniture and cracking open the plaster on the walls. The area being predominantly Official IRA, the two branches of the IRA fought the British army with gunfire, petrol and nail bombs. Four people were killed – three shot and one knocked down, pinned by a military vehicle – and by its cessation approximately 100 weapons and quantities of ammunition were seized. At the conclusion of the curfew, the army brought two Unionist Ministers, William Long and Captain John Brooke, into the area in the rear of a military vehicle to demonstrate their effectiveness. However, it only really ended when hundreds of women descended on the area with food, forcing their way through the cordon and leaving, it has been claimed, with IRA weapons concealed in prams and in their clothing.
Dr Patrick Hillery, the Republic of Ireland’s Minister for External Affairs, also visited the area, much to the outcry of the Unionists. The ‘Falls Road Curfew’ was an act of monumental stupidity as it generated a sense of alienation among the Catholic community. Trust was lost and the conviction that the British army were irredeemably pro-Unionist was copper-fastened. The year-long honeymoon between nationalist Belfast and the British army was at an end.
The Provisional IRA gained enormously from those early errors of judgement and was hurled headlong, beyond its expectations, towards embarking on the beginnings of its ‘offensive stage’. For a propaganda effect to be sustained you have to demonstrate its achievement in real terms; the young were vulnerable to the Provisional IRA’s propaganda, and these idealists in many cases became somewhat blinded by it. The Provisional IRA believed that violence was a necessary part of the struggle to rid Ireland of the British and aimed to enthuse public support for their ‘cause’ and encouraged people to believe that now was the moment to end partition. They believed that ‘one big push’ was all it would take and by escalation of the military campaign this was certain to be achieved. ‘Escalate, escalate, escalate’ became PIRA’s mantra.
The blunders and misuse of military resources by the Stormont Government, and by extension Westminster, caused the total alienation of the minority Catholic population from the Northern Ireland system, granting the Provisionals an opportunity to take hold. This all resulted from the Unionists’ unwillingness to compromise. A previously all but extinguished IRA had been handed a platform of opportunity – gifted a ‘cause’ – and the momentum of its initial campaign was accelerated beyond its expectations by sheer bloody-mindedness.
A visibly larger, stronger, more self-convinced Provisional IRA now took on the British army. Gun and bomb attacks became more frequent and ever more audacious and a battle of wits began between PIRA bomb makers and the British army bomb disposal teams. The Provisionals were soon getting the better of the street exchanges and British soldiers were now targets, whether they were on-duty or off-duty. For the British army, operations in Northern Ireland were a very different type of conflict to what they were trained for. The street fighting was as dangerous as any overseas foreign theatre, but there were no front lines and on any given day the ‘battlefield’ might be a street, a housing estate or a rural lane. The Provisional IRA could launch an assault, an ambush, a sniper attack, or a bomb explosion, then blend into the background by turning into an alleyway or a building, switching instantly from active hostility to just another person walking down the street – invisible and unknown.
For the British soldiers living conditions were poor, cramped makeshift barracks located in old factories and school buildings. These too were subject to attack, and there were daily hardships and dangerous demands on the individual soldier. Almost every day of a British soldier’s deployment to Northern Ireland was challenging, with high levels of street violence, riots, bombings and shootings, fatalities and being wounded not uncommon.
During the first six months of 1971, the idealists dedicated themselves to a desperate and deadly cause and the urban guerrilla offensive of the Provisional IRA concentrated heavily on ‘British’ economic targets as well as British troops. With the British army directed to pursue a military victory and the nationalists prepared to fight them, Northern Ireland was bloody, violent and politically stagnant. Through Stormont’s lack of reform and inaction towards equality, feelings of frustration, despair and grievance flourished in young Catholics, leading many in the community to join the IRA, which they saw as the only remaining option to change society in Northern Ireland. British politicians claimed that Northern Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom, while the Irish asserted that a small island, geographically, if not historically, ought to be an undivided state.
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When he stepped off the aircraft at RAF Aldergrove in November 1972, Edward Heath was the first British Prime Minister in fifty years to visit Northern Ireland. The British were absentee power holders, but the authority they exercised in Northern Ireland, via the British army, was a power without responsibility. Brian Faulkner, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and head of the province’s security committee, claimed that Belfast was as British as Bristol or Birmingham. Faulkner pushed for tough action against the ‘thugs and murderers’ of the Provisional IRA, and despite the misgivings of the General Officer Commanding of the British army in Northern Ireland, Lieutenant-General Harry Tuzo, who cautioned against it, Faulkner was granted authority to introduce internment without trial in August 1971.
Between 4 am and 7 am on 9 August 1971, ‘Operation Demetrius’ was executed and thousands of British soldiers, accompanied by RUC Special Branch detectives, swooped on addresses throughout the North, raiding houses and making arrests. Of the 342 individuals initially detained, 104 were released and the remaining 238 were jailed in Crumlin Road Prison in Belfast or on the Prison Ship Maidstone. Front doors were splintered, men and youths dragged from their beds, screaming wives, mothers and children roughly manhandled. It was an ill-conceived policy, poorly executed and one-sided. Few senior Official or Provisional IRA men were rounded up, since the RUC was operating with out-dated lists of suspected IRA members and many young members were unknown to them. Strikingly, no similar attempt was made to arrest Loyalist activists. Undertaken with the aim of smashing the newly emerging IRA, instead it imposed the gunmen on the people within nationalist ‘no-go’ areas. Riots and disturbances followed and thirteen people died on the first day of Internment. Overall, twenty-four people were killed in three days. Many refugees fled to camps south of the border and by mid-August an estimated 6,000 people had sought refuge in the South. Lieutenant Colonel Diarmuid O’Donoghue (Retd.) recalls:
When the Troubles started, I was