Soldiering Against Subversion. Dan Harvey
and a Garda arrived to say he had been contacted by my then Company Commander, Michael Minihan, and I was to report immediately to my unit in Dublin. Thereafter, I served six months in Castleblayney in Co. Monaghan. On this later occasion, whilst serving in Gormanstown Camp, I was catering officer for an FCÁ Camp and on the eve of its conclusion I was looking forward to once again holidaying in West Cork. However, suddenly the gates of the camp opened and refugees from the North – women and children for the most part – six abreast, came streaming into the camp. It seemed like hundreds of homeless, tired, distressed and worried people presented seeking shelter, security and sanctuary. I can honestly say we did our best for them. It was to be three further weeks before I managed to go on holiday.
Internment failed to achieve the propaganda aims of the authorities, and furthermore a number of detainees were mistreated. The fourteen ‘hooded men’, as they were to become known, experienced ‘Five Techniques’ used on them during interrogation, including hooding, sleep deprivation, white noise, starvation, standing for hours spread-eagled against a wall leaning on their fingertips, all the while accompanied by continual harassment, blows, insults and questioning. Some were forced to run the gauntlet between lines of baton-wielding soldiers and a few were taken up blindfolded in a helicopter (actually hovering only a few feet off the ground) and told they were going to be thrown out. In 1976, the Irish Government took the issue to the European Commission of Human Rights and in 1978 the European Court of Human Rights found the British Government guilty of using inhumane and degrading treatment. In Northern Ireland, the consequence of internment was to escalate the chaos and the level of conflict.
Brian Faulkner’s aim of using internment to end the violence by flushing out the gunmen did not work. On the contrary, the Provisionals’ benefitted from internment, rather than being crushed by it. The use of the British army as part of a policy prioritising a security approach over that of political reform, to nullify the fledgling Provisional IRA, backfired badly. Internationally too, the television images of the Troubles were of explosions, streets full of broken bricks and bottles, and burnt-out barricades; footage of rioting crowds, yelling and cursing in the midst of swirling clouds of CS gas as soldiers charged from behind a barrage of baton rounds, were all illustrative of a worsening situation. From July 1971 to year’s end saw a sharp increase in Provisional IRA activity. There were increased killings (140 people died in the four months after internment) and increased bombings as the Provisional IRA stepped up both the intensity and extent of its campaign, accelerating its policy of escalation.
On Sunday 30 January 1972, soldiers of 1 Para (1st Battalion, Paratroop Regiment) under Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford entered the Bogside area of Derry to police a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march and by the day’s end had shot twenty-seven unarmed people, fourteen of them fatally. The procession was near the Rossville flats when the army’s ‘arrest operation’ was mounted. It was one of the British army’s most controversial operations ever undertaken, and has since become known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. Outweighing any previous blunders, it was as inexplicable as it was incomprehensible, even for Northern Ireland. Overwhelming in its enormity, Bloody Sunday left the nationalists overwrought and inflamed and incited an already incendiary situation. Causing widespread shock and anger, 15-year-old Don Mullan, who was part of the rally on the day, described the situation as he saw it:
I participated in the civil rights march that day, my first ever, and was standing only 2-feet away from 17-year-old Michael Kelly when he was fatally shot. I can still hear him gasp as a ricochet bullet punctured his flesh. An instant later, confusion and terror reigned as a rubble barricade began to stir dust as bullets thundered into it. I am still unable to recall accurately the events of those horrific moments of my adolescence. I [remember] people to my right crying out and falling close to me at the barricade. Then suddenly, the wall of an apartment above my head burst, showering those below with brick and mortar. A primeval instinct took possession of me and unashamedly I started running home to safety. ‘Son, what’s happening?’ a woman’s voice called. ‘There must be at least six dead,’ I shouted back. Her face registered disbelief, but I did not stop to convince her.
The following day, my best friend called for me and we retraced our steps. I remember pointing to the bullet marks on the wall above where I had been the previous afternoon. We looked with incredulity at the bloodstains on the pavements and by the barricade. Across the road in a first-storey apartment, one window had six bullet holes with cracks spreading out like webs. The blue and white Civil Rights banner that had led our procession the previous day was now heavily stained with the blood of Barney McGuigan, a father of six children, who was shot while holding aloft a white handkerchief as he had cautiously made his way to the aid of a fatally wounded man. He was killed by a shot in the back of the head.
On the day of the funerals, my friend and I stood silently together in the cold rain that swept over Derry as cortège after cortège slowly made their way towards the cemetery gates. We were numb, confused and increasingly angry.
Over thirty years later, I would sit in the public gallery at Central Hall in Westminster, as ‘Soldier F’ of the Parachute Regiment in 1972 admitted under cross-examination that in addition to three other people he had also killed Mr McGuigan. Memories of that tragic day still give rise to anger and outrage within me.
Bloody Sunday was a bitter experience, especially after the whitewash of the Widgery Tribunal. The atmosphere began to change dramatically as a direct consequence. Boys that I played football with were making other choices. The IRA had many willing recruits thereafter and, well, honestly, I considered making that choice too.
The Creggan Estate in Derry was to become a Republican stronghold, but in my childhood it was not a rabid anti-British or anti-English environment. So the big question is why and how it became so? And it was not because my community was born with a genetic defect that made us prone to violence.
Following unrelenting street disturbances in August 1969, the British Army was ordered into the streets of Belfast and Derry. In the early days they engaged in various community liaison projects. It was not unusual for local soccer clubs to line out against regimental teams. I also recall on one occasion a British Army band, I think, Royal Marines, coming to our school. We gave them a rapturous welcome, preferring their percussion and brass to English, French and Maths. In May 1970 our school was the first in Northern Ireland to be offered an Adventure Training Course by the army with ten places at Magilligan Camp, about 25-miles from Derry, which included rock climbing, hill-walking, canoeing, orienteering and expedition work. Magilligan Camp was later to become a detention centre for internees in August 1971 and the theatre for an ominous encounter between unarmed Civil Rights [Association] demonstrators and 1 Para the week before Bloody Sunday 1972.
The Falls Road Curfew, the introduction of internment without trial, and especially Bloody Sunday were to have powerful, cumulative and long-lasting repercussions over the following three decades. At the time, anger, alienation and abhorrence drove a wedge between the British army and the Nationalist Catholic community, who felt that ‘the Paratroopers murdered 14 civilians on Bloody Sunday, but the Widgery Report (a British inquiry into the Bloody Sunday shootings) murdered the truth’. Trust and faith in the British army was lost, and for the Catholic community alienation became habitual and the State proved unsympathetic. Prior to these events, the Provisional IRA had nominal support, minimal backing and negligible encouragement. Afterwards, however, attitudes hardened and entrenchment followed.
CHAPTER 4
The Provisional IRA Emerges
The danger now was that PIRA’s campaign of terror could lead to a backlash and ultimately civil war, first in Northern Ireland but then spilling across the border, engulfing the entire island and population. As it stood, the situation in Northern Ireland was already very dangerous. Different groups of Republicans and Loyalists, all unlawful organisations, raised stark issues for the Republic. The security of the State was threatened by these small unrepresentative self-appointed groups without any mandate from the electorate. They had taken it upon themselves to conduct their campaigns and counter-campaigns of violence, causing death and destruction. They were attempting to dictate to the democratically elected government representatives of Irish society what policy to pursue. By organising themselves into private armies, their use of physical force, intimidation