1972 – The Troubles
Is there something in human nature that leads us to take unnecessary risks? That might seem a little unlikely, but I know I’ve been willing to take some chances, and no better an illustration was my behaviour back in 1961. I had embarked on a geology project, collecting fossils embedded in limestone (from which they could be removed by dissolving the rock with acid). I was up in Girvan, a tiny Ayrshire town on the south-west coast of Scotland. At the end of my two days fieldwork, I caught the bus down to Stranraer, got off at Cairnryan the ferry port just before the town, and caught the ferry over to Larne, in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. It’s the shortest ferry ride from Scotland to Northern Ireland, and I wanted to see the Irish countryside.
Was that a risky decision? Possibly. It was towards the end of the Irish Republican Army’s Border Campaign, a guerilla exercise codenamed Operation Harvest. The IRA attacked targets with the aim of overthrowing British rule and establishing a united Ireland. Seventeen years old, driven by curiosity, I hadn’t imagined there would be any real danger. I could catch the train down to Belfast, just a short trip, have a look around, and go back at the end of the day. Nearly sixty years later, my memory of that trip is very hazy, except for one image. As I left the quayside, I went past the police station. It was entirely enclosed by a high chain link fence, protecting the police force inside, while keeping the IRA outside – and anyone else for that matter. Suddenly my idea of a quick fun trip to Northern Ireland had become scary. Did I go to Belfast? I don’t think so. Was I pleased to be going back to Stranraer? I must have been.
At that stage in the centuries long tensions between the Irish and the English, the Border Campaign was proving something of a fizzer. It ran from late 1956 to early 1962, and when I was visiting, it was all but over. The intention had been to gain local support, but the response had been weak. Although it was already petering out by the late 1950s, the campaign was finally called off on 26 February 1962, with the announcement:
The leadership of the Resistance Movement has ordered the termination of the Campaign of Resistance to British occupation launched on 12 December 1956. Instructions issued to Volunteers of the Active Service Units and of local Units in the occupied area have now been carried out. All arms and other matériel have been dumped and all full-time active service volunteers have been withdrawn … Foremost among the factors motivating this course of action has been the attitude of the general public whose minds have been deliberately distracted from the supreme issue facing the Irish people – the unity and freedom of Ireland. The Irish resistance movement renews its pledge of eternal hostility to the British Forces of Occupation in Ireland. It calls on the Irish people for increased support and looks forward with confidence – in co-operation with the other branches of the Republican Movement – to a period of consolidation, expansion and preparation for the final and victorious phase of the struggle for the full freedom of Ireland.
The campaign ended, but seven years later ‘The Troubles’ began, a thirty-year conflict involving political and religious violence. Early 1969 had seen sporadic fighting, the result of a civil rights protests demanding an end to the discrimination against Catholics and Irish Nationalists. Each round of protests resulted in attacks by Ulster Protestant loyalists, and equally strong responses by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the overwhelming Protestant police force. Tensions rose and focussed on the Bogside, a major Catholic area outside the walls of Derry. In March and April 1969, there were six bomb attacks on electricity and water infrastructure targets, causing blackouts and water shortages. The attacks were first blamed on the IRA, but it later emerged members of the loyalist Ulster Protestant Volunteers and Ulster Volunteer Force had carried out the bombings in an attempt to implicate the IRA, and destabilise the Government.
There had been some steps toward reform. A majority of Ulster Unionist Party MPs voted to introduce universal adult suffrage in local government elections: the call for ‘one man, one vote’ had been one of the key demands of the civil rights movement. However, within days Terence O’Neill resigned as both party leader and Northern Ireland Prime Minister. He was replaced by James Chichester-Clark, who announced that he would continue the reforms begun by O’Neill. Despite the very English name, Chichester-Clark was from a Londonderry family: educated in England, he fought in the Irish Infantry in the World War II until he was invalided out in 1944.
Meanwhile, street violence continued to grow through 1969. In April there was serious rioting in the Bogside area of Derry, and during the Orange Order’s annual Twelfth of July marches there were further confrontations in Derry, Belfast and Dungiven. These culminated in a pitched battle in Derry from 12–14 August, the Battle of the Bogside, which most commentators identify as the beginning of the ‘Troubles’. Deep seated tensions and ancient enmities needed little to jump-start a major showdown. The RUC drove back the Catholic crowd and attempted to force its way into the Bogside, followed by loyalists who smashed the windows of Catholic homes. Thousands of Bogside residents mobilised to defend the area, and beat back the RUC with a hail of stones and petrol bombs. Further escalation was inevitable. Barricades were built, petrol bomb ‘factories’ and first aid posts were set up, and a radio transmitter (‘Radio Free Derry’) broadcast news bulletins and called on “every able-bodied man in Ireland who believes in freedom” to come defend the Bogside. The overstretched and under-resourced police resorted to throwing stones back at the Bogsiders, helped by loyalists. On 13 August, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association called for protests across Northern Ireland in support of the Bogside, and to draw police away from the fighting there, stating:
“A war of genocide is about to flare across the North. The CRA demands that all Irishmen recognise their common interdependence and calls upon the Government and people of the Twenty-six Counties to act now to prevent a great national disaster. We urgently request that the Government take immediate action to have a United Nations peace-keeping force sent to Derry.”
To read about these events now, they might seem rather inconsequential when compared to major civil wars overseas, but like a small fragment of ice breaking at the top of a mountain, once started an avalanche is almost inevitable. Very quickly people were no longer just throwing stones at each other. Responding to the events in Derry, nationalists held protests at RUC bases in Belfast and other locations. Some of these led to clashes with the RUC, even all-out attacks on the bases. In Belfast, loyalists responded by invading nationalist districts, burning houses and businesses. There were gun battles between nationalists and the RUC, and between nationalists and loyalists, and the RUC started patrolling in armoured cars mounted with machine guns: one opened fire on a block of flats and killed a nine-year-old boy. Momentum was building.
Later in the year, the Northern Ireland Joint Security Committee decided to create a ‘peace line’ to separate the Falls (predominantly Catholic) and Shankill (predominantly Protestant) communities. All agreed that there should be no question of the peace line becoming permanent, but that they might need to be strengthened in some locations. In September the British Army started construction of a ‘peace wall’, the first of many such walls across Northern Ireland that still stand today, vivid reminders scarring the land.
For a while, there were moments of co-operation. The relationship between the Army and the local population improved following the Army’s assistance with flood relief in August 1970, but, possibly as a result of being deliberately inflamed by the IRA and other extremists, relations between the Catholic population and the British Army soon worsened. From 1970 through 1972 violence grew, peaking in 1972, when nearly 500 people, just over half of them civilians, lost their lives, the worst year of the Troubles. Much of this centred on Derry, where 29 barricades had been erected by 1971, blocking access to Free Derry, 16 of which even excluded the British Army’s armoured vehicles. Why did it get so bad? It was a blame game. Unionists claimed the main reason was the formation of the Provisional IRA and the Official IRA, asserting their need to take on the role of ‘defenders of the Catholic community’. Nationalists explained the upsurge in violence was a result of various issues, especially the curfews that had been imposed.
Above all, a third event was the fatal shooting of thirteen unarmed men by the British Army at a proscribed anti-internment rally in Derry on 30 January 1972, an event to become known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, one of the most prominent moments in the Troubles. It comprised the largest number of civilians killed in a single shooting incident, greatly increasing the hostility of Catholics and Irish nationalists towards the British military and government, while accelerating the bubbling tensions. Gun battles continued, and in 1972, the Provisional IRA killed approximately 100 members of the security forces, wounded 500 others, and carried out approximately 1,300 bombings, mostly against commercial buildings. The continuing campaign also killed many civilians, notably on Bloody Friday, in July, when the IRA set off 22 bombs in the centre of Belfast, killing five bystanders, two British soldiers, a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) reservist, and a member of the Ulster Defence Association (the UDA).
Despite a temporary ceasefire in 1972 and talks with British officials, the Provisionals were determined to continue their attacks until they achieved their goal, a united Ireland. The UK government, conviced the Northern Ireland administration was incapable of containing the security situation, determined to take over the control of law and order there. This was seen as unacceptable by the Northern Ireland Government, with the result the British government pushed through emergency legislation which suspended the both unionist-controlled parliament and government, and implemented direct rule from London. The introduction of direct rule was initially intended as a short-term measure; the planned medium-term strategy was to restore self-government to Northern Ireland on a basis that was acceptable to both unionists and nationalists. As we know, agreement proved impossible, and the Troubles continued throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, with attempts at talks handicapped by a continuing political stalemate.
The aftermath of those years is complex, depressing, and in 2021 tensions are still unresolved. However, 1972 was a critical year. Did the escalation of the conflict touch everyday lives? Of course, it did. While most of the conflict was in Northern Ireland, it wasn’t long before there were bombs in London. Tension was high: there were warnings about unattended bags – possible bombs – and travellers searched at railway stations and airports. It affected many lives.
For four years in the early 1970s I was living in Edinburgh, frequently going down to London, once a week for weeks on end over two years. I would leave on a Tuesday morning, work at the Nuffield Foundation’s premises on the edge of Regent’s Park, and fly back on a Thursday evening. This was when the IRA were setting off bombs in London train stations, and we all learnt to be careful, asked to keep an eye open for suspicious activities, and unattended packages. Once, my underground journey was disrupted. Travelling in from Heathrow, I was ready to get out at Baker Street, but the train went straight through the station without stopping. What was going on? As I found out, along with other passengers when we got out at the next stop, it was because a possible bomb had been sighted on the platform at Baker Street. Of course, you have to wonder why the train wasn’t stopped before we got to the station …
It is easy to make light of events like that, but it was a tense time. One Thursday evening, I was in the queue waiting to go back to Edinburgh. In those days, security was simple but necessary. In the terminal at Heathrow, before we could board we had to walk through one of those simple metal detector arches used at most airports years ago. The man in front of me had a briefcase, and was told to leave it on a tray beside the detector. “I can’t.” “You have to.” He couldn’t because he was carrying Cabinet papers to Edinburgh, and the briefcase was locked on to his wrist; he didn’t have the key. There was a fifteen-minute stand-off. The rest of us got impatient, “Just let the bugger on” suggested one passenger. Eventually security relented and we boarded and flew safely out. Exactly one week later, there I was in the queue again. The man in front of me said “I have a revolver.” “You know the procedure?” He did. He took his revolver out, and it was put in an envelope for him to collect when he disembarked at the other end. When I got on the plane, I saw an envelope, open, by the door. There inside was the revolver. So much for security! It was funny? These were examples where a traveller could see the funny side of events, but it was the laughter that accompanies tension and fear.
1972 was momentous in another way, but this time in reducing conflict. President Nixon’s seven-day official visit to three Chinese cities was the first time a US President had visited the PRC, ending 25 years of no communication, with no diplomatic links between the two countries. It was the key first step in normalising relations between the U.S. and PRC. Mao Tso Tung was ill, and their meeting was brief, but Nixon had many sessions with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai during the trip. After the visit, the United States and the PRC governments issued a statement on their foreign policy views while Foreign Secretary Kissinger stated that the U.S. also intended to pull all its forces out from the island of Taiwan. The Chinese agreed to a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question. The statement enabled the U.S. and PRC to temporarily set aside the ‘crucial question obstructing the normalization of relations, in other words the political status of Taiwan. The U.S. did continue to maintain official relations with the government of the Republic of China in Taiwan until 1979, when it established full diplomatic relations with the PRC. If the UK faced the acceleration of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1972, the ‘troubles’ between the US and China managed a temporary period of relief that year.
Fifty years later, little has changed. There have been outbreaks of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, partly stemming from the effects of Brexit. China has taken back Hong Kong, and has been escalating threats over Taiwan and the Diaoyu (Senkaku) Islands. It’s easy to understand why: when the underlying issues are close to irresolvable, then the troubles never go away.
