Remembering the Troubles: Contesting the Recent Past in Northern Ireland [1 ed.] 0268101744, 9780268101749

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Remembering the Troubles

Remembering the Troubles Contesting the Recent Past in Northern Ireland

Edited by

JIM SMYTH

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Copyright © 2017 by University of Notre Dame Published in the United States of America The Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, University of Notre Dame, in the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Smyth, Jim, editor of compilation. Title: Remembering the Troubles : contesting the recent past in Northern Ireland / edited by Jim Smyth. Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016053427 (print) | LCCN 2017003504 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268101749 (hardcover : alkaline paper) | ISBN 0268101744 (hardcover : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9780268101756 (pdf ) | ISBN 9780268101763 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Northern Ireland—Politics and government—1969–1994— Historiography. | Social conflict—Northern Ireland—History—20th century— Historiography. | Political violence—Northern Ireland—History— 20th century—Historiography. | Collective memory—Northern Ireland. | Memory—Social aspects—Northern Ireland. | Memorials—Northern Ireland. | Northern Ireland—Politics and government—1994– | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / Ireland. | HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain. | HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century. Classification: LCC DA990.U46 R455 2017 (print) | LCC DA990.U46 (ebook) | DDC 941.70824072—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053427 ISBN 9780268101756 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected].

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: From Popular Mythology to History and Memory Jim Smyth

1. The Truth about the Troubles Ian McBride

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2. The Provisional IRA: History, Politics, and Remembrance Ruan O’Donnell

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3. Beating the Retreat on a Contested Past? The British Army and the Politics of Commemoration in Northern Ireland Aaron Edwards

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4. “Climbing over Dead Brambles”? Politics and Memory within Ulster Loyalism James W. McAuley

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5. The Past Never Stands Still: Commemorating the Easter Rising in 1966 and 1976 Margaret O’Callaghan

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6. Remembering and Forgetting: The Official Republican Movement, 1970–1982 John Mulqueen

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7. Milltown Cemetery and the Politics of Remembrance Jim Smyth

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8. Experiencing the Troubles Cathal Goan

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List of Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

I wish to warmly acknowledge the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, University of Notre Dame, for its support toward the publication of this volume and to thank Sam Fisher for his help in the final stages of putting this volume together.

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I N T RO D U C T I O N From Popular Mythology to History and Memory

Jim Smyth

Remembrance follows armed conflict, as night follows day. . . . It is not the act of remembrance which is problematic but rather the motives of some of those who engage in it. —Jay Winter, Remembering War

Among the more abiding clichés about the Irish and their troubles are that they are locked into history, that their perceptions of that history are lethally divisive—“anniversaries are the curse of Ireland,” remarked Sir Kenneth Broomfield1—and that politics and conflict are driven by senses of unexpiated grievance—“the mere intervention of years, however many,” wrote Oliver MacDonagh, can “do nothing whatever to change the ethical reality.”2 Moreover, it is often argued that politically toxic inheritance rests on simplistic and tendentious distortions of complex realities—history as morality tale or popular mythology. Thus the task of the professional historian, according to (now-“classical”) revisionist prognosis, is to purge popular beliefs and present politics of pernicious and divisive myth, rubbing out legends with the cleansing 1

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Introduction

astringents of archival evidence, skepticism, and irony and rendering accounts of the past “as it really was” (or some other such sub-Rankean platitude). In 1977 a founding father of the revisionist project, T. W. Moody, called for “a war of mental liberation from servitude to myth.” A decade earlier Tom Dunne recalls a “brief, brisk homily” delivered to him, and other students in University College, Dublin, by the historian Maureen Wall: “You probably think that this is a dreadful country, and indeed in many ways it is. But it’s up to you to do something about it—don’t walk away from it, stay here and help to change it.” Recalling also “her low-key but clinically efficient dissection of the mythologies of nationalist historiography,” Wall, it appears, was enlisting these eager young historians as foot soldiers in Moody’s (as yet formally undeclared) war.3 Irish revisionism is open to the usual objections concerning positivist technique: the inexpungible subjectivity of the historian; the inescapable constraints imposed upon him by the cultural assumptions and illusions of his time; the inevitable elisions, abridgements, and rhetorical and fictive elements intrinsic to all narrative construction; and so on. All these arguments were duly marshaled by critics of revisionism in the controversy which began—to its credit—in the pages of the discipline’s house journal, Irish Historical Studies, in 1989. And none of these arguments are peculiar, of course, to the Irish case. All of them are rehearsed, for example, by Michael Bentley, in his study of what he terms English historical modernism,4 a scholarly style which paralleled, informed, and, indeed, inspired Irish historical revisionism. The controversy which blew up in the early 1990s is well documented. To look back on it now is to cast into doubt the notion that controversy, by generating new ideas and fine-tuning established ones, is intellectually productive. There is precious little evidence of movement on either side of this debate, let alone of anyone changing their minds. From the standpoint of 1996, George Boyce and Alan O’Day looked back to 1991 and speculated on perhaps “the final collapse of the anti-revisionist case—that is,” they continued, “if that case had ever been based on rational argument.”5 Here is the language of stalemate, not of maneuver (or liberation). Such immobility is partly explained by the political stakes in play.6 Whereas English modernism’s assault on Whig teleologies, though never ideologically innocent, was mostly a

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matter of eliminating anachronism, the concurrent revision of Irish nationalist teleologies—“the myth of the predestinate nation,” as Moody put it—always packed a greater ideological payload. Thus the impasse. It was not, however, an entirely sterile affair. The coinage of the term “post-revisionism,” dismissed by skeptics as the old nationalist history dressed up with footnotes and a touch of Theory, nonetheless challenged a revisionist near-monopoly in professional historical discourse, opened up possibilities, especially for younger scholars, of nonauthorized approaches, and placed the revisionist project itself where it belongs, in historical perspective. The debate, framed essentially by political history, turned, ultimately, on rival conceptions of the “national question”; but in history, as in politics, it is at times more productive to change the question. The answers to different sorts of (skillfully devised) questions—subaltern, gendered, or postmodern, for example—can only but complicate and enrich our understanding of the past. One set of questions in particular, about the history of memory, or of memory in history, intersects directly with Irish historiography’s long-standing engagement with popular, or nationalist, mythologies. In the classic revisionist and modernist canon myth is a bad thing, a fogged-up mirror which must be shattered so that the “facts” can emerge in all their unadorned clarity—procedure complete. An exemplary, if venerable, set-piece instance of that procedure is provided by Lewis Namier’s The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929), a tour de force of historical reconstruction, based almost entirely on primary sources, which demolishes decisively the myth that the young king sought to recover powers lost to the crown since 1689. His work done, Namier was content to let the matter stand. It is obviously an important function of the historian to clear up misconceptions, to demythologize, as Moody puts it; it is, however, insufficient to leave it at that. The historian of political thought J. G. A. Pocock, addressed Namier’s achievement in this way: To divide the eighteenth century at 1760, the date of George III’s accession, risks seeming to perpetuate ancient myths about a new departure in politics occasioned by that king’s policies and personality. These myths are long exploded. Nevertheless, Britain was still a personal monarchy—it can be argued that George III was the last

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Introduction

great personal monarch in its history—and in the history of political discourse it is in fact possible to find some new departures, taking their rise from actions the new king took, or was said to have taken, soon after his accession. The myth of George III is a fact of this kind of history, even if it presents as facts events and intentions which must be dismissed as myths from history in general.7 In other words what some people believed, or believe, to be the case, no matter how inaccurate they were or may be, are “facts” in their own right, and facts which call for analysis. Pocock here acknowledges myths as salient facts embedded in the history of political thought (or discourse); the French historian Pierre Nora—and his associates—takes that engagement with popular legend and misremembering much further. By his own account he is less interested in “what actually happened” than with how it was represented and misrepresented and how these processes influenced “successive presents.” Nora did not invent memory studies, but the multivolume collection of essays which he edited, Les lieux de mémoire (1981–92), did catalyze, invigorate, and, far beyond the boundaries of France, lend greater definition and self-awareness to a hitherto miscellaneous historical genre. Whereas revisionists set out to “explode,” or to “debunk,” myth, Nora is concerned with how and why such myths—or symbols, icons and traditions, popular and official, the sites of memory and the practice and performance of memorialization, commemoration, and remembrance— originated and evolved, or more proactively, were manufactured and transmitted. What’s more, it has been rightly observed, far from viewing demythologizing as “mental liberation,” “Nora and others [construe it] in terms of loss rather than gain—the impoverishment of contemporary imagination rather than the triumph of truth over error.”8 Remembering and forgetting in these shared ways are, as Ian McBride points out, “social activities,”9 which shape historical consciousness and therefore collective senses of identity—local, regional, and national. Nora’s field of focus is primarily the making of French national identities, as conveyed by the selection of essays in English translation in Rethinking France (2001), which cover topics such as the king, Versailles, national boundaries, the symbolism of the state, and the memoirs

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of men of state. Tellingly, regional identity is addressed under the rubric “The Center and the Periphery.”10 Yet the nation comprises many, sometimes discordant, communities, each remembering their own, sometimes competing, versions of the past. McBride’s The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology (1997) is a model study of communal remembering loudly at odds with national identity formation. Guy Biener’s theoretically engaged Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (2007) concentrates on Counties Mayo and Longford. And as Biener’s title reminds us, memory studies’ closest cognate discipline is that most intensely local field of inquiry, folklore. Few societies fetishize remembrance and commemoration with the insistence and strenuous partisanship of “Northern Ireland” (no agreed upon term is available). Where else is there needed a Parades Commission to adjudicate the routes of annual marches marking historic anniversaries (and territory), viewed by participants as an affirmation of tradition and by opponents as sectarian provocation? Even before the Troubles, when wall murals tended to be confined to depictions of King “Billy” on his white horse crossing the River Boyne, “Ulster” graffiti when not directed towards his holiness in Rome enjoined the citizenry to “Remember” either 1690 or 1916. With the almost ending of “the north’s” thirty years’ war, the trauma still raw in a still deeply divided society, remembering the Troubles entails, depending on who you believe, either confronting the past in the name of resolution and reconciliation or a continuation of the conflict by other means. Taking the Good Friday Agreement as baseline the processes of remembering took off right away, officially, for example, in the shape of the Saville Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday, 1972. First announced in January 1998, some three months before the Belfast Agreement (as it is also known) was reached, Saville, which issued its report in 2010, turned out to be the longest, most expensive judicial inquiry in history, costing, according to one estimate, almost twenty times as much as the 9/11 Commission.11 Remembering the Troubles was always part of the Troubles as new dates were steadily added to the commemorative calendar: 9 August, for instance, marking the introduction of internment in 1971. But since 1998 public debate over the recent past has intensified. Demands for further judicial inquiries into still controversial episodes persist, such

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Introduction

as the cases of the alleged collusion of British security services in the Dublin-Monaghan bombings in 1974, or in 1989 in the Loyalist assassination of solicitor, Pat Finucane. Plaques, memorials, and murals proliferate, and from 2005 to 2014 Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Historical Enquiries Teams continued, not without controversy, to investigate unsolved murders. Not only is no end in sight, in 2012 all this activity, argument, and campaigning converged with the so-called decade of centenaries, stretching from the hundredth anniversary of the Ulster Covenant in 1912 to the end of the civil war in 1923.12 Public appetite, north and south, for the politics of remembrance, and their prominence in contemporary political culture, is illustrated by a random sampling of headlines from the Irish Times in the first months of 2012. These include “[Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Owen] Paterson Warns of Centenaries Being ‘Hijacked’” (3 February); “North Needs to Confront Past Quickly, Says D[irector] P[ublic] P[rosecutions]” (3 February); “Remembering in NI Need Not Be Divisive for Communities” (2 March); “Time to Meet Challenge of Finding Way for Historical Reflection on This Island” (20 March); “Grant of £900,000 to Address Troubles Legacy” (18 April); and “Oireachtas Seeks Bombings Inquiry” (18 May). Or moving forward—again randomly—to 2013, the Irish Times reported, “British Government Trying to Distance Itself from North’s Past—MP” (10 September); “Ahead of Haass Talks Amnesty International Complains of Failure to Deal with Past in Northern Ireland” (11 September); “Relatives Seek Review of UK Decision on Omagh Inquiry” (12 September); and “Efforts at Reconciliation in North Hampered by Myths about the Troubles” (21 November). Or again, no sign of resolution had emerged by 2015: “North Caught in Tangled Web ‘Dealing’ with the Past” (15 October); “Victims of the Troubles Promised ‘Legacy’ Issues Will Be Addressed” (14 December); and so on and on. In Ireland, remarked ATQ Stewart, all history is applied history.13 The past is present. It is therefore not surprising that versions of what happened during the Troubles conflict. The British Army’s Operation Banner and the Provisional IRA’s Long War plainly offer different narratives. Good history must stick to the rules of evidence, but it can never be either quite definitive or entirely objective, especially in a case like the Troubles, where rival interpretations are fiercely disputed and the myth

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of the intellectual detachment of the professional historian is even more threadbare than usual. The essays in this book thus embrace a diversity of perspectives: the Provisional Republican version of events, as well as that of its Official Republican rival; Loyalist understandings of the recent past, as well as the British Army’s authorized for-the-record account. Other contributors look at the importance of commemoration and memorialization to Irish Republican culture, and at the individual memory of one of the noncombatant majority swept up in the conflict.14 Ian McBride opens, however, with an early draft of history on the (contested) meaning of it all. NOTES The chapter epigraph is from Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, 2006), 281, 287. 1. Quoted by Brian M. Walker, “Commemorations Can Be Strong Unifying Influence,” Irish Times, 27 January 2012. 2. Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: Two Centuries of Anglo-Irish Conflict, 1780–1980 (London, [1983] 1990), 1. 3. T. W. Moody, “Irish History and Irish Mythology,” Hermathena 134 (1978); this essay is reproduced, and more readily accessible, in Ciaran Brady, ed., Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism, 1938–1994 (Dublin, 1999). Tom Dunne, “Maureen Wall (née McGeehin) 1918–1972: A Memoir,” in Gerard O’Brien, ed., Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century: Collected Essays of Maureen Wall (Dublin, 1989), x–xi. 4. Michael Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2005). 5. D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day, eds., The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (London, 1996), 10. 6. The function also of professional socialization, and of personal and institutional loyalties, must not be underestimated in accounting for individual attachment to “abstract” theories and ideas. 7. J. G. A. Pocock, “Political Thought in the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1760–1798, Part 1: The Imperial Crisis,” in J. G. A. Pocock with Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer, eds., The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1993), 146. 8. Ian McBride, “Introduction: Memory and National Identity in Modern Ireland,” in Ian McBride, ed., History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), 37.

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Introduction

9. McBride, “Introduction,” 12. 10. Rethinking France =Les lieux de mémoire, trans. Mary Trouille, under the direction of Pierre Nora; translation directed by David P. Jordan (Chicago, 2001–). 11. Gerald Warner, “Why Did the Saville Inquiry Cost almost Twenty Times the 9/11 Commission?,” Daily Telegraph, 18 June 2010. 12. See John Horne and Edward Madigan, eds., Towards Commemoration: Ireland in War and Revolution, 1912–1923 (Dublin, 1913). 13. I have been unable to locate the source for this quotation. 14. One of the anonymous reader’s reports on the manuscript of this book asks, where is the chapter on moderate, perhaps majority, political opinion and memory? It is a very good question, but I suspect that such a chapter would be next to impossible to write. Neither the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) nor the Alliance Party does wall murals, parading, or commemoration. In the case of mainstream Unionism, although it is more “respectable” than popular Loyalism, its close links historically with the Orange Order render problematic the designation “moderate.”

CHAPTER 1

T H E T RU T H A B O U T T H E T RO U B L E S

Ian McBride

Northern Ireland is a small region, comparable in size to Yorkshire or Connecticut, and with just 1.8 million inhabitants. But for scholars and students interested in the burgeoning field of memory studies it presents a vast academic safari park. Where else can we find a society—or perhaps we should say two societies—that reenact their violent past so obsessively? In the 1990s there were close to 3,500 commemorative parades taking place annually—one for every five hundred inhabitants, or ten for each day of the year.1 The vast majority of these are sponsored by the Orange Order, that curious mixture of Masonic fraternity, old boys club, and vigilante patrol, and its cognate organizations; they mark the anniversaries of the two iconic seventeenth-century confrontations, the Battle of the Boyne and the Siege of Derry, but also of the Battle of the Somme (1916) and more recent confrontations. Republican parades are fewer but are still vital to mobilizing the faithful; this is no longer the job of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which closely mirrored the 9

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The Truth about the Troubles

structures and symbols of Orangeism but is now effectively controlled by Sinn Féin and related groups such as the National Graves Association, Belfast. Easter remains the crux of the republican calendar, and the 1916 rising is still the paradigmatic act of resistance, even if Belfast’s contribution to it was practically nonexistent.2 It is hard to overstate the absolute centrality, in terms of both ideology and organization, of these processions to unionist and nationalist mobilization. In the lulls between Northern Ireland’s various elections they keep the pot boiling. This is especially true of the marches of the Orange Order, whose leadership has painted the organization into a series of increasingly futile corners since the Drumcree standoffs of the mid-1990s.3 In all the upheavals within Unionism since the sixties the Orange Order has indicated where the political center of Unionism lies, and the bands, banners, and slogans associated with it have provided the standard trappings of loyalist rebellion.4 It is the oldest political institution in Ireland, twice as old as the Ulster Unionist Council or the original Sinn Féin, and it is remarkable that no satisfactory historical study of the organization exists.5 Like Terence O’Neill and Brian Faulkner before him, David Trimble became convinced in the 1990s that Northern Ireland could not survive without cross-community support. Like them he found it necessary to articulate a modern, pluralist kind of Unionism, and indeed did so with more conviction and imagination than any of his predecessors. Eventually, however, he was defeated by segregationists who emphasized the traditional religious and cultural expressions of Ulster Protestants and above all the rituals of Orangeism.6 Republicanism has been equally reliant on “memory work.”7 A trawl through issues of An Phoblacht over the past fifteen years quickly confirms this point. In just a few weeks during the summer of 2011, An Phoblacht reports a march through Kilrea in remembrance of volunteer Tommy Donaghy, led by a color party from the South Derry Martyrs Band, with a graveside oration by the Sinn Féin politician Francie Molloy; the Eamonn Lafferty Memorial Lecture, given by Martin McGuinness, in honor of the first Derry volunteer killed by the British Army in the 1970s; a graveside oration for Patrick Cannon, who died in a premature explosion on the Donegal/Tyrone border in 1976; the unveiling of a plaque in memory of Fian Tobias Molloy, killed by a rubber bul-

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let fired by the British Army in 1972; and an article to mark the thirtyfifth anniversary of the assassination of the vice president of Sinn Féin, Máire Drumm.8 “Republicanism sustains itself,” Malachi O’Doherty once caustically observed, “for the work of respecting the dead. . . . If the cause collapses, there may be no one left to tend their graves or honour their memory. Conversely, if people forget to honour the dead, the cause will collapse, and scepticism is as close as a neighbour.”9 The republican movement is by far the most dynamic manipulator of collective memory on the island of Ireland. The Provisionals often present themselves as a natural outgrowth of the Civil Rights campaign of the 1960s. They have quietly co-opted Joe McCann, the preeminent icon of the Official IRA.10 And, all the while, they preserve the republican tradition of Wolfe Tone, the Fenians, and Patrick Pearse in what they regard as its purest form. Without abandoning the language of national self-determination, republican groups have broadened their appeal by reframing political demands in the newer discourse of human rights violations. The Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign, to take one prominent example, has demonstrated the remarkable capacity of republicanism to reinvent itself, successfully internationalizing the elaborate rituals that grew up around the annual commemoration of the fourteen unarmed protesters killed by soldiers of the Parachute Regiment (Paras) on 30 January 1972. At the same time, the prolonged campaign to overturn the findings of the Widgery Tribunal became linked with other, exclusively republican goals: the recovery of the remains of Tom Williams, the IRA man hanged for killing a member of the Catholic Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in 1942, or the call for an inquiry into the three unarmed IRA members killed on Gibraltar in 1988.11 This closer identification with physical-force resistance to British rule takes us a long way from the famous image of Fr. Edward Daly waving his white handkerchief as he helped move the dying Jackie Duddy. The brutality of the Paras marked a turning point precisely because it was indiscriminate: ordinary Catholics realized that “it could have been me.”12 In the years since 1998 Sinn Féin has successfully repositioned itself as the most effective guarantor of equality for nationalists while simultaneously protecting its monopoly over the memory of republican armed struggle. Maintaining this tightrope act means that, for some of the time

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The Truth about the Troubles

at least, republican violence has to be characterized not so much as a revolutionary instrument in the struggle for national liberation, but as the unfortunate product of unequal political and social relationships. Such elisions have shocked historians and journalists but are easily forgiven by nationalist voters who see Sinn Féin as their most effective political voice.13 As with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Sinn Féin has compromised its founding principles for electoral gain, maintaining the illusion of ideological fundamentalism through the energy it devotes to memorialization, thus safeguarding its core constituency from more radical alternatives. Each celebration of armed struggle risks alienating moderates within the nationalist bloc; but the offense caused to unionists is always much deeper, and ultimately the inevitable unionist reaction will reproduce the basic communal fault line which sustains the Sinn Féin vote.14 These entrenched cultures of commemoration profoundly shaped the emergence of the Northern Ireland conflict.15 They continue to shape the postconflict era, in which the Troubles are fought over again, this time symbolically, as the main protagonists seek to control public discussion of the past. Scholars interested in the memory boom will find all the hard cases familiar from other “transitional” societies.16 Investigation of the “dirty war” has uncovered evidence of persistent collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries.17 The publicity surrounding public inquiries into state violence (most obviously Bloody Sunday) has reinforced the demand for official investigations of particular republican atrocities: Omagh, Claudy, La Mon, Kingsmill. Those injured or bereaved in such notorious attacks have sometimes combined to exert political pressure, as when the La Mon victims denounced Ian Paisley for entering government with Sinn Féin.18 Northern Ireland also has its own “disappeared”: the painstaking identification and excavation of burial sites has so far uncovered the remains of ten of the seventeen individuals killed and secretly interred by republican paramilitaries.19 Finally, the Troubles created their own lieux de mémoire, most obviously the prisons of the Crumlin Road, Armagh, and, above all, Long Kesh/ the Maze, the subject of recurrent controversy since the 360-acre site was transferred to the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister in 2002.20

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The plan to construct a “Peace-Building and Conflict Resolution Centre” alongside the retained buildings of the Maze prison has on several occasions produced a state of paralysis in the power-sharing executive. But an examination of newspapers during the first fifteen years since the Good Friday Agreement also reveals the continuous low-level antagonism caused by the “memory wars” at a local level. The memorialization of the Troubles dead began soon after the first IRA ceasefire.21 A number of republican memorials were denounced by unionists as offensive to those families who had suffered as a result of paramilitary violence. Perhaps the most dramatic case was the sculpture of a ten-foot masked Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) man in Derry City Cemetery, erected in honor of the hunger strikers Michael Devine and Patsy O’Hara. One Protestant pensioner threatened to exhume the remains of his parents from the cemetery and have them reburied elsewhere so that he would not have to pass “this disgusting statue of a terrorist” every time he visted their grave.22 The Equality Commission was asked to investigate complaints about two other Hunger Strike memorials in Dungiven and Dromore (Co. Tyrone), and a Celtic cross dedicated to Colum Marks, an IRA man killed during a mortar bomb attack on the Downpatrick RUC station.23 Both are located in public spaces. Depressingly, memorials on all sides—to republicans, loyalists, British soldiers, the local security forces and even civilians—have been paint-bombed, defaced, or smashed.24 Like flags, murals, and painted curbstones, memorials to the victims of the Northern Ireland conflict have become boundary markers in a society where communal segregation has increased rather than diminished since the ceasefires. The combination of voter polarization and the relative stability of power-sharing has created a situation where cultural validation—and perhaps even the past itself—becomes a resource to be sliced up and allocated like social services, schools, broadcasting funds, or housing. The result is a kind of territorialization of memory, in which mutually exclusive narratives of the conflict become embedded in Northern Ireland’s tangled sectarian geography, and the task of establishing a principled basis for coexistence between the two communities is abandoned. The impossibility of reaching a common understanding of the conflict is encapsulated in the comments of the Democratic

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The Truth about the Troubles

Unionist MP Jeffrey Donaldson, a key figure in discussions over the Conflict Resolution Centre intended for the vast Maze prison complex: Hand on my heart, if I’m being totally honest with you, I would have levelled the site, I just would have levelled the site. It’s in my constituency. I would have put things on it that are about the new Northern Ireland not the old Northern Ireland. Look, if people want to retain an H-Block, or want to retain elements of the prison, fine, take it down, ship it off to West Belfast. . . . You could give the Loyalists an H-Block and put it wherever they want to put it as well.25 In spite of increasingly high levels of segregation, not all the inhabitants of the six counties live in ethnic enclaves, or want to, however, and even those who do still share the same state-run institutions (including the Equality Commission, the Parades Commission, the Victims Commission), the same public spaces, and the same mass media, where they not unreasonably expect to have their values given some form of expression. So far it has proved impossible to devise a method of dealing with the past that commands widespread support. The past has been used to maintain ethnic solidarity in the divided towns of the North, and used in ways that reinforce hostility between the two communities. For those who hope that history—or memory—might help people of the North to overcome division the outlook is bleak.

THE CONFLICT ABOUT THE CONFLICT

Surveying rival explanations of the Troubles, Brendan O’Leary and John McGarry have remarked that Northern Ireland is the subject of a “metaconflict,” that is, “a conflict about what the conflict is about.”26 The antagonism between unionists and nationalists has variously been viewed as an ethnic conflict, a clash of cultures, an anticolonial struggle, or a terrorist campaign; some think it is about national self-determination, and others see it as an expression of religious sectarianism. Concealed within the term “Troubles,” the rather homely euphemism used in everyday

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Loyalist mural, Shankill Road, West Belfast, 2004. Claremont Colleges Digital Library. Photo copyright © Tony Crowley. By permission of Tony Crowley.

speech by large sections of both communities in Northern Ireland, there exists a complicated range of violent acts. It might be helpful to make a basic distinction between two patterns of conflict, which can be described as vertical and horizontal. The first, or vertical, pattern consists of the violence between republican insurgents and the security forces of the British state, and it accounts for many of the deaths that resulted from gun battles, sniper attacks, assassinations, and ambushes. Of the 2001 deaths attributable to republican paramilitaries, more than half were members of the security forces. The British Army meanwhile killed 117 republicans, and the principal objective of Operation Banner was to contain the IRA. Many observers viewed this conflict as a

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The Truth about the Troubles

form of anticolonial struggle, a continuation of the IRA campaign of 1919–21. This is also how the Provisionals portrayed their own “armed struggle.” It is an interpretation embodied in the military terminology employed by republicans—of volunteers, OCs, active service units— and mimicked to some extent by loyalist paramilitaries. Republican insurgents saw themselves as fighting a war against the British state. But the IRA campaign was activated and fueled by street disturbances between Protestant and Catholic crowds. Patterns of residential segregation, rioting along territorial boundaries, and localized bursts of ethnic cleansing, or “burning out,” were all recurrent features of the history of Belfast since the 1830s.27 The sporadic rumbling of this horizontal violence was present during those periods of Irish history which appeared to be relatively calm at the level of high politics. As early as 1813 a Twelfth of July parade in Belfast precipitated a riot resulting in two fatalities. Regular detonations followed in 1832, 1835, 1841, 1843, 1852, 1857, 1864, 1872, 1880, 1884, 1886, 1898, 1907, 1909, 1912, 1920–22, and 1935. Orange processions frequently provided the spark, but other precipitating factors included elections, the preaching of antipopery sermons, a funeral procession, even on one occasion a Sunday school procession. In Derry, meanwhile, there were major disturbances in 1869 and 1883, while riots occurred in other towns such as Lisburn, Lurgan, and Portadown. By the 1880s these riots had already assumed ritualized forms. In his vivid book, The Truth about Ulster (1914), the journalist F. Frankfort Moore recalled how he had learned “the proper way to construct a street riot” in Portadown in 1869; in later decades he charted the adaptation of the street fighter’s technology as kidney-shaped cobbles gave way to “square setts” and eventually to riveters’ nuts from the shipyard.28 That the IRA should have been resurrected in the streets running between the Shankill and the Falls Road should not surprise us. West Belfast had provided the fault lines of Victorian and Edwardian disturbances, as it provided them in 1964 and 1969. The most recent scholarly account of the early Troubles documents fully the communal tensions fomented by John McKeague’s Shankill Defence Association, frequently but inaccurately labeled “Paisleyites” at the time. The stone throwing and street fighting orchestrated by McKeague escalated into

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full-scale rioting and the intimidation of Catholic families living in “Protestant areas,” creating the conditions in which “forties men” like Billy McKee, Seamus Twomey, and Joe Cahill were able to reactivate the IRA. If the loosely structured Protestant crowd was the initial aggressor, it was the armed interventions of this small group of veteran republicans at Unity Flats in August 1969 and at St. Matthew’s Church in June 1970 that propelled the violence onto a more lethal plane.29 In their attempts to manage the Northern Ireland problem, London and Dublin have left the “meta-conflict” to the natives. It is surely part of the historian’s job, however, to test the concepts and categories employed by the protagonists, particularly where they depend on simplified or distorted representations of the past. Since the 1994 ceasefire our understanding of the character of political violence in Northern Ireland has been transformed by the statistical analysis carried out by Marie Smyth and the other researchers associated with the Cost of the Troubles Survey.30 Their findings have challenged common perceptions of perpetrators and victims in a manner that discomfits both unionists and republicans. Most notably, the examination of those killed reveals that republican paramilitaries have been responsible for more Catholic deaths than the British Army and the local security forces combined—in spite of the IRA’s self-image as the defender of nationalist communities. For most unionists, meanwhile, Northern Ireland was a successful democratic polity in which ordinary people came under attack from terrorists. A subconscious tendency to equate the majority of ordinary, law-abiding people with the Protestant majority is perhaps evident in a detailed memorandum drawn up by FAIR (Families Acting for Innocent Relatives) in 2004: We must make the point that [our case] was in fact a mirror image of the South African experience where instead of a majority being denied their rights and democratic expression by a minority we saw the opposite. Here a violent terrorist minority sought to overturn the democratic wish of the majority and impose their political will through force. In the process they abused the rights of all and murdered with abandon. To equate that to a struggle for liberation and freedom is simply to accept the propaganda of the terrorist.31

18

The Truth about the Troubles

This link was explicitly recognized in the “Long March” of victims’ groups and their supporters between Derry and Portadown in the summer of 1999, where the organizers’ aims slipped unthinkingly from drawing attention to the “forgotten victims” of the conflict to the broader project of securing “parity of esteem for Protestant culture and heritage and for support for deprived unionist communities.”32 In fact the Catholic minority (roughly one-third of the population in 1969, rising to roughly two-fifths by 1998) accounted for a majority of all those civilians killed. (Table 1.1.) The statistics on who was responsible for the deaths between 1966 and 1999 (table 1.2)—particularly the finding that republican paramilitaries caused almost 60 percent of them—are now frequently repeated in the public domain, where they are used to close down debate rather than open it up. They do not provide anything like a complete view of “the cost of the Troubles.” Much less research has been carried out on those injured during the conflict, about ten times the number of fatalities. To get some idea of the challenge it is worth considering a littleknown survey on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) conducted by four psychiatrists working at hospitals in and around Belfast in the 1980s. On examining the case records of 499 victims of political violence they found a high incidence of depression, sleep disturbance, and startle reactions; 46 percent had experienced marital disharmony, and 4 percent had attempted suicide. The cases remind us of the wider impact of insurgency and civil disturbance, scarcely the subject of serious research. They include 90 targets of attempted assassination, 34 people injured in knee-cappings or other “punishment” assaults; and 75 people held captive by paramilitaries, usually in their own houses. Almost 40 percent of the total had witnessed a violent incident in which the subject or someone close to him or her was at risk; almost 30 percent had sustained injuries of various degrees of severity; 17 percent had seen someone being killed. Of the total group it was found that 23 percent had suffered PTSD.33 It has been pointed out that these regional statistics conceal significant local variations which have shaped perceptions of responsibility and blame.34 In the working-class nationalist areas of West and North Belfast we can find patterns of violence dominated by the vertical struggle

Table 1.1. Distribution of Deaths by Religion, 1966–1999 No.

%

Catholic civilians Protestant civilians Security forces (NI) British Army Republicans Loyalists Other

1,232 698 509 503 392 144 158

33.88 19.20 14.00 13.83 10.78 3.96 4.35

Total

3,636

100

Source: David McKittrick et al., Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Edinburgh, 1999), 1477.

Table 1.2. Responsibility for Deaths, 1966–1999 No.

%

Republican paramilitaries Loyalist paramilitaries All security forces Other

2,139 1,050 367 80

58.83 28.88 10.09 2.20

Total

3,636

100

Source: McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, 1476.

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The Truth about the Troubles

between the IRA and the security forces. In Ardoyne, for example, 99 local people died during the conflict, most of them Catholics. Although 26 residents were killed by the state forces, more often than not in disputed circumstances no one has ever been arrested or questioned about these deaths. A further 50 residents were killed by loyalist paramilitaries, who in some cases at least benefited from collusion with the state forces. It is easy to see how many people in North Belfast came to regard the Troubles as an attempt by the British state to coerce and control the nationalist people. Following four years of gathering oral histories, the Ardoyne Commemoration Project reached three conclusions: 1. The British State forces acted with impunity. 2. There was collusion between the British State agencies and Unionist paramilitaries. This was structured and institutional. 3. The British Government was an armed, active participant in the conflict.35 In many rural areas east of the Bann, by contrast, members of the local security forces greatly outnumbered civilians or paramilitaries among those who lost their lives. In many cases family members witnessed the attacks, and sometimes were injured or killed. In the town of Dungannon, County Tyrone, republicans were responsible for twothirds of all deaths, while the local security forces killed none. In the “bandit country” of Newry and South Armagh republicans were responsible for 88 percent of all deaths, and 60 percent of those killed belonged to the state forces.36 Particularly vulnerable were the members of the RUC and the UDR, often part-timers, who lived on isolated farms in areas where republican sympathies were entrenched. Of forty police officers and UDR soldiers killed in County Armagh during the 1980s, more than a quarter were ambushed while off-duty: visiting a livestock market, driving to a darts match, doing the milk delivery round or other day jobs. In addition, the IRA killed four civilians who were former members of the security forces and one retired unionist politician— mostly in their homes. The nature of these attacks inevitably gave the impression that family members were fair game: seventeen-year-old Trevor Foster was blown up while parking his father’s car in the family’s garage; Cecily Gibson was killed by a land mine alongside her husband,

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a senior judge.37 Against a background of low-level harassment and sectarian tension republican violence in such areas was interpreted as a struggle to drive out the Protestants. The most contentious element in the meta-conflict has been the role of the Provisional IRA. It should be immediately obvious that divisions over the IRA’s campaign cannot be completely divorced from differences over the existence of Northern Ireland itself. Republicans were able to claim during the 1970s and 1980s that they could not join the democratic process because there was no authentically democratic process while partition remained. Sinn Féin’s position is now constrained, however, by its participation in constitutional structures which do not provide any compelling reasons for thinking that a united Ireland is significantly closer than it was twenty or thirty years ago. Republicans have been unable to reverse the partition of Ireland, to undo the basic legal and constitutional framework of Northern Ireland, or even to have the criminal records of politically motivated prisoners expunged. Increasingly, therefore, mainstream republicans justify their long war by reference to the brutality of the British Army and the complicity of British intelligence agencies in loyalist assassinations, as opposed to the mere fact of British rule itself. For the most part the London and Dublin governments have tolerated this rewriting of the republican past in the interests of peace. Many people have been bewildered or angered by the latitude allowed to former paramilitaries. Michael Gallagher, whose son Aidan was one of the twenty-nine civilians killed in the Omagh bomb on 15 August 1998, has complained that “the word ‘terrorist’ seems to have been removed from the dictionary that we used too often in Northern Ireland over the past 35 years.”38 Republicans are perfectly aware that they never enjoyed the active support of most the nationalists they claimed to represent. But the selfimage of the IRA volunteer as a soldier of the people is nevertheless rooted in experience. The Provisionals derived their mandate from the networks of sympathizers who gave them intelligence, shelter, and food and who supported their protest within the prisons.39 Their morale was further sustained by the fact that many of those nationalists who rejected the violence nevertheless “felt they could identify with the hurt and anger that was generating it.”40 It is impossible to quantify levels of popular backing for the IRA and very difficult to interpret what little

22

The Truth about the Troubles

evidence there is. John Hume’s principled denunciations of violence were consistent and in the circumstances courageous.41 In the 1984 European elections Sinn Féin ran a high-profile candidate, Danny Morrison, who received 13.3 percent of first preference votes, as compared to Hume’s 22.1 percent. This was perhaps the closest thing we have to a nationalist poll on the relative attractions of moral and physical force. Research carried out in 1978 found that 65.8 percent of Catholics agreed, to varying degrees, with the statement, “The IRA are basically a bunch of criminals and murderers” (table 1.3). Even Sinn Féin voters were divided on the use of armed struggle, with more than a fifth of those sampled in a MORI poll conducted in 1984 opposing the pursuit of political change by physical force (see table 1.4).

Table 1.3. Attitudes to Paramilitary Violence, 1978 “The IRA are basically patriots and idealists”

Strongly disagree Moderately disagree Slightly disagree Slightly agree Moderately agree Strongly agree

Catholics

Protestants

18.8 19.9 14.9 21.8 15.7 8.8

45.8 13.0 6.5 11.6 9.2 13.9

“The IRA are basically a bunch of criminals and murderers”

Strongly disagree Moderately disagree Slightly disagree Slightly agree Moderately agree Strongly agree

Catholics

Protestants

11.8 9.6 12.9 21.2 21.2 23.4

2.1 1.9 3.8 5.0 13.0 74.2

Source: E. Moxon-Browne, “The Water and the Fish: Public Opinion and the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 5, no. 1–2 (1981): 41–72, at 58.

Ian McBride

23

Table 1.4. Nationalist Attitudes to Political Violence, 1984 How strongly do you agree or disagree that the use of violence can sometimes be justified to bring about political change?

Agree Neither Disagree Don’t know/no opinion

Sinn Féin (%)

SDLP* (%)

70 7 22 1

7 8 81 4

*Social Democratic and Labour Party. Source: E. Moxon-Browne, “Alienation: The Case of Catholics in Northern Ireland,” Journal of Political Science 14 (1986): 84.

Perhaps we can conclude that the IRA campaign enjoyed the active or passive support of somewhere between one-third and two-fifths of nationalists. All serious scholarship stresses that the momentum of the Provisionals’ campaign in Belfast was closely related to the aggression of the security forces, in particular of the British Army.42 Even in strongly nationalist areas of Belfast, however, attitudes were not static. In 1972–73 the sociologist Frank Burton found that around a third of the Catholics of Ardoyne were consistently pro-IRA, with the local priests leading the critique of militant Republicanism. Between these poles, the majority of residents tilted backward and forward, depending largely on the behavior of the British soldiers (house searches, verbal abuse, physical violence, humiliation). Many local Catholics complained that the Provisionals, far from acting as defenders of their districts, were cynically using the local population as a shield, manipulating children and adolescents. There was some ill feeling too about punishment shootings and beatings inflicted on residents. On the other hand, Burton emphasized that the Provisionals took care not to overstep the boundaries of tolerable behavior: “If the movement persistently violated community norms, doors would stop opening, billets would be harder to get, informing would rise and their isolation would increase.”43 Even in

24

The Truth about the Troubles

Ardoyne, ambivalence was probably more common than absolute positions on the morality of physical force.

NORTHERN IRELAND IN TRANSITION

In the Good Friday Agreement itself the importance of grappling with the legacy of violence was clearly recognized, but reconciliation was hastily subordinated to more urgent political priorities. The Northern Irish political settlement is based on a variety of consociational governments, creating institutions which work around the entrenched antagonisms of the two main communities rather than attempt to overcome them.44 Its most distinguished theorist is Brendan O’Leary, who has memorably described the accommodation in Northern Ireland as “a bargain derived from mutually conflicting hopes about its likely long-run outcome.”45 These mutually conflicting hopes could be sustained because the external forces in London and Dublin that have driven the peace process forward have no desire to impose an official version of the past on the region’s inhabitants. The devolved structures created in 1998 constitute a repudiation of the simple majority-rule model of government which had been discredited under the old Stormont regime. By institutionalizing cross-community consensus as the basis of decision making, however, the agreement also inadvertently institutionalized the communal division deplored by so many of the individuals and groups who actively tried to make Northern Ireland a more equal, tolerant, and peaceful society.46 Members of the Legislative Assembly are required to register as unionist, nationalist, or “other.” Executive power is exercised by a duumvirate appointed by parallel consent, that is, by the support of concurrent majorities in both the unionist and nationalist blocs. Other key decisions are reached by a ‘weighted’ majority procedure, that is, by 60 percent of Assembly members, including 40 percent in each of the communal blocs. Ministerial positions are then allocated according to the d’Hondt rule, with parties nominating ministers in proportion to their strength in the Assembly. The resuscitated Stormont government reflects an entrenched stalemate rather than the hope of conflict resolution.

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The drawback is that political stability derives from the hard bargaining of the political elites rather than any broader societal shift in attitudes. A stark demonstration of this situation can be derived from results in the first elections to the Legislative Assembly, held in June 1998. The adoption of the single transferable vote system created the welcome possibility that moderates on either side might transfer their lower-order preferences across the divide in attempt to protect the Good Friday Agreement against the extremes. But the habits of communal solidarity proved resilient, with most voters transferring predominantly within their own ethnonational bloc. The available evidence suggests that a relatively small number of SDLP votes (17 percent) and “Yes” unionist votes (13 percent) were cast in support of each other’s candidates. By contrast, 41 percent of SDLP transfers went to Sinn Féin, and 56 percent of Sinn Féin lower-preference votes went to the SDLP. The pattern on the unionist side is even more revealing. The largest beneficiaries of transferred votes from the pro-agreement unionists—candidates, that is, backing David Trimble—were in fact “No” unionists, including the DUP (31 percent). Although the DUP fought the election on a belligerent “No” platform, their bitter personal attacks on Trimble for caving in to the “IRA/Sinn Féin” did not prevent 44 percent of their lower-preference votes—by far the largest single category—from going to Trimble’s “Yes men.”47 Even during this brief honeymoon period, the traditional determination of the Northern Irish voter to keep “the other side” out remained decisive. Whereas all nationalists elected to the Legislative Assembly in June 1998 were supporters of the peace process, the unionists were split down the middle. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that the division within Unionism was not caused by unhappiness with the constitutional arrangements agreed upon on Good Friday: power sharing plus crossborder bodies. The institutional links between North and South which absorbed so much attention in the all-party negotiations before Good Friday have since been viewed with remarkable indifference by unionists and republicans alike. In 1998, for the first time, the vast majority of Irish people, North and South, effectively recognized the partition of Ireland, albeit in a new, pluralist form. Sinn Féin ministers in the devolved executive engaged in an increasingly token opposition to the

26

The Truth about the Troubles

Union, as when Conor Murphy advised his Civil Service staff to refer to Northern Ireland as “the North” or simply “here.”48 Every act of the assembly, unionists point out, is an act of the crown—a judgment shared by dissident republicans. Instead, Protestant alienation was overwhelmingly focused on the early release of paramilitary prisoners, the reform of the RUC, and the refusal of the IRA to decommission its weapons. The importance of guns was not merely symbolic. The existence of Northern Ireland had always been closely linked to its security forces— and to some extent had actually grown out of them. But prisoners, policing, and decommissioning were issues with fundamental implications for the clashing historical narratives cherished by unionists and republicans. By refusing to engage convincingly in the decommissioning process between 1998 and 2005, the republican movement made it impossible for David Trimble to survive as unionist leader. Reluctance to hand over its weapons also kept Sinn Féin at the center of the peace process and left the SDLP struggling on the sidelines. This was not a risk-free strategy. Polls showed that Catholics were split over the early release of prisoners, with a third in favor, another third opposed, and the remaining third somewhere in between. More than half of all Catholics surveyed believed that decommissioning should take place before the release of politically motivated prisoners (57 percent) and before the admission to government of parties with paramilitary links (53 percent).49 But as decommissioning became the rallying cry of the unionist parties—and, indeed, the key area in which the DUP sought to outbid Trimble’s moderates—it increasingly appeared to nationalists that the real obstacle to peace was not so much the failure of the IRA to destroy its weapons as old-fashioned unionist intransigence.50 The Good Friday Agreement has therefore brought the political class together in a workable form of devolved government; to some extent, indeed, it has helped to create a political class which did not exist twenty or twenty-five years ago. In doing so, it defied the expectations of many of Northern Ireland’s most experienced commentators, including some of its most accomplished historians.51 But it rests upon one central, constructive ambiguity. The question of the perceived legitimacy of the IRA’s campaign is still bitterly divisive, often cutting through nationalist communities as well as exacerbating hostility between na-

Ian McBride

27

tionalists and unionists. This question was left unresolved by the 1998 agreement, which provided for the early release of politically motivated prisoners but also required committed parties to renounce the use or threat of physical force for political purposes. As Sinn Féin has entered the political mainstream so too has the term “IRA volunteer,” once strictly avoided in the media, and the grouping together of the security forces and paramilitary organizations as “ex-combatants.” The core principles of consociational democracy provide that executive power should be shared across the two communities; that each community enjoys a measure of autonomy, particularly in cultural matters; that each benefits proportionally from public resources; and that each possesses the right of veto over major changes. It is very difficult to see how this kind of logic can be applied to the profoundly moral challenges of “dealing with the past.” Consociationalism has proved capable of managing the Northern Ireland conflict, but it has done nothing to resolve the conflict-about-the-conflict. To illustrate the point we only have to recall the complete failure to find agreement on the definition of the “victims” of the Troubles. When the executive was unable to agree on the appointment of a victims commissioner at the beginning of 2008, the decision was taken instead to appoint four, rather in the spirit of the d’Hondt mechanism. They were Bertha McDougal, whose husband, a reserve police officer, was shot dead by the INLA in 1981; Patricia McBride, whose brother Tony was killed in a shoot-out with the Special Air Service (SAS) near the Fermanagh border in 1984; the peace activist Brendan McAllister, director of Mediation Northern Ireland; and Mike Nesbitt, a former television newscaster who would go on to become leader of the Ulster Unionist Party. It was an admirably balanced team, representing both the shades of opinion in the region and the multifaceted nature of the conflict. But a press release describing McBride’s brother as an “IRA volunteer” who was “killed on active service” instantly alienated unionists, forcing the DUP to harden its position on “dealing with the past.”52 As the party’s spokesman for victims put it: There has to be some moral line that you create here, because if you don’t create that moral line what you say to future generations is

28

The Truth about the Troubles

that, well, actually it’s okay to go out and kill people, it’s okay to engage in criminal and terrorist activity because eventually you’ll be almost absolved of it, and you yourself are a victim.53

THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH

Official attempts to deal with the legacy of the conflict began with the appointment in October 1997 of Sir Kenneth Bloomfield as victims commissioner, a new post with a controversial future, as we have seen. Bloomfield had previously been head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service and governor of BBC Northern Ireland. His approach reflected the more liberal, cosmopolitan strand of Unionism that Jennifer Todd has called the “Ulster-British” tradition.54 Perhaps predictably, Bloomfield’s report, We Will Remember Them (1998), displeased some of the most vocal elements within both Unionism and Nationalism. The political context for the report was the anger caused by the phased release of paramilitary prisoners envisaged in the Good Friday Agreement, hence perhaps Bloomfield’s conclusion that “victims must, at barest minimum, be as well served as former prisoners in terms of their rehabilitation, future employment, etc,” and his recommendation that those killed or injured in the service of the community—that is, the security forces—should receive special consideration.55 This was not enough to satisfy some of the unionist victims organizations, but Bloomfield’s relatively brief consideration of those killed by the security forces also led to accusations that “a hierarchy of victimhood” was being constructed: over the next decade Bloomfield was repeatedly attacked by organizations such as Relatives for Justice which lobbied for inquiries into state violence, with an increasing emphasis on allegations of collusion between the security forces and the loyalist paramilitaries. Bloomfield’s vision of a Northern Ireland Memorial Building, set in “a peaceful location, amidst beautifully-landscaped gardens,” inspired partly by the Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem, with its “extraordinary Chagall windows,” implied a level of decorum rather at odds with the unfolding debate on victimhood.56 The various options he considered—a memorial, an annual Reconciliation Day, a truth recov-

Ian McBride

29

ery process—were subsequently explored in a series of extensive consultation exercises and reports carried out by the Healing Through Remembering project (2002), the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee of the House of Commons (2005), and the Consultative Group on the Past (2009) chaired by Robin Eames and Denis Bradley. The creativity, sensitivity, and sheer hard work involved in these investigations provide a stark contrast with the masterful inactivity of the politicians. The Eames-Bradley team, in particular, crafted plans for a series of interlocking mechanisms to deal with sectarianism, the review of “historical cases,” a victim-centered mode of information recovery, and “thematic” inquiries into collusion and paramilitary activity. Months of painstaking research and reflection were nullified when the Consultative Group’s recommendation that relatives of those killed during the conflict—paramilitaries included—should receive a recognition payment of £12,000 was leaked to the press.57 In the absence of state-driven projects, the memorialization of the dead has proceeded in the partisan and piecemeal manner described earlier. Rather than bringing together the two communities on the basis of their shared experience of loss, commemoration has reinforced the convoluted sectarian geography of the North, adding new refinements to its enclaves, interface areas, and borderlands. Even the most appalling civilian losses, such as the Omagh bombing of 1998, cannot be remembered without objections.58 Although the number of paramilitaries who lost their lives is far outweighed by the British Army (approx. 400), the RUC (approx. 300), and the UDR (approx. 200), the state security forces have mourned their dead largely in closed spaces. There are exceptions, such as the memorial windows to the RUC and the UDR in Belfast City Hall; but the RUC George Cross Gardens inside the headquarters of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, can only be visited by prior arrangement, and British Army memorials are sited within barracks. Individual officers have been commemorated privately, on plaques in churches or Orange Halls or on Orange banners: in Clogherny Parish Church, near Omagh, seventeen members of the security forces and three civilians are named in a Roll of Honour.59 While the British government naturally seeks to protect the reputation of its political institutions and armed forces it is neutral in the

30

The Truth about the Troubles

struggle between unionists and nationalists across the water. British governments have seldom expressed any commitment to foster a British identity in Northern Ireland.60 During the peace process Ulster unionists discovered that they could still obstruct the removal of Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom, but they could not prevent the United Kingdom, as an ideological or cultural force, from being incrementally removed from Northern Ireland.61 The bitter disagreements over republican memorials, mentioned earlier, are exacerbated by the demotion of the symbols of Britishness, particularly west of the Bann, where the political and demographic retreat of Unionism has been most marked.62 Nationalists now occupy public spaces which unionists had monopolized under Stormont. Derry’s Guildhall Square, once the preserve of the city’s unionist establishment, provided the stage for the dramatic broadcast of David Cameron’s apology to the Bloody Sunday families. Even in Stormont buildings, the greatest monument to unionist power, it is now possible to celebrate the life of the IRA martyr Mairéad Farrell as an inspiration for contemporary Irish women.63 Proposals for a truth recovery process have encountered the same obstacles, above all the difficult question of how to treat victims, like Mairéad Farrell, who have themselves been perpetrators of violence.64 At one end of the spectrum are those like FAIR which believe that the only appropriate way to deal with the past is through the British criminal justice system. A number of the submissions made to Healing Through Remembering rejected talk of truth and reconciliation in language that implied entrenched hostility to the entire peace process and the compromises it required, including one recommendation that the best way to remember the victims of the conflict would be to build more jails.65 A much broader section of opinion, mostly but not entirely unionist, expressed fears that a truth process would be exploited by republicans to rehearse the familiar justifications for armed struggle, and to “condemn so-called British imperialism as the root cause of everything that is wrong with Northern Ireland society.”66 For these groups and individuals, it was vital that the remembrance of victims of the Troubles should exclude those who were killed while engaged in acts of terrorism and focus on the “innocent” people “who had no choices in their lives.”67

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At the other end of the spectrum are the nationalist lobbying groups such as Relatives for Justice, the Eolas Project Group, the Ardoyne Commemoration Project, and Firinne which have sought to expose the brutality and unaccountability of the state security forces. For these organizations the British criminal justice is not the solution but a large part of the problem. The following two statements, taken from memoranda drawn up for the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in 2004, make the point forcefully.68 The British Parliament justified torture in Castlereagh and other police interrogation centres as referenced in various UN reports. They justified British soldiers murdering men, women and children on our streets. And worse still soldiers who murdered our loved ones were retained as serving soldiers within the ranks of the British Army. Their legislation facilitated daily harassment, house raids, physical and verbal abuse. (Relatives for Justice and the New Lodge Six) It is important to note that a de facto amnesty has existed for the actions of the security forces since 1969. On the few occasions where soldiers have been convicted of murder for instance they have been granted early release from life sentences and allowed to rejoin the armed forces. At present two soldiers convicted of murder, Guardsmen Wright and Fisher, are serving soldiers. One has been promoted. Mrs Thatcher’s claim that ‘murder is murder is murder’ has not been reflected in the actions of various governments to wrongdoing by the security forces. (Pat Finucane Centre) Matters would be simple if one or both of these views were manifestly absurd, but they are held by substantial numbers of people and accurately reflect the complex realities of the situation. Between these two polarized positions, what is most striking is the sheer diversity of responses to the problem of dealing with the past. The 108 submissions collected by Healing Through Remembering range from lengthy disquisitions with citations of Bourdieu or Derrida to the brief declaration that loyalist and republican paramilitaries deserved to “Rot in Hell.”69

32

The Truth about the Troubles

Many of the clergy of all denominations have viewed both the Northern Ireland problem and its solution within a Christian framework in which constitutional preferences and national allegiances are muted or set aside. One of the most memorable statements came from a Presbyterian elder, who described how he used a marked-up copy of Lost Lives to pray every day for the victims of the Troubles.70 Indeed spiritual commitments are clearly vital to some of the most prominent figures associated with Healing Through Remembering. Christian perspectives on forgiveness and reconciliation increasingly overlap with the psychological language of pain, closure, trauma, and acknowledgment employed by a significant number of respondents, also generally free from overt political allegiances. An extensive survey carried out in 2004 found that just over 40 percent of respondents believed that a truth recovery process would help the people of Northern Ireland come to terms with the past, although unionists were notably more skeptical than nationalists. When given the statement, “You wouldn’t necessarily get the truth from a truth commission,” however, a resounding 83 percent agreed.71 Analysis of the South African experience reinforces the view that the truths uttered to truth commissions are likely to be selective, and that in many cases the tactical release of information rather than full disclosure is the likely result. In South Africa “powerful groups and organisations have determined their own acceptable levels of truth through negotiation.”72 The investigation of human rights violations was inevitably subordinated to political considerations: Chief Buthelezi’s refusal to participate was tolerated, for example, by those anxious not to endanger the fragile relationship between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha Freedom Party. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission abandoned attempts to obtain documents from the South African Defence Force, and the records of the Directorate of Special Tasks, the branch of Military Intelligence at the center of the “dirty war” in Angola, Mozambique, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe, appear to have been shredded. Access to the ANC’s own records was also severely limited.73 It is hard to imagine that truth commissioners meeting in, say, Armagh might be able to compel American citizens to give evidence about the gun-running operations which were vital to creating the Pro-

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visional IRA, or former MI5 operatives to reveal details of the agents they handled, or members of paramilitary punishment squads to describe how they inflicted lacerations and bone fractures on thousands of teenagers with metal bars, baseball bats with nails driven through them, hammers, knives, axes, concrete blocks, and handguns.74 Members of loyalist groups are acutely aware that they never received the levels of communal support enjoyed by their republican counterparts, and have been particularly anxious about proposals for South African–style truth hearings: Children today will probably find it difficult to imagine the threats and fears that inspired their fathers to take up arms. Once their fathers became involved in the ‘dirty war’ a certain hardening often took place, which will be difficult to understand unless one has been in the same situation and political context.75 Is it actually helpful, anyhow, to imagine that loyalist assassins are capable of knowing the truth about their own motivations? What might it mean for individual republicans to give a true account of the deaths and injuries for which they accept responsibility? Even those who are not practiced politicians must have mentally arranged and rearranged their experiences in the light of their political commitments, which have often evolved over time. Presumably the men and women who joined paramilitary organizations share with the rest of us the subconscious tendency to construct self-serving truths that enable us to live comfortably with the choices we have made. The most compelling argument in favor of a truth recovery process is the palpable need of the bereaved to find out what happened to their relatives. Reading the House of Commons report Ways of Dealing with Northern Ireland’s Past, one encounters again the range of human responses to physical injury and emotional pain. Here are three female voices from the report. The first is Barbara Deane, a mathematics teacher who sustained multiple injuries in a bomb blast on Belfast’s Ormeau Road in 1971, which resulted in the amputation of her right leg, a thousand stitches, and plastic surgery to her mouth and jaw.

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I had my hand on the red skirt when I became aware of a commotion behind me and turned to see a man with a gun. He put something down next to the wall beside the police station and I realised it was a bomb since it was lit. Calmly I asked him how long we had got—up until then there had been 20 minutes warning. He answered ‘20 seconds from when it was lit’. My memory is that I tried to marshal the others on the ground floor and as I emerged (last of them) I saw the police emerge and I went towards them to direct them after the man. I hesitated then, because he was heading round the corner to where mother was sitting in the car. If I had dashed in the other direction I might have got away as some others did. As I turned he was firing at them from the corner but I must have been looking down the barrel of his gun because I saw the intense light coming from it and thought ‘Oh that is where the lost energy goes’—we had been doing sums in A-level maths about this. Afterwards someone told me that he had shot my ear almost off. .... I personally would have no problems with an amnesty but I know that some of the wider groups in the community might not feel like that. I just go on living; that is thrawn you see. I would not let them win by making me bitter.76 The second is an Armagh social worker who, like a surprising number of people, was made a victim of the Troubles more than once. In August 1969 her father was shot dead by the B Specials, one of the very first to die. Twenty-one years later she was injured in a land-mine explosion which killed three policemen and a nun on the outskirts of Armagh. One of the IRA bombers, released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, had returned to live in the town and now saluted her in the street. He knows me personally, this man who had served 10 years for four murders and one attempted murder. For me, I would like at some stage to get in a room with him, sit down beside him and talk to him. I would like that to be facilitated in a way that would make it easy for me and make it equally easy for him. I do not want any

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apology from him but I would like him to hear my story and the impact that it has made on me and to hear, unlike the stories he has been told that he did not do me any harm, but I went on to live my life, have a nice home, have a nice job, have a nice car and a nice family, what he has put me and all my family through. For me he is a victim in that sense in that he does not really know what it has done to me. He sees it from his side. I would like to hear what his story is. I do not want an apology from him but I would like to hear his story.77 Finally, “Witness C” is the mother of a thirty-four-year-old man who was shot dead in 1999, when Northern Ireland was supposed to be at peace. He was the target of a random sectarian attack carried out by a loyalist group calling themselves the Red Hand Defenders. We are very lost people. We are here today now talking to you but we are very lost people. We are like a book you take off the shelf and dust us and take us out now and again and it makes everybody feel good and we have coffee or we have a meal and it is all very nice and we go away and we do not hear a thing. I really want to know what is going to come out of this. . . . I reared my child to be a moderate and so when it came to my door I could not understand because I taught my children not to hate. As we were saying earlier on, only when it comes to your door do you understand. I said to an MP, ‘When your daughter or son walks down a road and somebody shoots him in the back of the head then you can tell me you understand’. I just think we are used. . . . There are a lot of people that you do not hear about. There are a lot of Catholics who are not Sinn Féin supporters here. We are just ordinary people and you never hear our voices; you do not hear our voices.78 Ways of Dealing with Northern Ireland’s Past shows how a truth commission might help to recover the experiences of ordinary people who found themselves in very extraordinary circumstances after August 1969. It reveals how many individuals sought to maintain a moral space in which the pressures of communal solidarity could be weighed against

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other commitments. The same can be said for the numerous “storytelling” projects and workshops which have set out to encourage and record testimonies from individuals and groups who have suffered in the conflict.79 Its advocates suggest that storytelling has a “levelling effect”: although we might disagree with the narrator’s political viewpoint, we can nevertheless “recognise and appreciate the human experiences of loss, trauma, disappointment, hope and triumph.”80 This kind of latitude is probably an unrealistic aspiration for many of those damaged by the Troubles. Two academics from Queen’s University who recorded the experiences of border Protestants in 2004–5 have described unforgettably the emotional intensity of storytelling, in this case concerning harrowing experiences of IRA attacks. Listening to the story of one man, shot seven times with an Armalite automatic rifle in his home, and now partially paralyzed, they were confronted by two local women who asked, “Are you going to tell the truth? Do you know that this is a story of innocent victims murdered by butchers?”81 The members of the Ardoyne Commemoration Project equated “storytelling” with fiction, preferring to publish their oral histories as Ardoyne: The Untold Truth (2002); the “truth” in this case was “very much bound up with a sense of bearing witness” and consciously opposed to what the residents viewed as the “hierarchy of victimhood” established by Bloomfield.82 Nevertheless, the accumulation of individual testimonies is already helping historians to appreciate further the complexity of violence in Northern Ireland and the multidimensional nature of the conflict. In time it may also help us to understand that the inhabitants of Northern Ireland do not all come neatly stacked in two opposing piles labeled “perpetrators” and “victims” but that many played more than one role in the conflict still widely known as the Troubles. NOTES 1. Neil Jarman, Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland (Oxford, 1997), 119. This figure is for 1995, when there were 2,581 loyalist and 302 republican parades; the remainder included St. Patrick’s Day parades and May Day parades but also events organized by the Boys Brigade and the Salvation Army. The population was then 1.6 million

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2. The Rebellion is, of course, traditionally commemorated on Easter Sunday. 3. See Eric P. Kaufmann, The Orange Order: A Contemporary Northern Irish History (Oxford, 2007), chs. 6 and 7. 4. Henry Patterson and Eric Kaufmann, Unionism and Orangeism in Northern Ireland since 1945: The Decline of the Loyal Family (Manchester, 2007). 5. David Fitzpatrick is currently working on a major book on Orangeism. In the meantime, the work of David W. Miller remains essential; see “The Armagh Troubles, 1784–95,” in Samuel Clark and James S. Donnelly Jr., eds., Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914 (Madison, WI, 1983), 155–91; Queen’s Rebels: Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective (Dublin, 1978). See also Frank Wright, Two Lands on One Soil: Ulster Politics before Home Rule (Dublin, 1996). On the social and cultural functions of Orangeism, see Dominic Bryan, Orange Parades (2000); and Desmond Bell, Acts of Union: Youth Culture and Sectarianism in Northern Ireland (Basingstoke, 1990). Also relevant is A. D. Buckley, “The Chosen Few: Biblical Texts in the Symbolism of an Ulster Secret Society,” Irish Review, no. 1 (1986): 31–40. 6. Jonathan Tonge and Jocelyn A. J. Evans, “Faultlines in Unionism: Division and Dissent within the Ulster Unionist Council,” Irish Political Studies 16, no. 1 (2001): 111–31. 7. Surprisingly, the commemorative culture of Northern Irish republicanism—as distinct from Irish nationalism more generally—has attracted few scholars. See Margaret O’Callaghan, “From Casement Park to Toomebridge: The Commemoration of the Easter Rising of 1916 in Northern Ireland in 1966 in Political Context,” in Margaret O’Callaghan and Mary Daly, eds., 1916 in 1966: Commemorating the Easter Rising (Dublin, 2007), 86–147; John Mulqueen and Jim Smyth, “‘The Che Guevara of the IRA’: The Legend of ‘Big Joe’ McCann,” History Ireland 18, no. 1 ( January–February 2010): 46–47. 8. These examples are taken from An Phoblacht, 18 August and 9 September 2011, the period when the first version of this essay was written. They also contain articles on the Pat Finucane campaign and the thirtieth anniversary of the Hunger Strikes. 9. Malachi O’Doherty, The Trouble with Guns: Republican Strategy and the Provisional IRA (Belfast, 1998), 22. 10. “Families Unite to Honour Memory of Shot IRA Chief,” Irish News, 14 April 1997. 11. Graham Dawson, Making Peace with the Past? Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles (Manchester, 2007), 160, 183. 12. Graham Dawson, “Trauma, Place and the Politics of Memory: Bloody Sunday, Derry, 1972–2004,” History Workshop Journal 59 (2005): 151–78.

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13. Henry McDonald, Gunsmoke and Mirrors: How Sinn Féin Dressed up Defeat as Victory (Dublin, 2008). 14. For the most recent example, see http://sluggerotoole.com/2013/07/31/ republican-castlederg-parade-the-insensitivity-of-the-impotent/. 15. See Ian McBride, “Memory and National Identity in Modern Ireland,” in Ian McBride, ed., History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), 1–42. 16. Dawson, Making Peace with the Past? 17. See, e.g., Statement of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland on her investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Raymond McCord junior and other related matters (Belfast, 2007). 18. “La Mon Victims Lash Out at Power-Sharing,” News Letter, 28 January 2008. Michelle Williamson, whose parents were killed in the Shankill bomb of 1993, has actively campaigned to have the statutory definition of a victim redefined to exclude those engaged in acts of terrorism. 19. See http://thedisappearedni.co.uk. 20. See, e.g., “Coiste Proposes Museum for Long Kesh,” An Phoblacht, 12 June 2003; “Raze It to the Ground,” Belfast Telegraph, 27 April 2004; “Interpreting and Developing Contested Sites,” Coiste.comm 8, no. 1 (January–April 2006); “Long Kesh: Preserved Site Will Tell Story of Those Held There,” An Phoblacht, 26 January 2006; “Shared Vision for Long Kesh Site,” An Phoblacht, 2 November 2006; “Historical Status of Long Kesh Must Be Maintained,” An Phoblacht, 12 July 2007; “Victims Oppose Euro Funding for Maze Site,” News Letter, 28 December 2010; “Maze ‘Shrine’ Row in Assembly,” News Letter, 26 November 2011. See also Brian Graham and Sara McDowell, “Meaning in the Maze: The Heritage of Long Kesh,” Cultural Geographies 14, no. 3 (2007): 343–68. There are other, less well known lieux de mémoire, including the restored First Presbyterian Church, Derry, a regular target of sectarian violence during the past forty years. Indeed the entire walled city and the Bogside constitute one complex site of memory. 21. See “Memorial to Black Taxi Dead Unveiled,” Anderstown News, 15 February 1997; “Plaque Unveiled in Honour of Fian,” An Phoblacht, 18 April 1996; “Harvey Memorial Unveiled,” An Phoblacht, 23 January 1997; “New Memorial to Strabane Volunteer,” An Phoblacht, 14 August 1997. 22. “Pensioner’s Anger over Terrorist Memorial,” Belfast Telegraph, 3 March 2000; “Anger over Terror Statue in Graveyard,” Belfast Telegraph, 2 March 2000; and for other examples, “Unionist Anger at Memorial to IRA Murderer,” Irish News, 2 October 1998; “IRA Memorial to Be Erected on Peaceline,” News Letter, 3 February 2009. 23. The debate over the Marks monument can be followed in “Row over Tribute to Shot IRA Man,” Irish News, 22 February 2000; “Graves Group to Care for IRA Statue,” Belfast Telegraph, 22 June 2000; “War of Words on ‘IRA

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Plaque,’” Irish News, 8 November 2000; “Memorial Is ‘Sending Out Wrong Message,’” Irish News, 17 September 2001; “Marks Memorial Is Unveiled,” Irish News, 2 April 2002. For a similar case in Fermanagh, see “Unionist Anger at Memorial to IRA Murderer,” Irish News, 2 October 1998. 24. “Monument for Dead IRA Men Vandalised,” Irish News, 21 October 1998; “Headstone Stolen from an IRA Grave,” Irish News, 30 June 2000; “IRA Memorial Demolished by Sledgehammer Attack in Town,” Belfast Telegraph, 20 November 2001. Other vandalized monuments include a memorial to the eight Protestant workmen killed by the IRA at Teebane crossroads in 1992 (“Teebane Memorial Reinstated Following Attack,” Tyrone Courier, 6 November 1996), a granite memorial to two UDR men killed by an IRA land mine in 1980 (“Shattered Memories,” Belfast Telegraph, 15 November 1996); a monument to the fifteen Catholic civilians killed by an Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) bomb in McGurk’s bar, 1971 (“Memorial to Bar Bomb Victims Is Vandalised,” Belfast Telegraph, 11 June 2002), and the memorial to the eight British soldiers killed near Ballygawley roundabout in 1988 (“Anger as Arsonists Attack Memorial,” Belfast Telegraph, 27 August 2002). Finally, loyalist factions have defaced each other’s memorials, as when a mural tribute to Billy Wright on the Shankill estate was defaced, apparently by UVF supporters (“UDP Fury at Mural Attack,” Belfast Telegraph, 17 April 2000). 25. Interview with author, Westminster, 8 December 2010. 26. John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images (Oxford, 1995), 1. 27. S. E. Baker, “Orange and Green: Belfast, 1832–1912,” in H. J. Dyos and M. Wolff, eds., The Victorian City: Images and Realities, 2 vols. (London, 1973), 2:789–814; A. C. Hepburn, “The Impact of Ethnic Violence: The Belfast Riots of 1936,” in A. C. Hepburn, A Past Apart: Studies in the History of Catholic Belfast 1850–1950 (Belfast, 1996), 174–202; Mark Doyle, Fighting Like the Devil for the Sake of God: Protestants, Catholics, and the Origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast (Manchester, 2009). 28. F. Frankfort Moore, The Truth about Ulster (London, 1914), 16, 22, 25, 45. 29. Simon Prince and Geoffrey Warner, Belfast and Derry in Revolt: A New History of the Start of the Troubles (Dublin, 2012), chs. 6 and 9; quotation on p. 208. 30. Marie-Therese Fay, Mike Morrissey, and Marie Smyth, Northern Ireland’s Troubles: The Human Costs (London, 1999). 31. House of Commons, Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, Ways of Dealing with Northern Ireland’s Past: Interim Report—Victims and Survivors (London, 2005), II, Ev. 180. Hereafter cited as HC, Ways of Dealing with Northern Ireland’s Past.

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32. Andrew Finlay, “Defeatism and Northern Protestant ‘Identity,’” Global Review of Ethnopolitics 1, no. 2 (December 2001): 17. 33. G. C. Loughrey, P. Bell, M. Kee, R. J. Roddy and P. S. Curran, “PostTraumatic Stress Disorder and Civil Violence in Northern Ireland,” British Journal of Psychiatry 153 (1988): 554–60. Cases of PTSD have also been reported among both former prisoners and targets of paramilitary punishment squads. 34. The next two paragraphs are indebted to Mike Morrissey and Marie Smyth, Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement: Victims, Grievance and Blame (London, 2002), ch. 2. 35. HC, Ways of Dealing with the Past, II, Ev. 46. 36. Fay, Morrissey, and Smyth, Human Costs, 175. 37. Lost Lives, nos. 2385, 2834. 38. HC, Ways of Dealing with Northern Ireland’s Past, II, Ev. 185. 39. Interview with Patrick Magee, King’s College London, 27 October 2010. 40. O’Doherty, The Trouble with Guns, 86. 41. For examples, see P. J. McLoughlin, “‘. . . It’s a United Ireland or Nothing’? John Hume and the Idea of Irish Unity, 1964–72,” Irish Political Studies 21, no. 2 (2006): 169–70. 42. Richard English, Armed Struggle, the History of the IRA (Oxford, 2003), 140. 43. Frank Burton, The Politics of Legitimacy in a Belfast Community (London, 1978), ch. 3; quotation on p. 109. 44. See, e.g., John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, “Consociational Theory, Northern Ireland’s Conflict, and Its Agreement,” Government and Opposition 41, no. 1 (2006): 43–63; 41, no. 2 (2006): 249–77. Consociationalism is not the only component in the Good Friday Agreement. It builds upon the efforts of the British government since the 1980s to redistribute economic power and cultural esteem more evenly between the two communities. In the long term this social engineering may have more important consequences than the constitutional arrangements of 1998. 45. Brendan O’Leary, “The Nature of the Agreement,” in John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, The Northern Ireland Conflict: Consociational Engagements (Oxford, 2004), 263. 46. Robin Wilson, “From Violence to Intolerance: Ethno-Nationalism and the Crowding out of Civic Life,” in Christopher Farrington, ed., Global Change, Civil Society and the Northern Ireland Peace Process: Implementing the Political Settlement (Basingstoke, 2008), 199–213. 47. Geoffrey Evans and Brendan O’Leary, “Northern Irish Voters and the British-Irish Agreement: Foundations of a Stable Consociational Settlement?,” Political Quarterly 71, no. 1 ( January–March 2000): 89–90.

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48. Kevin Bean, The New Politics of Sinn Féin (Liverpool, 2007), 174. 49. The corresponding figures for Protestants were 84 percent and 88 percent: Evans and O’Leary, “Northern Irish Voters and the British-Irish Agreement,” 93, table 14. 50. David Mitchell, “Sticking to Their Guns? The Politics of Arms Decommissioning in Northern Ireland, 1998–2007,” Contemporary British History 24, no. 3 (2010): 341–61. 51. Richard English, “Challenging Peace,” Fortnight 362 (June 1997). 52. “Victim’s Daughter in Legal Challenge to Commissioners,” News Letter, 26 February 2008; “‘Volunteer’ Row Rocks Victims’ Commission,” News Letter, 30 January 2008. 53. Interview with author, Westminster, 8 December 2010. 54. See her influential “Two Traditions in Unionist Political Culture,” Irish Political Studies 2 (1987): 1–26. 55. We Will Remember Them: Report of the Northern Ireland Victims Commissioner, Sir Kenneth Bloomfield KCB (Belfast, 1998), 3.3, 8.1. 56. Ibid., 7.13–18. 57. For unionist reactions, see the extended coverage in News Letter, 26, 27, 28, 30 January and 2, 7, 24, 26, 28 February 2009; for the cross-community Wave Trauma Centre, see Wave News Letter, February 2009. Eames’s defense of the recognition payment is in “We Have Listened to All Sides—Eames,” News Letter, 28 January 2009. 58. See, e.g., “War of Words over Omagh Memorial,” News Letter, 19 September 2007; “Omagh Memorial Wording Is Agreed,” News Letter, 7 March 2008. 59. “Crossgar Murder Victim Remembered by Plaque at His Place of Worship,” Down Recorder, 22 November 1995; “IRA Victims Remembered,” News Letter, 19 April 1996; “Dromore Fire Bomb Victims Remembered,” Orange Standard, May 1996; “Troubles Memorial,” Belfast Telegraph, 27 October 1997 (for Clogherny); “Banner Painting ‘Fitting Tribute to Murdered Soldier,’” News Letter, 3 February 2009; “Order Pays Tribute to Troubles Victims,” News Letter, 22 September 2010. 60. Indeed it is arguable that this reticence dates back to the Act of Union. See Peter Mandler, “Nation and Power in the Liberal State: Britain c. 1800– 1914,” in Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer, eds., Power and the Nation in European History (Cambridge, 2005), 354–69. 61. I am paraphrasing John Lloyd’s well-known remark, made during his interview with John Reid, New Statesman, 26 November 2001. 62. One of the more creative was the greening of up to fifty Royal Mail postboxes in County Tyrone by members of Ógra Shinn Féin. “Anger as Republicans Paint Postboxes Green,” News Letter, 31 July 2010.

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63. “Fury over Tribute to Terrorist,” News Letter, 23 February 2008; “Republican Women Celebrated in Stormont,” An Phoblacht, 13 March 2008. 64. Few republicans will accept Christopher Andrew’s account of the Gibraltar incident, which dismisses accusations that Farrell, McCann, and Savage were the targets of a shoot-to-kill operation. But his conclusion that the IRA bombing mission, executed successfully, would have caused many civilian as well as military casualties seems entirely reasonable. See Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 (London, 2005), 744. 65. I am grateful to Kate Turner and the staff of Healing Through Remembering, Belfast, for permitting me to consult anonymized versions of the 108 submissions summarized in their 2002 report. Quotation from S039; see also S005. 66. The Report of the Healing Through Remembering Project, June 2002 (Belfast, 2002), 30. 67. Healing Through Remembering, Belfast, 2002 submissions, S024, S073. One victim of a loyalist assassination attempt (S062) commented, “I know that we have to move forward but not at the cost of giving all to the Perpetrators and fuck all to Victims” (boldface in original). 68. HC, Ways of Dealing with Northern Ireland’s Past, II, Ev. 45. 69. HTR, Belfast, 2002 submissions, S082, S086, S020. 70. Ibid., S085. 71. Patricia Lundy and Mark McGovern, “Attitudes towards a Truth Commission for Northern Ireland in Relation to Party Political Affiliation,” Irish Political Studies 22, no. 3 (2007): 328–29. 72. Elizabeth Stanley, “Evaluating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Journal of Modern African Studies 39, no. 3 (2001): 531. 73. Janet Cherry, John David, and Madeleine Fullard, “Researching the ‘Truth’: A View from Inside the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in Deborah Posel and Graeme Simpson, eds., Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Johannesburg, 2002), 17–36. 74. Between 1970 and 2000 more than 4,000 people were hospitalized as a result of vigilante attacks and around 115 people were killed. Even by Belfast standards their experiences make for horrific reading. Andrew Silke, “The Impact of Paramilitary Vigilantism on Victims and Communities in Northern Ireland,” International Journal of Human Rights 4, no. 1 (2000): 1–24. 75. HC, Ways of Dealing with Northern Ireland’s Past, II, Ev 4. 76. Ibid., Ev. 107. I have silently corrected the misspelling of the Ulster Scots word thrawn, meaning “obstinate.” 77. Ibid., Ev. 75. 78. Ibid., Ev. 112.

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79. There have been at least thirty-three of these: Healing Through Remembering, “Storytelling” Audit: An Audit of Personal Story, Narrative and Testimony Initiatives Related to the Conflict in and about Northern Ireland (Belfast, 2005; updated 2007). 80. “Memorandum submitted by David Bolton,” in HC, Ways of Dealing with Northern Ireland’s Past, II, Ev. 257. 81. Hastings Donnan and Kirk Simpson, “Silence and Violence among Northern Ireland Border Protestants,” Ethnos 72, no. 1 (2007): 18. 82. Patricia Lundy and Mark McGovern, “Participation, Truth and Partiality: Participatory Action Research, Community-Based Truth-Telling and Post-Conflict Transition in Northern Ireland,” Sociology 40, no. 1 (2006): 83.

CHAPTER 2

T H E P ROV I S I O N A L I R A History, Politics, and Remembrance

Ruan O’Donnell

Although the focus of a burgeoning bibliography, the Irish Republican movement has contributed little to academic studies of the organization. A culture of secrecy within armed Republicanism was assiduously promoted from the 1790s when the Defenders and United Irishmen adopted cellular structures. Vindication of revolutionary tactics and objectives was never a major concern for the Irish Republican Army (Óglaigh na hÉireann), which, by virtue of being proscribed for most of the twentieth century, was in any case inhibited from offering direct commentary to the public.1 Security consciousness of a high order endured and was perpetuated owing to the incapacity of the physical force tradition to deliver the thirty-two-county republic to which it had been pledged since 1916. The IRA harshly enforced internal discipline during the Long War of 1968–98, creating an emotive dimension to the Troubles which has elicited considerable attention if sparse explanation. 44

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The coercive Offences Against the State Act and Special Criminal Court in Dublin reinforced the perceived virtue of responding with silence to interrogators rather than attempting explanation. An ideological position of withholding cooperation from partitionist institutions gelled in this instance with the common sense of avoiding self-incrimination. While successive Dublin governments tolerated extreme modes of questioning at times, nonrecognition of institutions by republican detainees simplified the identification and jailing of persons viewed as subversives.2 Republicans relaxed their approach in the mid-1970s. Hard evidence was not required to incarcerate suspects for the readily sustainable scheduled offense of membership in an illegal organization in the juryless courts of the two Irish jurisdictions. Populist sayings such as “loose talk costs lives” and “whatever you say, say nothing,” were imparted to activists and the general public with utter seriousness by the Republican movement.3 One effect of this discouragement is a dearth of reliable, citable information concerning matters regarded as simply historical in more stable countries. A resilient republican culture of organizational secrecy and silence (concerning the past as well as the present), combined with a strong tradition of skillfully managed commemoration, thus presents the historian of social memory with a most challenging paradox. IRA volunteers were forbidden to correspond unilaterally with third parties under “minimum penalty” of “dismissal with ignominy.” Unacceptable forms of dialogue with external elements often resulted in fatal consequences. Acolytes were specifically subject to General Order No.  10 of the Constitution of Óglaigh na hÉireann, which prohibited members from making “any statement either verbally or in writing to the Press or Mass Media without General Headquarters permission.”4 Public relations were the preserve of the Army Council using its “P. O’Neill” nom de guerre and selectively appointed spokespersons. The situation governing former volunteers and persons “stood down” by the Provisional IRA leadership in July 2005 in the historic message read by Seanna “Sid” Walsh is less clear.5 Regardless, the studied omission in Ireland, “north” and “south,” of a statute of limitations encompassing offenses of a political character has significant bearing on the generation of academic sources. The February 2011 conviction of former

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The Provisional IRA

IRA member Gerry McGeough for a June 1981 shooting incident in Tyrone illustrated that the latent threat of prosecution was not merely theoretical.6 The PSNI’s Historical Enquiries Team was conceived to resolve selected “cold cases,” a telling and controversial merging of past and present political divisions. Professional historians, deprived of legal immunity for primary research, insider assistance, and citable documentary evidence, demurred in grappling with the subject of the Provisional IRA. The first major assessment of the organization did not appear until 1987 and was written by the journalists Patrick Bishop of the Sunday Telegraph and Eamonn Mallie of Downtown Radio (Belfast). It was not unusual for journalists to pioneer a historical field, although the requisite time lapse normally sought in academia as a means to achieve more neutral perspectives has not produced significant advances on the basic analysis of the Provisional IRA. The canon remains unacceptably spare in relation to the history of the most sophisticated and potent paramilitary force in the Western world.7 Neglect has ensured that numerous canards and factual errors have been perpetuated, and no synthesis of existing material can provide an authoritative survey. It is not immaterial that the IRA has been indisposed to originate or assist substantial histories of its campaigns. Very little has appeared in respect to the schismatic 1930s and violent 1940s when Sean Russell’s S-Plan dramatically targeted English political, commercial, communication, and penal infrastructure. Basic overviews and narratives of the period are indebted to the Herculean self-directed work of Uinseann Mac Eoin, whose interviews with numerous IRA veterans preserved unique testimonies. Mac Eoin’s personal republican credentials, extended by involvement in the influential Wolfe Tone Society after 1963, were undoubtedly significant in gaining such access.8 The “Fifties” (aka “Border”) campaign of 1956–62 lacked Mac Eoin’s printed primary sources and has yet to receive either detailed or accurate description. Sean Cronin, Irish Times correspondent, occasional historian, and intermittent IRA chief of staff during the period 1957–60, declined to set down a potentially vital account after migrating to the United States despite the protections of the First Amendment.9 Cronin was privately disappointed at the outcome of Operation Harvest and would have appreciated that the reticence of his contempo-

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raries often stemmed from their subsequent political activism.10 His main contribution in the 1970s was assisting the North American Republican Clubs allied with the Official IRA. Many other republicans authorized to speak to journalists in the 1970s and 1980s were in a position to disclose important information on the 1950s but declined the opportunity. Their preeminent concern was addressing the demands of the Long War, which they had partly conceived. Positioning the Provisional IRA within the protracted, complex, and contested history of 1968 to 1998 is complicated by its origins as a breakaway rather than successor organization. This irregularity stemmed from the urgency created by the chronic political situation in the North of Ireland in 1969 and seeming incapacity of existing structures to respond effectively. If many of those adhering to the emergent Provisionals had ideological concerns about the political path followed by Cathal Goulding and Tomás Mac Giolla from 1962, the actual defection of men like Sean Mac Stiofain, who continued to regard himself as a socialist republican, pointed to the primacy of immediate pressures. As director of intelligence in the pre-split IRA, Mac Stiofain had stayed the course on the Army Council past the staged brutalization of civil rights marchers at Burntollet in January 1969 and the egregious razing of parts of nationalist Belfast in mid-August 1969. He hesitated to act decisively in September 1969 when much of the Belfast Brigade withdrew its allegiance from General Headquarters, probably owing to his desire to gain support within the existing structures. If it was part of the fabric of society and retained basic cohesion, the IRA had not functioned in Belfast, Newry, and Derry even to the modest extent it had acted against the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in the 1940s.11 In the weeks preceding Christmas 1969 the IRA was deeply factionalized. Mac Stiofain’s clique liaised with disparate restive elements and individuals who had become estranged from the movement since 1966. He opposed the Army Council decision to hold an Extraordinary Army Convention in Boyle, County Roscommon, when it appeared that Goulding sought to address the crisis by enabling Sinn Féin to participate in elected forums. All IRA departments and brigades were entitled to nominate delegates to the convention, a forum capable of altering the composition of the Army Executive and Army Council. If the requisite two-thirds majority of delegates approved a major policy

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The Provisional IRA

change on abstentionism, a topic under serious discussion since March 1969, traditionalists feared the eventual recognition of the partitionist and supremacist Stormont regime. The historic step had been projected for a relatively peaceful environment in which internationally recognized just demands for civil equality could be championed.12 By 1968 mass demonstrations in the United States, West Germany, and France tended to affirm the crude efficacy of anti-government streetlevel politics. The contemporary nomenclature of international popular dissent and resistance resonated in Ireland, where social and political issues germane to the neighboring United Kingdom were analogous. Agitation to protest inadequate housing provision, intergenerational unemployment, and property destruction in the guise of “modernization,” as well as the internationally reviled Vietnam War, were collectively indicative of a restive and increasingly well-educated electorate which, if by no means instinctively disposed towards the rare Cuban precedent of successful socialist insurrection, contained significant restive constituencies. The numerically small and hermetic republican movement—all but reestablished in 1948 and dominated by veterans of the offensive, which the Army Council had terminated in 1962—was inherently ill equipped to harness such forces for any progressive purposes. For republicans the viability of contesting elections with a view to participation in governance had been fatally undermined from June 1968 by the actions and inactions of the RUC and British authorities in the face of violent “loyalist” attacks on civil rights demonstrations. While the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and Peoples’ Democracy obtained support from numerous IRA members acting in a personal capacity, they did not come under the remit of the Republican movement.13 The assertion of civil rights in the Six Counties in 1968 was not the devious IRA conspiracy predicted in unionist circles in the advent and aftermath of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising. County Derry’s Larry Bateson and others had striven to promote political development in republican circles across Ulster in 1966. Far from the harbinger of revolution, precautionary efforts to rearm the IRA in 1968–69 were spurred by the sudden malaise of self-doubt inside the formerly pro-political Army Council. The upper

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echelon was only partially successful, and such belated initiatives did not allay the grave concerns of a sizable portion of nominal adherents.14 The razing of parts of nationalist West Belfast by marauding loyalist gangs on 14 and 15 August 1969, notwithstanding the local presence of regular British Army forces in support of the resident RUC, sent shockwaves through the seemingly paralyzed Republican movement. The “burning of Bombay Street” and related incidents occasioned destruction of international proportions. If intended by their abettors to intimidate Northern nationalists from asserting their demands for civil rights, the violence had the immediate effect of reengaging the Dublin government on the issue of partition as a stunned and discredited IRA leadership reevaluated its policy.15 Timing and tactical differences, rather than outright repudiation of the previously pursued policy of broadening the base of Republicanism, were prime determinants for many IRA delegates who managed to attend the critical meeting in Boyle. A minority opposed the expansive and leftist National Liberation Front concept, which was linked to the proposed abandonment of abstentionism. Leadership elements, which forced the agenda in Roscommon, secured a hollow, inoperable victory. An insufficient quotient of votes was cast, and they conceded in retrospect that “it was an unfortunate issue at an unfortunate time.”16 Gerry Adams observed, “For many of the dissidents [at the convention] the issue was not abstentionism itself but what it had come to represent: a leadership with the wrong set of priorities that had led the IRA into ignominy in August [1969].”17 Having failed to decisively outmaneuver the incumbents, followers of the sizable minority headed by Mac Stiofain, Ruairi O’Bradaigh, and Daithi O’Conaill moved immediately to create a fresh identity and on 22 December formed the Provisional Army Council in Athlone, County Westmeath.18 The Republican Publicity Bureau announced the existence of what Mac Stiofain regarded as the “nucleus” of the new organization on 28 December 1969.19 This role would ordinarily have been fulfilled by Sinn Féin, which remained theoretically if not actually united. As was then all but inevitable, the party openly split at its Dublin Árd Fheis on 11 January 1970 when transparent moves to obtain backing for an end to abstentionism collapsed because of an insufficient

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vote ratio. The Caretaker Executive of Sinn Féin, the embryonic dissenting offshoot, declared its adherence to the Provisional Army Council.20 A significant group of Tyrone republicans who had resigned from the movement in January 1969 to protest its failure to embrace abstentionism revised their position to endorse the Provisional thrust.21 Establishing an identity distinct from Goulding’s “Officials” was initially the paramount concern and a vital part of the process of legitimizing the grave and punishable resort to splintering. Many founding Provisionals regarded the 1962–69 policy direction as having been ill conceived but, more important, rendered obsolete by the momentous contextual shift on the ground. Allegations of “internal methods” and “extreme socialism” within the Goulding leadership occurred in the midst of realignment.22 Both organizations referred to as “the IRA” extolled the republican legacy of Tone, Emmet, Pearse, and Connolly. Ideological divisions per se, while important to some protagonists, did not trigger the December 1969 schism, and numerous militants, not least Martin McGuinness of Derry and Seamus Costello of Bray, County Wicklow, were temporarily content to labor with an Official IRA wedded to armed struggle.23 Marxist-oriented Brian Keenan, an IRA member since 1968, was “disgusted at the split” and surprised some by opting for the Provisionals. He pinpointed his decision as arising from the “betrayal” of Belfast by the “Dublin leadership.”24 Adherents of the Provisionals included men who walked out of the Boyle Convention, former IRA members stood down after the Border Campaign in February 1962, persons and units dismissed by Goulding since 1966, former “British” soldiers, and members of the Citizens Defence Committees in Belfast and Derry. They were loosely allied to independent armed elements in East Tyrone and to members of Liam Kelly’s supposedly dormant Tyrone/Monaghan Saor Uladh organization, some of whom were later absorbed. IRA brigade areas, urban and rural, retained considerable local autonomy. Cooperation between the Official and the Provisional IRA occurred on occasion in South Down, Tyrone, Monaghan, and elsewhere in the early 1970s.25 No such ad hoc grouping could function if minute discussion of ideological tenets was foregrounded and rigidly policed. Hugh Heron and John Paddy Mullan, Official IRA members killed by the British Army in Ardboe, Tyrone, on 16 October 1972, are listed on the Provisional IRA’s Roll of Honour.26

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When publicly addressing its formative period from the vantage point of 1973 the Provisionals simplified their complicated genesis. This retrospective and determinist approach was politic and occurred at a time when the Official Republican movement was theoretically on permanent ceasefire.27 O’Bradaigh, a major figure of impeccable IRA and Sinn Féin background, subsequently denied any split had taken place owing to the egregious breaches of two constitutions, to which he had declared lifelong allegiance, by intransigent Gouldingites. He countered, in the course of the bitter schism, that in such extraordinary cases “the minority is going to expel the majority.”28 This claim represented an assertion of a pure evolution from the Army Council which he had led with resignation into cessation in February 1962 if not also to convention-endorsed successor leaderships down to December 1969. Being perceived by the broad republican constituency as a maverick breakaway tendency remained an issue of fundamental importance to the self-definition and private consciousness of the Provisionals. Nothing less than the supreme authority of the General Army Convention–appointed Army Council was in play, a “Green Book” regulated competency, which neither the Provisionals nor the Officials dared contest for mutual fear of the consequences of a total impasse. The more conservative-minded followers of Mac Stiofain keenly appreciated that the IRA volunteers who formed the Republican Congress in the 1930s and Saor Uladh in the 1950s had forfeited, in so doing, their entitlement to the historical legitimacy conferred by adherence to the main force. Intimating and stating preeminence in this regard was important to the Provisionals, albeit not without contest from the Officials. At first, the main practical development of the 1969 split was the promise of the deterrent paramilitary presence of the Provisionals in northern urban zones. Abstentionist Sinn Féin and illegal IRA then shared the vision of a thirty-two-county Irish Republic and lack of faith in the capacity of constitutional processes to realize that goal. The conventional desirability of underpinning such an ambitious objective with an electorate-oriented manifesto did not pertain. In short, the early Provisionals possessed sufficient inherent republican politics to pursue a militarist agenda. Their first statement averred an intention to “reaffirm the fundamental Republican position.” Self-professed inheritors of the mantle of the unelected United Irishmen, Irish Republican Brotherhood

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The Provisional IRA

(IRB), Irish Citizen Army, and original Óglaigh na hÉireann required neither mandates nor popular acclaim.29 The moral approval of survivors of the Second Dáil, Ireland’s last thirty-two-county government, was nonetheless welcomed in December 1969. When, on 22 October 1986, Mayo’s Second Dáil Sinn Féin TD General Tom Maguire transferred his allegiance to the republican Sinn Féin and the Continuity Army Council, the pragmatic and much larger Provisionals were not unduly taxed by the implications.30 Unbroken lineage, a major theme of the 1916 Proclamation, was important for the Provisionals whose members were required to declare their endorsement of the document under section 3 of the IRA Constitution.31 It was not mere chance that the IRA in June 1973 described their actions as “the resistance campaign” and thus revived the term used by republicans in reference to the 1956–62 offensive.32 The Provisionals courted identification with an underrated military campaign which the Goulding clique had heavily critiqued since 1962 for its lack of political character. In Derry and Belfast it was apparent that most young grassroots activists were not especially conflicted in 1969–70 by the minutiae of republican ideology. They were, however, strongly motivated by local provocation, institutional discrimination, and day-to-day repression to attack the visible face of the obnoxious Orange state. Thousands came under the influence or formal control of the two IRAs. The hostile prounionist stance of the British military enabled the Provisionals to align their anti-Stormont revolt in the North with the historical quest for the unitary republic.33 The informal adoption of the term “Provisional” in Westmeath was partly contingent as the new Army Council hoped to wrest the title deeds of the historic Republican movement from its “Official” rump.34 The nominal cessation of the Official IRA campaign in May 1972 greatly aided the process. As the Official IRA moved towards a prolonged and often denied armed existence as “Group B,” a term promoted as early as December 1972, the Provisionals were increasingly granted unquestioned entitlement to the “IRA” designation.35 In the streets people spoke in terms of “Provos” or “Provies” and “Sticks,” “Stickeybacks,” or “Stickies.” The less obvious and generally pejorative word for the Officials arose from their use from Easter 1970 of adhesive

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Easter lily emblems in memory of the republican dead. This was the only reliable means of associating unknown persons with particular factions. Attempts by Officials to brand the Provisionals as “Pinheads” for retaining the pin-secured lily did not capture the popular imagination, and from November 1972 resin badge versions were adopted. Ironically, adhesive lilies had been authorized by the 1968 IRA Convention in response to a South Tipperary resolution but were not manufactured in time to distribute in Easter 1969, the last opportunity prior to the division. In June 1973 the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID) promised to arrange the mass production in America of metal lilies for the Provisionals, which they soon honored.36 Initially, however, shared nomenclature in 1969–70 masked an energetic program of rival reorganization. In all instances, the generic structure of the movement had to be quickly replicated wherever it could not be co-opted by the Provisionals. The National Graves Association (NGA), independent of the Army Council but within the Republican movement family, cooperated with the Provisionals from the outset and facilitated access to the memorials and burial plots it maintained across the country. The Officials developed a distinct burial plot in the Milltown cemetery alongside the Antrim Memorial, a necessary spatial detachment which limited but did not entirely obviate the prospect of clashes during commemorations. Proximity and other more unpredictable factors resulted in a melee in Milltown on 10 April 1977 which came close to igniting a major feud.37 The situation eased following the 27 July 1977 shooting of a leading and popular Ballymurphy IRA volunteer, Thomas “Todler” Tolan. The men who ambushed Tolan were castigated by the Provisionals as late as 2002 as “renegade Irishmen” and “Official IRA gunmen.”38 By late 1970 NORAID assisted the Provisionals from the United States, where the Officials enjoyed backing from the much smaller Republican Clubs network. This paralleled developments in Britain where a “Sinn Féin” political party was revived owing to the retention by the Officials of the Clann na hÉireann equivalent and its Rosc Catha imprint. An Cumann Cabrach or Cabhair variously assisted prisoners’ dependents according to their affiliation.39

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Dividing assets in shared territories was fraught with risk of feuding and presented substantial logistical challenges. It was not until February 1970 that the urgently required monthly newspaper, An Phoblacht, was launched in opposition to United Irishman, which the Officials produced as usual in Gardiner Place.40 The Provisionals were obliged to issue special bulletins between editions until finances permitted their main title, announced as early as December 1969, to become a weekly. The importance of this was illustrated by Mac Stiofain’s dispatch to London of Jim Monaghan, intelligence officer of the Dublin Brigade prior to the split. Monaghan was tasked with raising funds for the planned newspaper, and his more general interaction with the IRA in London resulted in his becoming one of the first Provisionals jailed in England during the Long War. An Phoblacht created a national platform in tandem with Republican News, which concentrated on the Belfast Brigade sector from June 1970. Both papers generated income, disseminated propaganda, and helped establish the character of the evolving organizations. While incipient feuding did not attain the proportions some had feared in 1970, the specter of internecine violence fueled the pace of consolidations. Office premises at 44 Parnell Square, Dublin, passed without serious reverberation into “Provisional” Sinn Féin hands.41 Protecting vulnerable nationalist enclaves in the Six Counties was a priority for the Provisionals, and this was addressed ahead of mounting major offensive operations in Ireland or the United Kingdom. Circumstances dictated that the “defensive” phase featuring gunrunning, recruitment, and training lasted into the summer of 1970. An Phoblacht promised “total war” in October 1971 as the iniquities of internment and the fallout of failed negotiations with the British encouraged extremity. This did not occur. It was not until early 1972, following the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry, that sustained and widespread use of arms and explosives with lethal intent was authorized. The worsening crisis in the North unleashed a virtual insurrection, and historical reflection, even insofar as it functioned to serve the propaganda interests of contemporaries, was a minor concern. The longevity of the conflict, however, surprised all participants, and the anomalous gap between events and reflection has cast a long shadow on scholarship.42 For decades, the Provisionals were satisfied to produce numerous historical

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feature articles in their publications traversing the early modern period to more recent times. Anniversary-themed columns of the 1980s very rarely imparted insights on the 1970s. The eclectic nature of the articles suggested the natural ascendancy of the Provisionals to the apex of broad republican retrospection. The September–October 1970 edition of Republican News, in fact, contained no accounts of IRA activities and devoted approximately six of its eight pages to items on the Clann na nGaedheal Girl Scouts, a Derry jail escape of the 1940s, the national flag, Irish family names, Protestant Patriots No. 2 (Henry Munro), and the Connaught Rangers. The focus on the past was partly dictated by the comparative military inactivity of the IRA and immaturity of Sinn Féin’s political program, as well as the logistics of production. However, in April 1972, as the Provisional offensive escalated, the headline of An Phoblacht read, “‘Blitzkrieg!’ Vigorous IRA Comeback as Peace Proposals Ignored.” The Republican movement claimed to have killed three soldiers and lost seven volunteers in recent weeks, although few details were provided. With the tempo of politics and warfare unusually high, only one article addressed a historical theme: “Connolly: The Man Revered But His Gospel Ignored” related the Hiberno-Scot’s theories to the conditions of 1972.43 The raison d’être of the Provisionals was to restore the primacy of the IRA inside the Republican movement at a time when retaliatory action was deemed both necessary and desirable. If it was forced into premature confrontations by the British Army in the North from the summer of 1970, the wider objective of achieving the unitary Irish Republic remained. Sinn Féin, when based in Kevin Street, Dublin, issued its major political statement on 17 January 1971 with the publication of Eire Nua: The Social and Economic Programme of Sinn Féin.44 Mac Stiofian’s support for the endeavor was partly to counter negative media coverage during a brief truce that the organization “consisted of mindless bombers and those obsessed with physical force.”45 The evolving concept drew on the theories of Desmond Fennell, Emmet O’Connell, and others, including the Provisional leadership, to set down a rationale for the reconfiguration of Ireland as a self-sustaining entity. The IRA acknowledged that the document “declared the aims of the Movement to be the securing of a 32 County Democratic Socialist Republic with

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guaranteed rights for all citizens.”46 The format agreed on from August 1971 comprised “regional parliaments, subject to a federal national parliament.”47 The “public launch” on 28 June 1972 of “EIRE NUA folders” presaged the distribution of 25,000 copies of the revised program over the summer months against a backdrop of grave political unrest. Opposition to Ireland’s entry into the European Economic Community was then an additional policy dimension owing to its implications for national sovereignty. This set the party on a collision course with the Irish government, and Sinn Féin responded to such extraneous developments on an ongoing basis.48 Attracting voter support was not a major concern as the Provisionals intended to dictate their settlement terms to the British government whenever the IRA had obliged London to enter final status discussions at a disadvantage. This militant position was by no means untenable. Exploratory, albeit fruitless, negotiations between the IRA and the British government were held in Ireland and England between March and July 1972.49 The most comprehensive political statement issued by the Provisionals was the Army Council–endorsed Freedom Struggle booklet of 101 pages released on 30 June 1973. The revised Eire Nua document of June 1972 was appended, as was a listing of 106 republicans killed on active service from 1969.50 The Roll of Honour was generally maintained by the National Graves Association, which, owing to the embarrassing split, did not update the archaic 1932 edition until April 1976.51 Freedom Struggle, in the meantime, aggravated the Dublin authorities and in July 1973 Drogheda Printers was fined £100 for accepting the contract. Donal Casey and Gerard Byrne were convicted of publishing an “incriminating document” and fined £25 each. By court order all copies of the title were seized and the plates melted down in the presence of the Gardai. Consequently, the lightly revised second edition was produced in the United States and distributed by NORAID from New York.52 P. Michael O’Sullivan, a noted Chicago-based Irish American photojournalist who had covered the Vietnam War, addressed American and international readers with a sympathetic book in 1972. His track record earned the respect of republicans, and he paid his fifth visit to Ireland in

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August 1969 spending six tumultuous weeks in the embattled Clonard district of the lower Falls Road. O’Sullivan described the pre-split IRA of the time in the Chicago Tribune in July 1971 as “an active defense force.” “Óglaigh na hÉireann, or the people’s army, had been reborn,” he declared.53 The paper of record of America’s deposed “second city,” notwithstanding the confusion occasioned by Bernadette Devlin’s sensational identification with African American militants, described Belfast Nationalists positively as “Irish rebels” and “street fighters.”54 O’Sullivan subsequently spent the twelve months of 1971–72 embedded with armed republicans on active service in Belfast, Tyrone, and Derry. Patriot Graves: Resistance in Ireland, an oft-pirated 1972 collection of images showing IRA units undertaking operations across the Six Counties, published by Follett in Chicago, was far more explicit than anything commissioned by the mainstream media. Possession of the volume in Ireland entailed risk of prosecution. Irish Americans alleged interference from British proxies in the United States. High-quality photographs of unmasked and in some cases well-known IRA volunteers discharging weapons and using explosives countered the type of terse, impersonal, and caustic press descriptions of such activities.55 In February 1974 Gerry O’Danachair’s booklet Provos, Patriots or Terrorists? complied with Irish publishing legislation while performing the function of its illegal precursors. Indeed, the cover image of an IRA volunteer shouldering a Libyan-supplied Warsaw Pact–produced RPG-7 (rocket launcher) was used in the American edition of Freedom Struggle. The posed nature of the photograph was signaled by the weapons’ retention of sighting mechanisms that are disposed of when actually used. Caution was required, and O’Danachair was credited as “Sean O’Riain” in the first Irish edition of Provos. From September 1974 the second revised edition carried his real name despite the strongly pro-Provisional message of its contents.56 There was no equivocation in his claim that the “British Army which was supposed to ‘protect’ the people murdered four innocent men during the military curfew on the Falls Road in July 1970. It was only then that the IRA campaign began.”57 Defenders of communities, therefore, assumed the mantle of the historical republican project. The main text section concluded with the declaration, “Our cause is just, our effort great and our victory assured. Let us go forward.”58

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IRA poster, 1974. Source: Martin Melaugh, CAIN (cain.ulster.ac.uk).

Provos once again packaged the Eire Nua policy and referenced the fall of the short-lived Sunningdale Agreement from which the once secretly consulted Provisionals had been excluded by London and Dublin. Another significant inclusion was the incorporation as an appendix of a leaflet originally distributed by Fr. Denis Faul of Dungannon and Fr. Ray Murray of Armagh. In general, the Provisionals welcomed the humanitarian- and justice-themed pamphleteering of the two campaigning priests whose labor and efficacy relieved Sinn Féin of sole responsibility for such work.59 Fr. Piaras O’Duill, a prominent 1950s campaign veteran and editor of Irish Republican Information Service bulletins aimed at journalists, performed a similar service in Dublin.60 In a parallel development, numerous publications in the late 1970s by the Prisoners Aid Committee (PAC), Troops Out Movement (“Information on Ireland”), and Revolutionary Communist Group (Hands off Ireland! ) were

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regarded as valued acts of solidarity in Britain.61 In contrast to the qualified support offered by the Connolly Association in the Irish Democrat, various far left groupings accepted the Provisional strategy of entering advantageous negotiations arising from revolutionary action rather than the ballot box.62 Analogies to the “resistance campaign” appeared increasingly anachronistic as the fortunes of the IRA ebbed and flowed into the mid-1970s in Ireland and England. The loss of political status in March 1976 and “conveyor belt” systematic abuse of prisoners in interrogation centers and juryless courts demanded fresh thinking.63 Changes included increased use of leftist rhetoric which appealed to international revolutionaries during the Cold War. Once the preserve of the Officials, which in December 1974 had ignored a technical ceasefire to violently part ways with former members attempting to establish the Irish Republican Socialist Party and Irish National Liberation Army, the new language served to counteract the isolation of the unelected Provisionals. This occurred without a public critical reassessment of the recent past, even though the IRA was keenly aware that the interrupted long ceasefire of 1974–76 had cost valuable momentum. As early as September 1976, the influential Long Kesh prisoner Gerry Adams used the then-unfamiliar if apposite term “long war” to describe the conflict in his Peace in Ireland? A Broad Analysis of the Present Situation. The pamphlet argued that the underlying causes of the war encompassed a British imperialist interest in Ireland and a hostile twenty-six-county establishment.64 Discussion of “controlled” and “revolutionary violence” by Adams hinted at the nature of ongoing restructuring inside the Republican movement, which ultimately maximized its IRA offensive and Sinn Féin political impact.65 Within a few years internal advocacy of Eire Nua declined, and, from 1983, an emergent upper leadership with strong roots in Belfast and Derry impelled the organization towards the 1986 split.66 Those who walked out of the October 1986 Árd Fheis in Dublin rebranded themselves by prior agreement as Republican Sinn Féin and were linked by the media to the Continuity Army Council.67 The myriad challenges of waging the Long War and building Sinn Féin, meanwhile, postponed the day when the Provisionals could or would comment on their historical journey.

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IRA ACCOUNTS

Other than an ad hoc scattering of titles produced by former IRA and Sinn Féin authors, adherents have assiduously avoided going on record. An infinitesimal fraction of the over fifteen thousand potential qualified perspectives are in the public domain. Autobiographies by Eamon Collins, Maria McGuire (aka Gatland), Shane Paul O’Doherty, Sean O’Callaghan, Martin McGartland, and Gerry Bradley (aided by Brian Feeney) which detail aspects of their IRA experiences are exceptional, and unusual circumstances pertain.68 O’Doherty had distanced himself from the Republican movement when behind bars in England and shielded former comrades from calumny and legal risk. This was emphatically not the case with O’Callaghan, whose much-disputed The Informer was released in 1988.69 An Phoblacht/Republican News (AP/RN ) averred that the volume had been ghostwritten by a female journalist whose Belfast-based partner was said to work for “MI5’s favourite paper.” Noting the sudden proliferation of revelatory accounts, AP/RN described a major Dublin bookseller in June 1998 as having “the makings of a shelf specially reserved for informers.”70 Coming mere weeks after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, it was seemingly being made clear that former members who had been “turned” or acted as infiltrators remained excluded from their former communities. Circulation of such titles had repercussions for those discussed and for several of their authors. Collins gave evidence in a British court against a man accused of being chief of staff of the IRA and was killed by persons unknown in Armagh in January 1999. O’Callaghan also appeared for the prosecution in trials of a political nature and settled in England following release from prison. Revelations of McGuire’s identity were less serious but scuppered her tenure as Conservative Party councilor in the borough of Croydon, London, in December 2008.71 McGartland, who outlined his infiltration of the Belfast IRA in Fifty Dead Men Walking, also moved to Britain, where he was nonetheless shot and wounded. No such animosity existed against the uncompromising Bradley. He was, however, displaced from Belfast amidst a backlash against segments of his account and tragically took his own life in October 2010.72

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Posthumous Troubles biographies have also proven legally hazardous, especially in the case of Ed Moloney’s Voices from the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland.73 Brendan Hughes, a close friend of Bradley’s, furnished a series of depositions in Boston College which were published in edited form by Moloney in 2010. Hughes was in ill health when interviewed by the Boston team and made a series of unguarded statements concerning unsentenced former comrades. Although widely respected in the IRA, Hughes would have faced stern criticism in republican quarters if he were alive at the time of publication. An assumption was made that Hughes had not intended the more legally actionable parts of his depositions to reach the public sphere until the substance of what he had imparted in good faith was effectively rendered harmless by the passage of time. This was not the case. Commentary regarding a particularly controversial 1972 killing widened the heated discussion and complicated litigation to which it pertained.74 Prison memoirs by Gerry Adams, Danny Morrison, Ray McLaughlin, Bobby Sands, Jim Monaghan, Gerry Kelly, Aine and Eibhlin Nic Giolla Easpaig, and Richard O’Rawe et al. comprise the most common and internally acceptable republican genre.75 Those who claimed right of succession eagerly grasped the imprimatur of John Mitchell in the 1840s and Tom Clarke in the 1880s. Monaghan’s Colombia Jail Journal was specifically named in homage to Mitchell’s prototype of a transported Young Irelander.76 When jailed in Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight in the late 1970s, IRA lifer Sean Kinsella walked with pride on the scoured and weathered stone once trod by Clarke, the Fenian icon and lead 1916 Proclamation signatory. Released in 1996, Kinsella contributed a foreword to the 2011 reprint of the Tyroneman’s classic Glimpses of an Irish Felon’s Life. With the notable exception of O’Callaghan’s anti-IRA reminiscences, such accounts are united in their circumspection with regard to how their writers came to be imprisoned.77 The initial major Long War example of the genre was Prison Struggle: The Story of Continuing Resistance Behind the Wire, which was produced by the Provisionals in Belfast in March 1977, when the March 1977 loss of “political status” became an increasingly acute issue. Within a few years the prison question was central to the expansion, international profile, and political program of Sinn Féin.78 Prison Struggle modestly claimed to fall “short of the standards set by Tom Clarke and O’Donovan

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Rossa” while boldly highlighting this politically valuable association.79 Ultimately, the crises of the 1980 and 1981 hunger strikes in Long Kesh propelled Sinn Féin into significant political engagement and presaged the 1986 decision to jettison the perennially controversial abstentionist principle.80 Gerry Adams, Jim Gibney, Tom Hartley, Danny Morrison, Richard McAuley, Aidan McAteer, Ted Howell, and others transformed the Provisionals into a highly effective political machine as the decade elapsed. One of the first post-1986 Árd Fheis Sinn Féin publications emanated from the prisons in a timely de facto endorsement from that sizable constituency of the new departure. Questions of History, by Republican Prisoners of War, was printed in June 1987 by An Phoblacht for the Sinn Féin education department and comprised an otherwise anonymous survey of Republicanism from the United Irishmen of the 1790s to Saor Eire in the 1930s. It was axiomatic that the Provisional IRA was positioned at the far end of the republican evolutionary spectrum. Although released as “part one,” the remainder of the “historical analysis” did not appear. Polemic in tone and intended as a primer for internal debate, the italicized “questions” interposed in the text included many imbued with striking contemporary relevance, as was no doubt intentional.81 Irish Republican prisoners evidently drew skillfully on the lessons of the past, even if “part one” went no further than the 1930s. From the autumn of 1989 imprisoned IRA personnel possessed the magazine The Captive Voice/An Glor Gafa, in which the POW department provided an outlet for writings and commentary.82 Questions of History appeared in 1987, which witnessed a major upsurge in IRA activity boosted by military supplies imported from Libya. The offensive met with mixed results, and Sinn Féin, some believed, underperformed in the general election for Dáil Eireann.83 Nonetheless, the non-appearance of the Continuity IRA as a major armed rival confirmed that the base Republican movement remained united and capable of pursuing a twin track armed struggle geared towards ultimate negotiations with London. Sinn Féin’s electoral success across Ireland from the August 1994 IRA ceasefire and the passage of time facilitated the production of privately published books addressing the prisoner experience in Long Kesh

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and Crumlin Road. Post–Good Friday Agreement (1998) memoirs by Dominic Adams, Sean Maskey, and, to a lesser extent, John Noonan maintained the code of discussing internment and imprisonment with scant account of IRA active service in the North of Ireland.84 Other former prisoners, notably Jim McVeigh and Martin Og Meehan, penned biographies of senior IRA Northern Command figures of the 1930s and 1940s in preference to setting down their own stories.85 Similarly, Ella O’Dwyer, former life-sentenced IRA prisoner in England, organized the production of and edited biographical booklets on Brian Keenan, Michael Gaughan, and Sheena Campbell. It was not a coincidence that all three subjects featured in the Irish Republican Legends series were deceased at the time of publication.86 After P. Michael O’Sullivan’s controversial foray in 1972, republicans generally discouraged photography. Oistin MacBride’s 2001 Family, Friends and Neighbours stands alone as a graphic 1980s and 1990s collection created by a man whose brother is listed on the Roll of Honour.87 Books concerning leading Sinn Féin personalities, Gerry Adams, Ruairi O’Bradaigh, Joe Cahill, Alex Maskey, and Martin Ferris, focus overwhelmingly on their political contributions to the legal political party in which they attained distinction. In a conspicuously short section addressing his prominence in the cauldron of North Belfast, Maskey is merely cited as having “played an active part in the defence of his community.”88 The malign attention of legal institutions and pro-British death squads indicated a somewhat greater engagement, although his historic cross-community role as Lord Mayor of Belfast suggested the political wisdom of maintaining privacy. Cahill, who was seriously ill at the time of publication of his memoir, took most of his secrets amassed at the heart of the IRA since the 1940s to the grave in July 2004.89 The prolific Adams, arguably the preeminent republican of his generation, has been obliged to deny he was ever a member of the IRA, an offense for which he had never been convicted. Yet Adams produced a series of autobiographical accounts released by Steve MacDonagh of Brandon Books, Kerry. Brandon was also the imprint of significant political texts from Adams, including The Politics of Irish Freedom, which was published in 1986. MacDonagh was determined to breach the veil of state censorship surrounding Sinn Féin, which, in his opinion, had

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inappropriately occluded the “identifiable policies and sense of political strategy” within Republicanism.90 In relation to the late 1980s and early 1990s, he claimed, “To be informed about republican figures in any depth was regarded in media circles as suspect. . . . The ‘correct’ journalistic position was, it seemed, to refuse to progress beyond sweeping dismissal and puerile abuse.”91 One of the most remarkable examples of historical reticence pertained to Eamonn O’Doherty’s The IRA at War, 1916 to the Present. The lavishly illustrated volume was ostentatiously pro-republican, yet legal due to its conformity with publishing regulations.92 When a youth O’Doherty had infiltrated the British military as an IRA volunteer and later rose to the position of chief of staff of the Provisionals. In 1982 O’Doherty’s name was raised by the FBI in relation to the massing of war material in New York by the “Brooklyn Five” gunrunning circle. He was not, however, convicted in the jurisdiction, and the five men on trial in Brooklyn walked free from a court in which one, George Harrison, had brazenly admitted an additional twenty years of illegal activity. The experienced and well-traveled O’Doherty omitted all details of his significant political activism in Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Libya in a book dedicated to the organization of which he was a figure in high standing. The book’s title was an expressly political statement calculated to assert the relevance and legitimacy of the 1980s Republican movement on the cusp of taking seats in partitionist forums.93 The reserve of the Provisionals on their own history, one of the two most significant actors of the longest low-intensity war in post–World War II Europe, renders all current Troubles literature exploratory. Writers of long-standing interest in the organization, J. Bowyer Bell and Tim Pat Coogan but also Martin Dillon, Peter Taylor, Brendan O’Brien, and Ed Moloney, were reliant on controlled access to authorized sources.94 Journalists rather than historians predominated in this role as befitting the perceived function of such interactions, viewed by the IRA and Sinn Féin, as advancing the contemporary interests of the Republican movement. This small grouping acquired information endorsed by respective leaderships or dissenting individuals who had diverged from their control. Bell was regarded by Official Sinn Féin (later the Workers’ Party)

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president Tomás Mac Giolla as having CIA connections, but this did not preclude him being furnished with viewpoints the organization wished to document.95 Paradoxically, the Republican movement openly displayed its historical hyperconsciousness and sense of entitlement to ideological lineage from the respected United Irishmen. Promoters of countervailing revisionist propaganda in the 1980s interpreted this intense proprietorship as a possible weakness. The industrious devotion of militants to commemoration, stone memorials, and the Fenian rituals of the physical force tradition, however, were rarely conceived as augmenting the historical record. Rather, the perceived utility of asserting continuity of ideology and organizational succession ensured that the goal of achieving the republic relegated the task of documenting the requisite processes to  a secondary concern. The past is superficially addressed without bridging the gap between historical themes and authoritative statement. Nothing in the realm of definitive commentary could be expected ahead of the elusive final victories promised annually from 1969 into the early 1970s and frequently ever since. History is cited and remembered by persons wishing to justify their preeminent right to pursue its unfulfilled but commonly cherished agenda of the republic. Major historically themed annual commemorations such as Bodenstown ( June) and Edentubber (November) were the main platforms for Army Council policy statements, as well as morale building, fundraising, and clandestine side meetings. Belligerent speeches by Jimmy Steele and others in the advent of the 1969 split were among the most discernible signs of dissension within the Goulding leadership. Honoring the “Fenian dead” signaled affinity with revered forebears and the promise of ultimate acclaim. At Edentubber in November 1978, a base area for IRA operations on the militarized Louth-Armagh border, Daithi O’Conaill asserted, “Some may say that the Republican Movement has too many commemorations, but as long as people revere the memory of those who suffered and died in the cause of Ireland, freedom will never be defeated.”96 O’Conaill invoked Pearse’s 1915 concept of the “Fenian” graves and while noting the sacrifice of the five republicans killed on the site by a premature explosion in November 1957, implied that their full acknowledgment entailed the completion of the republican mission.

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This echoed Robert Emmet’s evocative definition of his “epitaph” as final victory, an ideological strain which connected the militant Provisionals to the widely admired United Irishman.97 Demonstrations of continuity often entailed the biological phenomenon of living history. In June 1974 Lillian Nally, grandniece of P. W. Nally “the Fenian martyr,” extolled the virtues of Mayo IRA volunteer Michael Gaughan, who had been force-fed to death in England when seeking political status and repatriation.98 In 1974 the NGA assumed responsibility for honoring Gaughan, the first IRA volunteer to die on hunger strike during the Long War. The location and immediate cause of his demise in Parkhurst accentuated grievances. Such special circumstances led to the Mayoman’s coffin being draped with the Tricolour under which Terence MacSwiney had emerged from Southwark Cathedral following his death on hunger strike in Brixton prison in November 1920. The first meeting of the NGA took place on 21 August 1926 at 41 Parnell Square, Dublin, and was chaired by Kathleen Clarke, widow of Tom Clarke. The meeting resolved to erect a monument in the “old Republican Plot” in Glasnevin cemetery where John O’Mahony of Young Ireland and P. W. Nally of the IRB were interred.99 Few nonunionists would have repudiated MacSwiney’s courage, sincerity, and legacy, and the funeral of Gaughan in Ireland, with whom he was associated fifty-four years later, occasioned a level of popular observance that unsettled the government.100 Although derided by cynics and political enemies, such iconic and tactile continuities were for republicans immensely profound. This was well understood by their establishment opponents who also frequented Bodenstown and Beal na Blath for identical purposes.101 The February 1976 attempt of a right-wing Fine Gael–Labour Coalition to minimize the impact of such propaganda extended to hijacking the remains of another Mayo IRA hunger striker who had perished in England. If not withheld in a jailyard, as was the case with executed IRA men in 1922–23, or buried in an unmarked rubbish-strewn corner of Portlaoise, as had occurred with George Plant in March 1942, the intervention was nonetheless distressing and divisive.102 When Joe Cahill insisted that Frank Stagg’s dying wish of burial in the Republican Plot beside Gaughan would be honored, none believed that eighteen inches of “Free

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State” concrete and a Special Branch guard detail could prevent fulfillment. This was duly achieved and the matter allowed to rest by the authorities in the interest of national political stability.103 The gradual onset of a more irenic atmosphere following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998 did not deliver commensurate advances in authoritative history of Irish republicanism. If it was far from the hierarchical monolith imagined by its enemies, the underground organization eschewed the option of writing a structured internal history. Recent brigade area compilations, notably Gerard Magee’s 2011 Tyrone’s Struggle, represent tentative steps into the arena. Supporters rather than general readers were canvassed by the inclusion as cover art of the Provisional Easter lily pin emblem and modified captive lark/ spirit of freedom symbol decommissioned of its traditional Armalite. Given an estimated fifteen hundred IRA operations carried out in Tyrone between 1970 and 1994, Magee’s 688 pages of text and photographs from the “republican perspective” is necessarily cursory as a work of analytical history.104 All deceased Tyrone volunteers in good standing with the IRA, however, were at the very least remembered in outline biographies and, where appropriate, in poignant photographs. The book went beyond the remit of Tirghra, which Sinn Féin produced in 2002, to survey 364 deceased Provisional Republicans in the absence of an updated edition of The Last Post.105 If the schism of 1986 complicated the production of an expanded The Last Post, the bitterness of the 1969–70 split and subsequent feuds significantly subsided in the 2010s. The Labour Party, incorporating the Workers’ Party splinter Democratic Left, was content to sponsor the admission of a Sinn Féin member to the Seanad. In 2013, former Official Republican movement member Eamon Gilmore served as Tanaiste in coalition with Fine Gael Taoiseach Enda Kenny, while Gerry Adams headed the Sinn Féin party in opposition. Alongside newly created metal badges celebrating the “Irish Republican Army” and “The Provos,” the Sinn Féin Bookshop on Parnell Square, Dublin, stocked one depicting the Official IRA hero Joe McCann, who was shot dead in his native Belfast by the British Army on 15 April 1972.106 The selected image was the famous photograph-derived silhouette of McCann in which he held a carbine in the Markets district. The

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round badge contained the “starry plough” flag surrounded by the militant legend, “They may kill the revolutionary, but they will never kill the revolution.” Gerry Adams, as detailed in his autobiography, Before the Dawn, had worked with McCann on the Unemployment Action Group in 1967 when both were members of the Republican Clubs in West Belfast. The lack of controversy surrounding Sinn Féin’s manufacture of a badge commemorating McCann was indicative of vastly improved relations between organized republicans on protracted ceasefire.107 The foundations for an overarching or project-based major history of the 1970s and 1980s have yet to be built, and it is unlikely that anything approaching authoritative accounts will soon appear. Unfortunately, this unsatisfactory situation cannot be redressed by traditional scholarly endeavors in state archives.

ARCHIVES AND MUSEUMS

Modern first world conflicts stimulate the collection of vast quantities of historically valuable information. The Stasi, secret police of communist East Germany, amassed at least eleven kilometers of shelved files using nondigital and often basic Cold War technology.108 This trove was made available for consultation, whereas security restrictions have ensured that the much-vaunted “thirty year rules” concerning government file transfers in Britain and Ireland have prevented the flow of similar files to public access. Irish and British state archives do not as yet physically possess, let alone catalog and release, vast quantities of judicial, police, military, prison, and diplomatic files of vital importance. An insignificant portion of extant documentation has been opened, and although much useful secondary and contextual material has emerged, surprisingly little of historical consequence has come to light. The advent of the “Boston College tapes” case in the United States in 2011–12 broadened the scope of the issue and increased the level of legal threat.109 The serving of a federal subpoena on the John J. Burns Library of Boston College on 5 May 2011 proved that events dating from the early years of the Long War vicariously affect the present regardless of political sensitivities. Incidents occurring as distantly as De-

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cember 1972, well beyond the traditional redefinition of politics as “history,” resonate with a vengeance. In this instance basic academic freedoms were threatened by the novel invocation of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (2003) between the United States and the United Kingdom in order to prise the contents of a closed oral history archive from Boston College. The failure to compensate for the lack of a de jure general amnesty from the Good Friday Agreement in a legal environment where no statute of limitations pertains to political offenses exposed thousands of individuals to potential prosecution.110 The roots of the Boston imbroglio stretched back to the late 1990s when a climate of distrust and uncertainty clouded expectations of the Peace Process. The deliberate omission from the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 of any mode of truth and reconciliation legislation and necessary indemnifications is indicative of opposition within the respective establishments to furnishing a full accounting of state activities. The fact that persons acting on behalf of the British state have effective immunity does not negate the theoretical prospect of future prosecutions for serious transgressions. Freedom of Information protocols have failed to uncover sufficiently incriminating documentation to enable major cases to be initiated. The chances of this eventuality have not been such as to marshal political will behind a blanket amnesty for all protagonists. In all likelihood, persons cognizant of the alleged role of Fianna Fail figures in founding the Provisional IRA and British “black operations” in Ireland will not be facilitated in the immediate future in Dublin or London. The objective of writing integrated history, informed by all major Troubles constituents, is consequently far in the future. The essential input of still silent former Provisionals is by no means the only outstanding criterion to achieve this narrative. NOTES 1. The Irish Defence Forces retain the title Oglaigh na hÉireann (Soldiers of Ireland) as the official name of the military. The term was adopted by the paramilitary Irish volunteers in November 1913 (a front group of the revolutionary Irish Republican Brotherhood). See An Cosantoir, May 2013, 30. The Defence Forces are referenced in Irish in the Constitution of Ireland as “Forsai

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Cosanta.” See Bunreacht na hEireann, Constitution of Ireland (Dublin, 2009), 29. I wish to acknowledge the assistance of Anthony Coughlan, Larry Donnelly, and Deasun O’Longain for providing a number of sources utilized in this chapter. 2. See Patsy McGarry, While Justice Slept: The True Story of Nicky Kelly and the Sallins Train Robbery (Dublin, 2006). 3. See Saoirse Nua: The Voice of the Republican Movement, no. 8 (Summer 2012): 1. 4. “Constitution of Oglaigh na hEireann,” in Martin Dillon, The Dirty War (London, 1988), 488. The illegal document is referred to as the Green Book (482). 5. Guardian, 29 July 2005. 6. An Phoblacht, 4 March 2011. 7. Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie, The Provisional IRA (London, 1987). In 1993 Indiana academic Bob White published an account which drew heavily on interviews with nine Irish Republicans. See Robert W. White, Provisional Irish Republicans: An Oral and Interpretive History (Westport, CT, 1993). 8. Uinseann Mac Eoin, The IRA in the Twilight Years, 1923–1948 (Dublin, 1997). For a personal IRA overview of the 1930s and 1940s, see Ned Gargan, The Great Betrayal: Russell and Hayes (Dublin, 1989). 9. For Cronin’s work on Clann na Gael, see The McGarrity Papers: Revelations of the Irish Revolutionary Movement in Ireland and America, 1900–1940 (New York, 1992). 10. Sean Cronin, Tone’s Republic: The Case against Sectarianism, pamphlet (1975), 20–21. 11. See Sean Mac Stiofain, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Edinburgh, 1975), chs. 8, 9. An alternate account is provided by the Official Republican Movement in Fianna Fail: The IRA Connection, pamphlet ([Dublin], 1971). Provisional IRA members were required to seek “the establishment of an Irish Socialist Republic based on the 1916 Proclamation.” See “Constitution,” in Dillon, Dirty War, 482. See also Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party (Dublin, 2009), ch. 4. The IRA in South Armagh were on “active service” from August 1969 supported by “operational bases” on Liam Fagan’s farm in Proleek, Ravensdale, County Louth, and on that of Packie Duffy at Ballyrush, Inniskeen, County Monaghan. See Sinn Féin, Legends in Their Time, booklet (2013), 16. 12. Bishop and Mallie, Provisional IRA, 101–3; and Sean Swan, Official Republicanism, 1962 to 1972 ([Belfast], 2006), 320. 13. For a summary, see Simon Prince and Geoffrey Warner, Belfast and Derry in Revolt: A New History of the Start of the Troubles (Dublin, 2012). 14. Ruan O’Donnell, Special Category: The IRA in English Prisons, 1968– 1978 (Dublin and Portland, 2012), 19–21.

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15. See Ciaran De Baroid, Ballymurphy and the Irish War, rev. ed. (London, 2000), 19–20. 16. IRA Connection, 51. Left-leaning Jack McCabe, director of engineering with the Provisionals in Dublin, informed Sean Cronin that “the national issue should take precedence over all else in the summer and autumn of 1969.” John Joe McGirl of Ballinamore, Leitrim, was similarly conflicted when breaking with his close friend Cathal Goulding. Sean Cronin, Irish Nationalism: A History of Its Roots and Ideology (New York, 1981), 292. McGirl was a significant supporter of Sinn Féin’s 1986 decision to abandon abstentionism. See Sinn Féin, The Politics of Revolution: The Main Speeches and Debates from the 1986 Sinn Fein Ard-Fheis including the Presidential Address of Gerry Adams, 24. 17. Gerry Adams, Before the Dawn, an Autobiography (Kerry, 1996), 127. 18. Robert White, Ruairi O’Bradaigh (Bloomington, IN, 2006), 151–52. 19. Mac Stiofain, Memoirs, 142. 20. Freedom Struggle, 10. 21. Brian Feeney, Sinn Féin: A Hundred Turbulent Years (Dublin, 2002), 246–50. 22. Freedom Struggle, 10. 23. See Liam Clarke and Kathryn Johnston, Martin McGuinness, from Guns to Government (Edinburgh, 2001), 32–33. 24. Brian Keenan, 1941–2008, a Republican Legend, pamphlet (Dublin, 2008), 9. 25. Interview with Tony Loy, Bray, County Wicklow, 19 October 2002. 26. See Tirghra, I nDil Chuimhne, Ireland’s Patriot Dead (Dublin, 2002), 90–91. The 2002 account made no attempt to conceal this affiliation: “Both members of the Official IRA and their political wing Republican Clubs attended the funerals . . . and heard Cathal Goulding, a leading republican of the time, give the oration” (90–91). On 6 April 1971 members and supporters of the Provisional and Official IRA marched “side by side” in Dublin, accompanying the funeral cortege of Tony Henderson, a twenty-one-year-old republican from Andersonstown, Belfast, killed in a training accident in County Laois. Irish Independent, 7 April 1971. 27. See Freedom Struggle, 10. Ed Moloney aptly described the Provisionals as a “coalition.” Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (London, 2002), 79. 28. White, O’Bradaigh, 151. 29. Mac Stiofain, Memoirs, 143. 30. Thomas Maguire, “Entering Leinster House, a Veteran Speaks,” 22 October 1986, Press Release document (author’s collection). See also White, O’Bradaigh, 330. 31. See “Constitution,” in Dillon, Dirty War, 482. 32. Freedom Struggle, 43. 33. See Tommy McKearney, The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament (London, 2011), ch. 3.

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34. This process was mirrored in July 2012 when disparate “dissident” armed republican elements believed to include the Real IRA and Republican Action Against Drugs (Derry) united as “the IRA.” Irish Times, 29 July 2012. 35. See Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 262. 36. Des Long, “Short History of the Easter Lily,” unpublished MS (author’s collection). Sale of paper lilies was conceived by Cumann na mBan in 1926 as a fund-raising initiative. The first public sale of resin lily badges designed in Limerick occurred in Dublin outside the Mater Hospital in November 1972 when Sean Mac Stiofain was on hunger strike. Ibid. 37. See photo section in Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 434. A UVF bomb planted in Beechmount Avenue killed ten-year-old Kevin McMenamin shortly after local Provisionals had left the locality to march to Milltown Cemetery but before the Official Republican movement equivalent departed. McMenamin’s family supported the Officials, and bitterness over the incident led to violent scenes at Milltown when the rival organizations encountered each other. Angered by the chain of events, Provisionals shot John Short, uncle of the young McMenamin, later that day. The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator and Gaelic American, 16 April 1977; and David McKittrick et al., Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Edinburgh, 2001), 715. 38. Tirghra, 209. 39. O’Donnell, Special Category, 23–28; and Clann na hÉireann, Where We Stand, leaflet (London, n.d.). 40. The Officials accordingly retained a title used by Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin publication at the turn of the century, while the Provisonals revived one used by the Republican movement in the 1920s and 1930s. See White, O’Bradaigh, 156. 41. O’Donnell, Special Category, 41. 42. For an early overview, see Martin Dillon and Denis Lehane, Political Murder in Northern Ireland (London, 1973); and Alan F. Parkinson, 1972 and the Ulster Troubles: “A Very Bad Year” (Dublin, 2010). 43. An Phoblacht, April 1972. 44. Eire Nua: The Social and Economic Programme of Sinn Féin, pamphlet (Dublin, 1971). See also Ruairi O’Bradaigh, “What Is Irish Republicanism?,” Irish Independent, 9 December 1970; and White, O’Bradaigh, 165. 45. Mac Stiofain, Memoirs, 278. 46. Freedom Struggle, 43. See also Freedom Struggle, v; G. O’Danachair, Provos, Patriots or Terrorists?, 2nd ed. (Dublin, 1974), 54; and An Phoblacht, March 1970. 47. Freedom Struggle, 44. 48. Ruairi O’Bradaigh, Árd Fheis Address, 29 October 1972, in Ruairi O’Bradaigh, Our People, Our Future: What EIRE NUA Means (Dublin, 1973),

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20–21. See also The Quality of Life in the New Ireland, pamphlet (May 1973); and What Sinn Féin Means by “REGIONALISATION,” pamphlet (May 1974). 49. O’Donnell, Special Category, 62–65. 50. Freedom Struggle, 99–101. 51. National Graves Association, The Last Post (Dublin, 1976). In April 1985 a discrete volume was issued by the NGA to cover the losses sustained by pre-split and Provisional IRA adherents in the northern city and its environs: Belfast Graves (Dublin, 1985). The city’s NGA branch had hitherto issued the less ambitious but popular Belfast’s Patriot Graves, which detailed republicans killed up to the 1940s. An expanded version of the pamphlet was subsequently edited and renamed by Jimmy Steele: Antrim’s Patriot Dead, 1797–1953, introduction, 3. 52. Freedom Struggle, 2nd American ed. (New York, 1973), 1. 53. Michael O’Sullivan, quoted in “The Troubles, 1971,” Chicago Tribune, 25 July 1971. 54. Chicago Tribune, 25 July 1971. 55. Michael O’Sullivan, Patriot Graves: Resistance in Ireland (Chicago, 1972). O’Sullivan’s first visit was to Dublin in Easter 1966 to cover the 1916 commemoration (8). Don Johnson, a progressive Honduran American journalist with the Boston Globe and Newsweek magazine, wrote the main text of the book. See www.PatriotGraves.com. 56. O’Danachair, Provos. 57. Ibid., 32. 58. Ibid., 63. 59. Ibid., Appendix A, 64–65. 60. Interview with Fr. Piaras O’Duill, Dublin, 20 July 2007. 61. See O’Donnell, Special Category, 139–41, 281–82; and PAC, Irish Voices from English Jails: Writings of Irish Political Prisoners in English Prisons (London, 1979). 62. See Revolutionary Communist Group, Hands off Ireland!, no. 1, December 1976. 63. Fr. Denis Faul and Fr. Raymond Murray, The Castlereagh File: Allegations of RUC Brutality, 1976–1977 (n.p., 1978). 64. Gerry Adams, Peace in Ireland? A Broad Analysis of the Present Situation, pamphlet (Belfast, 1976), 14. 65. Ibid., 13. 66. For the roots of this tension, see Cronin, Irish Nationalism, 210–11. Republican Sinn Féin remained committed to Eire Nua. See Saoirse, July 2012, 6. 67. Republican Bulletin/Irish Na Poblachta, November 1986. See also White, O’Bradaigh, ch. 16; and Michael Hall, ed., Republicanism in Transition (1): The Need for a Debate, pamphlet (Belfast, 2011), 8–10.

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68. Eamon Collins with Mick McGovern, Killing Rage (London, 1997); Gerry Bradley with Brian Feeney, Insider: Gerry Bradley’s Life in the IRA (Dublin, 2009); Martin McGartland, Fifty Dead Men Walking (London, 1997); and Maria McGuire, To Take Arms: My Year with the IRA Provisionals (New York, 1973). See also Mac Stiofain, Memoirs, 307. 69. Shane Paul O’Doherty, The Volunteer: A Former IRA Man’s True Story, American ed. (New York, 2008); and Sean O’Callaghan, The Informer (London, 1998). 70. An Phoblacht, 11 June 1998. 71. Irish Independent, 4 December 2008. 72. Belfast Telegraph, 27 October 2007; An Phoblacht, 28 October 2010. 73. Ed Moloney, Voices from the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland (London, 2010). 74. Belfast Telegraph, 4 January 2012. 75. Former IRA prisoners produced a memoir-style history of the HBlocks in 1994. Brian Campbell, Laurence McKeown, and Felim O’Hagan, eds., Nor Meekly Serve My Time: The H-Block Struggle, 1976–1981 (Belfast, 1994). See also Lachlan Whalen, Contemporary Irish Republican Prison Writing: Writing and Resistance (New York, 2007). For an early collection of Long Kesh creative prison writing, see Have You No Anger: Long Kesh Poems, pamphlet (Dublin, 1975). 76. James Monaghan, Colombia Jail Journal: The Compelling, Exclusive Inside Story of the Colombia Three (Kerry, 2007). 77. Danny Morrison, Then the Wall Came Down: A Prison Journal (Dublin, 1999); Richard O’Rawe, Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-Block Hunger Strike (Dublin, 2005); and Ray McLaughlin, Inside an English Jail: The Prison Diary of the IRA Volunteer Raymond McLaughlin (Dublin, 1987). 78. Prison Struggle: The Story of Continuing Resistance Behind the Wire, pamphlet (March 1977). 79. Ibid., 1. 80. See Brian Feeney, Sinn Féin: A Turbulent Century (Dublin, 2002). 81. Republican Prisoners of War, Questions of History (Dublin, 1987), 150. One queried, “Can a guerrilla army such as the IRA expect to win popular support for a social programme if it has no organised political party actively involving itself in the daily struggle of the oppressed?” Ibid. 82. An Glor Gafa: The Captive Voice 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1989). A more radical and polemical internal education department publication, Irish Bheag, was edited from 1987 by Jim Monaghan and Dr. Rose Dugdale. Irish Bheag [no. 1, 1987]. 83. See Kevin Rafter, Sinn Féin, 1905–2005: In the Shadow of Gunmen (Dublin, 2005), 150–51. 84. Sean Maskey, Long Kesh: My Lost Freedom (Belfast, 2011); Dominic Adams, Faoi Ghlas (Belfast, 2010); and John Noonan, What Do I Do Now?

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([Dublin], 2005). Noonan’s account of his activity in South Down is more detailed. 85. Mairtin Og Meehan, Finely Tempered Steel: Sean McCaughey and the IRA (Dublin, [2006]); and Jim McVeigh, Executed: Tom Williams and the IRA (Belfast, 1999). 86. See Keenan; Michael Gaughan, Prepared to Fight or Die (Dublin, 2009); and Ella O’Dwyer, Dancing to the Revolution: Sheena Campbell, a Lost Leader (Dublin, 2009). 87. Oistin MacBride, Family, Friends and Neighbours: An Irish Photobiography (Dublin, 2001). 88. Barry McCaffrey, Alex Maskey, Man and Mayor (Belfast, 2003), 26. 89. Chris Ryder, Obituary of Joe Cahill, Guardian, 26 July 2004. 90. Steve MacDonagh, foreword to Gerry Adams, The Politics of Irish Freedom (Kerry, 1986), xv. MacDonagh tested the waters in 1982 when releasing Falls Memories by the same writer. 91. Steve MacDonagh, Open Book: One Publisher’s War (Dingle, 1999), 175. 92. Eamonn O’Doherty, The IRA at War: 1916 to the Present (Dublin, 1985). 93. See Jack Holland, The American Connection: US Guns, Money, and Influence in Northern Ireland (New York, 1987), 95–96. 94. See J. Bowyer Bell, The Secret Army, 3rd ed. (Dublin, 1989); and Tim Pat Coogan, The IRA, new ed. (London, 1995). 95. Tomás Mac Giolla to author, 20 September 2002, City Hall, Dublin. 96. Irish Republican Information Service, 22 November 1978. See also Ruan O’Donnell, From Vinegar Hill to Edentubber: The Wexford IRA and the Border Campaign (Wexford, 2007), 58. 97. See Ruan O’Donnell, Robert Emmet and the Rising of 1803 (Dublin and Portland, 2003), 198–200. 98. An Phoblacht, 24 August 1977. In April 1976, the seventieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising, Dublin veteran and active Provisional IRA supporter Joe Clarke was ailing but alive. Among those sharing the GPO platform with O’Bradaigh and O’Conaill were Fiona Plunkett, sister of 1916 martyr Joe Plunkett, Tipperary Tan War survivor Dan Gleeson, and Belfast “Forties” man Joe Cahill. Irish World, 1 May 1976. 99. National Graves Association, Last Post, xix. 100. O’Donnell, Special Category, 201–9. 101. Extraordinary conflict within the Establishment regarding national history led to a decision by the Department of Posts and Telegraphs to release a stamp commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Fenian dynamiter, at the height of the H-Block hunger strike in September 1981. See An Phoblacht/Republican News, 9 September 1981.

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102. [Enda O’Riordan, ed.] George Plant, Irish Republican Army, Executed by Firing Squad in Portloaise Prison, March 5th, 1942, pamphlet (Dublin, 1992). 103. See O’Donnell, Special Category, chs. 5, 8; and Gerry Adams, “Frank Stagg,” in Cage Eleven (Dingle, 1990), 116–24. 104. Gerard Magee, Tyrone’s Struggle (2011), 7. 105. Tirghra, 1–3. 106. McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, 175–76. 107. Adams, Before the Dawn, 80–81. For McCann’s memorial, see Robert Kerr, Republican Belfast: A Political Tourist’s Guide (Belfast, 2008), 122. 108. Derek Scally, “Secrets and Files: Dealing with the Painful Stasi Past,” Irish Times, 7 January 2012. 109. Irish Times, 10 and 19 January 2012. 110. Ruan O’Donnell, “The Boston College Tapes,” History Ireland, April 2012, 12–16.

CHAPTER 3

B E AT I N G T H E R E T R E AT O N A C O N T E S T E D PA S T ? The British Army and the Politics of Commemoration in Northern Ireland

Aaron Edwards

Stories of past glories or of past wrongs are useful tools in the present, but they, too, often come at the cost of abusing history. History is also abused when people try to ignore or even suppress evidence that might challenge their preferred view of the past. —Margaret Macmillan, “The Uses and Abuses of History”

With the withdrawal of British troops from the streets and the drawdown of the military presence at the end of Operation Banner in 2007,1 the security landscape of Northern Irish society was transformed. The British Army’s long deployment during the “Troubles” had been characterized by routine vehicle checkpoints, huge surveillance watchtowers 77

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perched strategically along the 303-mile border with the Irish Republic, a massive buildup of regular infantry battalions in bases scattered across the province of Ulster, and daily patrols by air, sea, and land. Arguably, this enduring mission, known under the constitutional rubric Military Aid to the Civil Power (MACP), would become the most potent symbol of the army’s intervention in twentieth-century British politics and come to define the conflict for those who lived through it. Curiously, as Kevin Boyle and Tom Hadden were to report in the early 1990s, many visitors to this part of the world were struck “by the way in which people go about their business as if the heavily armed army and police patrols which pass close by were invisible.”2 Despite attempts to ignore the proverbial elephant in the room, the army’s physical presence on the surrounding social and political landscape nonetheless seeped intrusively into the consciousness of everyday life. In spite of the military’s centrality to the Northern Ireland conflict, there is little of substance written on the effects of the Troubles on Britain’s armed forces.3 Some 250,000 soldiers qualified for the Northern Ireland clasp of the army’s General Service Medal;4 a total of 770 lost their lives, including 136 members of the British Army’s locally recruited Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR, which later became the Royal Irish Regiment [RIR]) and 35 regular soldiers who were off-duty when they were killed. In contrast, the security forces (made up of the regular army, the UDR, and the Royal Ulster Constabulary [RUC]) were responsible for 364 deaths overall—approximately 88 percent were Catholics and 12 percent were Protestants—with the British Army responsible for 302, the RUC for 54, and the UDR for only 8.5 Add to these figures republican allegations of collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries, and the story of British military intervention becomes an increasingly complicated one. Official discourse on Operation Banner has rarely departed from the most opaque references to the role played by the military in “protecting the people of Northern Ireland, providing much needed stability and thereby helping to set the conditions for the peace Northern Ireland enjoys today.”6 While it is tempting to agree with this superficially attractive view of troops returning gallantly to barracks and being redeployed to other far-flung operational theaters, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, this

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evades a more nuanced interpretation of the British Army’s legacy in Northern Ireland. As this chapter makes clear, the military helped to define and shape the conflict and, therefore, must be more systematically factored into accounts of what remains a hotly contested past. In order to address the deficit in our knowledge, I explore three key aspects of how the British Army, as an institution, “remembers” the Troubles. First, I describe how the army commemorates its fallen from its campaign in Northern Ireland;7 second, I examine how the army (re)constructs its involvement in the conflict; and third, I consider how historians have contested these narratives.

COMMEMORATING THE FALLEN

According to the anthropologist John Nagle, commemoration is “Janus faced” insofar as it “often evokes an aura of timeless continuity with the past, [it] can serve as a rite to signify rupture from tradition.”8 In this sense memorialization is a double-edged phenomenon; on the one hand, it has enormous transformative potential, while on the other, it can be used malignly to reinforce deep division and suspicion between rival communities.9 Moreover, the rituals, symbols, and pageantry associated with commemoration have a rich heritage in both Britain and Ireland, though it is in the former where, as Sara McDowell suggests, “remembrance and commemoration [are] inextricably bound to and shaped by the politics of the present.”10 Graham Dawson conceptualizes this as the “present-past,”11 wherein the contested past is used as a marker of difference that ultimately perpetuates division, rather than serving to unify communities, long after violent conflict has subsided. For the reasons identified by Nagle, it is perhaps unsurprising that in a polity where the constitutional arrangement has been so deeply contested, commemoration should itself be deeply divisive.12 Ultimately, argues Kris Brown, the restoration of peace and stability is mitigated by the “sensitivities of memory and space in a divided society, and their amplifying intersection,” which “pose new challenges to the resolution of conflict and the inculcation of trust.”13 It is in this context, therefore, that all acts of Troubles-related commemoration should be judged.

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From the invaluable ethnographic research identified above, it is possible to discern further, important truisms about Troubles-related memorialization, such as the tendency for ritualized practices of remembrance by loyalists and republicans to take place in public spaces, firmly rooted in territoriality and conditioned by the raw, social power structures tethered to paramilitary groupings. By comparison, security forces memorials are typically located away from prying eyes, and speak, “internally” at least, to “commemorative practices hidden and institutionally private.”14 In the case of the RUC George Cross Memorial Garden in East Belfast, McDowell argues that its location, inside the fortified Police Service of Northern Ireland Headquarters at Brooklyn, is “indicative of the distancing of memory and of the impossibility of remembering these narratives in a public space.”15 Though undoubtedly insightful, Switzer, Graham, and McDowell largely ignore the dynamics of group identity that makes these practices possible, if not wholly necessary. The IRA’s war against the British state extended more fully and liberally into the unionist community than is openly admitted, as the “terrorists” frequently stalked “soft targets” among locally recruited members of the RUC and UDR, a disproportionate number of whom were killed while “off duty.”16 As a direct consequence, security forces personnel led secret personal lives, sought refuge in limited social circles, and, ultimately, coveted a subculture of anonymity. In another sense, a more public acknowledgment of the sacrifices made by security forces personnel is compounded by the tendency to knit the memorialization of the Troubles into a much broader patchwork of national commemoration. Official state commemorations devoted to paying homage to military service—such as those held on Remembrance Sunday across Great Britain and Northern Ireland— rarely concentrate on discrete campaigns. On these annual occasions it is much more common to find the Troubles remembered as part of a larger mosaic of “big” wars (World Wars I and II) and a whole host of “small” wars (Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden) involving the British Army since 1945.17 Shorter interventions, like the Falklands War (1982) and the First Gulf War (1991), are also remembered alongside what has been referred to as Britain’s “forgotten war” in Korea (1950–53). However, at the forefront of what Dawson has usefully la-

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beled “British official memory”—that is, the “dominant national narrative” that articulates “official memory” at the level of the state18—are the recent interventions in Iraq (2003–9) and Afghanistan (2001–14). Here emotions are much rawer than those of other conflicts, especially for families who have been recently bereaved. Importantly, it was common in the closing stages of Britain’s Afghanistan campaign to see throngs of people participating in such publicly uplifting spectacles as “homecoming parades” and the somber rituals of repatriation ceremonies for fallen soldiers. In direct contrast, no such greeting awaited the returning coffins of those killed in action during Operation Banner; a brief mention amidst busy media headlines was the only sign that a war was being fought on British streets.19 Nowadays, for those wishing to commemorate soldiers who lost their lives in the Troubles, the government, by way of the Northern Ireland Office, has supported the construction of an “ash garden” at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.20 Curiously, there are few if any state-sponsored commemorations of security forces deaths in Northern Ireland itself. As McDowell’s research confirms, on 19 February 2007, just weeks short of the formal end of Operation Banner, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced the removal of 250 memorials commemorating soldiers killed in the Troubles.21 This was done partly because many memorials were housed inside security forces bases in predominantly nationalist areas and partly because a proliferation of sites of mourning did not serve the state’s penchant for what McDowell refers to as the “channelling of remembrance.”22 There is considerable purchase in the view that territoriality has played a significant role in tempering state attitudes to memorialization. For example, the large monument in Ballysillan Park, North Belfast, which commemorates three Scottish soldiers murdered by members of the Provisional IRA in 1971, was built principally from donations made by the local Protestant working-class community in the area. Conversely, Narrow Water, situated on the Newry to Warrenpoint bypass in County Down, was the site of a Provisional IRA bomb and gun attack that claimed the lives of eighteen British soldiers on 27 August 1979. The poppy wreaths left in memory of the soldiers killed on that day have been repeatedly desecrated by some local republicans who regard the killings as entirely

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justified.23 Narrow Water aptly encapsulates the continuing difficulties surrounding public acts of memorialization involving the security forces in this divided society. Although the “normalization” process sought to remove makeshift military structures from the landscape, thereby reflecting an emerging political stability, it also, rather pertinently, became a metaphor for the British Army’s curiously seminal, yet transient, role in the Troubles. Moreover, while this “channelling of remembrance” might appear, on the surface at least, unproblematic, there is a sense in which the state is seeking to dictate the terms of commemoration. As Jenny Edkins reminds us, “Memorialisation takes a variety of forms and is contested. It can reclaim the dead either as political beings or as bare life. It can be state-sponsored or community-driven. It can respect the difficulty of remembering trauma or it can obscure the problem.”24 It is this obfuscation of the trauma experienced by the security forces that is most problematic. Switzer and Graham have rightly pointed to the “memorial agnosticism”25 of the British state, which has further marginalized the experiences of those who soldiered during Operation Banner. Fastidiously at least, we could be forgiven for coming away with an impression that the conflict was solely one fought between republicans and loyalists, with the British state and its security forces serving as referees. In fact, the opposite is the case: the British Army had become a key actor in the conflict from the early 1970s, despite seeing its role primarily as an impartial one and, above all, as the servant of its political masters in London. Nonetheless, by taking refuge in the constitutional subordination of the military instrument to the civil authority, the military risks reproducing an artificial remembrance of its role, which has less to do with the elision of complicity and more to do with a misunderstanding of the historical record. In other words, while official discourse seeks to minimize the impact of military involvement in the Troubles it also unwittingly draws generalized demarcations between a “bad past” and a “good future,” which inadvertently plays into the hands of the highly politicized debate on “dealing with the past.”26 On a less philosophical level, the practice of state-led commemoration across the United Kingdom merges the sacrifices of all soldiers, sailors, and airmen across all times and all places. This has both intended

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Newly arrived British soldiers stand on guard in the Catholic Falls Road area of Belfast, August 16, 1969. Hulton Archive. Photo by James Jackson/Getty Images. By permission of Getty Images.

and unintended consequences. For J. G. A. Pocock, “Institutionalization tends to reduce, if hardly ever to eliminate, the importance of myth; it replaces a mythic dream-time with a secular time of institutional continuity.”27 The army’s superimposition of the values of honor, sacrifice, and courage on these institutional narratives may serve the organization well in terms of instilling pride and a sense of tradition in its ranks, but it does little for our understanding of a contested past or, indeed, for the education and training of new generations of soldiers who have little conception of the Troubles. Indeed, the latter point is an important one. Because of the passage of time, fewer and fewer serving soldiers have had any direct experience of losing comrades and friends in Northern Ireland. Certainly, younger soldiers (at the time writing, January 2012, 56.3 percent of all soldiers were age twenty-nine and under) would have no operational experience of the Troubles prior to the 1994 paramilitary ceasefires. At a stretch, the numbers of serving personnel who could possibly have served during the

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height of the violence in the 1970s is restricted to less than 1.6 percent.28 Moreover, given the nature of current military deployments, the vast majority of those taking part in commemoration are veterans. Indeed, some officers may even take the view that their younger soldiers need more rounded exposure to the realities of combat experiences beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. Consequently, it is at the subunit, or regimental, level where more discrete forms of memorialization are held, fallen comrades remembered with pride, and veterans of past tours invited back into officers’ and sergeants’ messes to speak from experience. Historians are generally absent from such proceedings, as the context is instead dictated by the broad sweep of regimental corporate memory, which amounts, at times, to nothing more than folklore, in which feats of derring-do and heroism are recalled alongside the exploits of famous figures. Almost all of these remembrances are tinged with a deeply subjective sense of adventure. Of even greater significance, however, is the widening of the gulf between generations, which continues to have significant consequences in terms of how Britain’s army (re)constructs its lessons from the Troubles.

(RE)CONSTRUCTING THE PAST

As an institution, the British Army has grappled with the perennial issue of capturing, retaining, and disseminating its operational experience during Operation Banner. This was dramatically revealed in 2007 when the Pat Finucane Centre, a nationalist-oriented victims group dedicated to investigating state-sponsored violence, successfully obtained an official army assessment of its military operations in Northern Ireland.29 The document, requested and released under the Freedom of Information Act, was interesting for a number of reasons. First, on the surface it appeared to be a rather perfunctory piece of work and displayed a palpable lack of insight into the complexity of divisions bedeviling Northern Irish society. Second, and typical of publications of its kind, it lacked coherence in its authorship. Purportedly penned by junior officers who had been tasked with capturing the most salient “lessons” from Operation Banner, it sought to facilitate a cacophony of operational experi-

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ences, though appeared to lack an overall appreciation of the military’s role vis-à-vis British government security policy. Third, and most regrettably of all, it was devoid of any real historical analysis and committed the cardinal sin of treating some apocryphal tales as fact. In many respects, it shortchanged the military’s thirty-eight-year contribution to ending the Troubles in Northern Ireland. What the pamphlet episode further illustrated, however, was something altogether more profound: the army tended to absorb and inculcate its “lessons” from Operation Banner through a process of osmosis. In other words, through a spoken “folk wisdom,” rather than specifically through military doctrine and training, soldiers are informed of how the techniques, tactics, and procedures they are being taught were honed in the back alleys and rural hamlets of Northern Ireland. This is certainly evident in the training of officer cadets at Sandhurst, with examples ranging from patrolling skills and public order drills to a basic understanding of how the intelligence gathering cycle works and why soldiers must adhere to their rules of engagement (ROE).30 It is important to remember, however, that these skills and drills learned and adapted over a long period in Northern Ireland have also come to inform Britain’s broader approaches to counterinsurgency and counterterrorism at higher operational, strategic, and policy levels.31 So how does this process of osmosis inform the army’s institutional memory of its involvement in the Troubles? It could be argued that it does so in three important ways. First, in the functional sense, the lessons of Northern Ireland are disseminated in discrete ways akin to the cultural logic of folk wisdom. For instance, in teaching young soldiers and officers the dangers of complacency in patrolling, a much more experienced noncommissioned officer, usually a sergeant, colour sergeant or, given the passage of time, warrant officer, might recall an anecdote of when a patrol in Armagh City was ambushed by the Provisional IRA. The vignette highlights the very basic assumptions about the patrol’s mission, how it was commanded and why it neglected to do A, B, and C. Thus the failures become explicit in the recalling of the lesson: had the soldiers done it differently, they would have thwarted the terrorist’s plan to lure them into a kill zone. Hindsight is used to good effect here. The learning process is triggered by the need to inform present-day

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soldiers how to avoid making the same mistakes. Intriguingly, the emphasis on failure or, in this hypothetical example, of averting failure is something the American counterinsurgency expert John Nagle has argued is necessary if military organizations are to learn effectively from the past.32 Second, osmosis serves to sanitize training by avoiding the risk of delving into messier or more controversial episodes from which “lessons” are drawn. An example of this is the recounting of the dangers of employing disproportionate force, which has had profound repercussions for soldiering in the province. Prominent examples are the “Falls Road Curfew” (July 1970), “Internment” (August 1971), and “Bloody Sunday” (January 1972). Moreover, it is the discursive haunting of the historical record by reference to the so-called five techniques (when several detainees were allegedly subjected to “inhumane and degrading treatment” at the hands of the security forces) that serves to highlight the real dangers of employing disproportionate force. Historically, of course, the Republic of Ireland government took Britain to the European Court of Human Rights to protest the treatment of several terrorist suspects. Although these techniques were at the time prohibited under the Law of Armed Conflict, they were considered a by-product of the frustration at the lack of actionable intelligence. As the head of the army complained to the defence secretary at the time, “In the present situation, we are vitally concerned to make the most of all sources of intelligence, and of these interrogation is the one which appears to be falling far short of its potential.”33 An awareness of how these ill-fated military actions had wider political consequences for troops serving in the Province reinforces the conception of wrongdoing without explaining the dynamics prevailing at the time. The context is willingly abandoned, and we receive, instead, a neatly packaged “warning from history.” It is undoubtedly the case that in a divided society such actions give sustenance to the perceptions that one side is being treated more unfairly than the other. A casual glance at the memorialization of incidents such as the Falls Road Curfew, Internment, and Bloody Sunday confirms how the particularist readings of the past by ethnonational groups can be injurious to the historical record. As the Sinn Féin president, Gerry Adams, told his party’s annual Árd Fheis in 2011:

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In August 1971 a British Army regiment, the Paras, killed 11 people in Ballymurphy. Five months later in January 1972 this same regiment killed 14 people in Derry on Bloody Sunday. That July in Springhill, in West Belfast the Paras killed five more people. Shortly after that they shot dead two men on the Shankill Road. And in early 1973 they killed five men in Ardoyne. It is claimed that the Paras killed 42 people in disputed circumstances in the 20 months after internment in 1971.34 Although some acknowledgment of gun battles between the army and loyalist paramilitaries is alluded to in Adams’s speech, the seriousness of these acts is downplayed and instead a teleological history is reimagined that, ultimately, sets out to indict British military action while conveniently minimizing the IRA’s involvement in the Troubles. It is also somewhat astounding how, in an armed conflict lasting thirty-eight years, a single regiment could be responsible for 14 percent of all armyrelated deaths in such a short time frame, twenty months. Nevertheless, Adams’s monochrome remembrance of the past serves its purpose of informing recycled narratives of injustice, repression, and inequality by blaming every death on the British “Crown forces.”35 Third, the process of osmosis permits the formulation and dissemination of an uncomplicated account of history, one which leaves out the political context of the British Army’s deployment. The distinguished military historian Sir John Keegan, who taught at Sandhurst for many years, remained pathologically dismissive of the political connotations of war, arguing that there was a tendency among some historians to buy into Clausewitz’s overzealous and jingoistic interpretation of war as a wholly “worthy” political activity. Keegan argued instead that war was much more of a cultural phenomenon and that Clausewitz’s followers, like the Prussian general himself, were guilty of immoral thoughts on war.36 In Northern Ireland, like in all other British military campaigns, politics really did matter. From relegating the army to a supporting role after 1976–77 to providing the context in which the military drawdown could take place thirty years later, the political process could hardly be avoided. As intimated above, it is the artificial demarcation between the politician’s orders and the soldier’s service to his political masters that

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has confounded more detailed examination of the role of the military in Northern Ireland. By and large, it is informed by the individual knowledge and/or experience (or lack thereof ) which permits the recycling of well-worn narratives. British official memory—particularly as represented in military doctrine—is, unusually, informed by nationalist perceptions of the conflict, just as much as British or unionist perceptions. Arguably, as Paul Dixon reminds us, this has been reinforced by the “propaganda war” which has run in parallel to the “real war” in Northern Ireland.37 There are grounds for arguing that the army impeded its mission by deliberately recycling misleading narratives of contemporaneous events, such as Bloody Sunday, which may have played into the hands of the rightwing British press and hard-line unionists but which further entrenched misperceptions about the army in the nationalist community. As Dawson rightly contends, “This orchestrated official memory was predicated on what can best be described as official amnesia, which concealed (kept private) the political significance of Bloody Sunday for nationalists in the North of Ireland, preventing the wider public articulation of their memories of injustice.”38 Symbolically, Bloody Sunday became the focal point of what Dawson refers to as “public counter-memory,” concocted and articulated by certain sections of the nationalist community in lieu of official recognition by the British state of culpability. The official discourse was, of course, dramatically altered after publication of the Saville Report in 2010.39

CONTESTING THE HISTORICAL RECORD

It is a trying set of circumstances indeed that the parties emerging out of violent conflict in this part of the world cannot even agree on how to characterize the experience. Most analysts forgo the temptation to label what happened between 1969 and 2007 as a “war,” referring to it instead as the Northern Ireland “conflict” or “Troubles.” Interestingly, despite the fact that it is considered a war by its principal protagonists on the ground, military historians have been conspicuous by their absence in critically analyzing Britain’s experience in the province. This is especially surprising considering the drive, mainly in the United States and Brit-

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ain, to revisit the historical record in search of lessons—particularly from “small wars”—to help recalibrate current military practices. I have written elsewhere how the slavish adherence to colonial policing tactics almost led to the failure of army operations when applied in the domestic setting of Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s.40 Arguably, the misapplication of these tactics led inexorably to the alienation of the Catholic population in the early 1970s. That the army could draw on a vast intellectual reservoir of “counterinsurgency” was a moot point because, in Northern Ireland at least, the lessons from Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden were irrelevant.41 Notwithstanding the availability of evidence of the army’s tendency to (re)construct the past by searching out actionable lessons from its other operational experience, some historians have highlighted the state’s continued suppression of the official archives.42 Whether the archival records are being suppressed or not, historians (military or otherwise) should be no more dissuaded from challenging such perfunctory tautological narratives that claim an unbridled “counterinsurgency success” for the army, or other, mainly republican, narratives of “800 years of British oppression in Ireland,” “atrocities,” and “massacres” carried out by “Crown forces” against a “defenceless nationalist community.” An underinvestment by historians in challenging these narratives is as much a part of the problem as the predilection by state and community groups to ignore uncomfortable empirical evidence. As this chapter shows, these tend to be important for political sustenance but are also the product of moral vacuity. Margaret Macmillan has put the point more succinctly: “Nursery history is certainly an attractive proposition for ethno-nationalist groups locked in conflict, but historians must treat self-serving myths for what they are—however uncomfortable a proposition that may seem.”43 Historians ignore the political import of these narratives at their peril. On another level, there has been a universal failure to bring the human experiences of security forces personnel more clearly into focus in studies of the Troubles. No serious investigation of the effects of political violence on individual soldiers has yet been completed, and there has been a noticeable tendency to elevate the trauma and suffering of members of illegal paramilitary groupings above security forces and civilians. The silencing of victims, who may or may not be considered active participants in hostilities, is palpable, and instead loyalist

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paramilitaries are conveniently conflated with unionist attempts to raise the profile of incidents which form part of the fabric of their collective memory.44 Even the most recent paralegal commentaries, such as those by Kieran McEvoy,45 do not address security forces deaths in their ambit. Arguably, this is indicative of a profound imbalance in the analysis of the human cost of the Troubles. It is little wonder that the language of “dealing with the past” provokes such trenchant opposition from within the broader unionist community to a formal (and rather Orwellian sounding) “truth recovery process.”46 Not only has this become a failure of nerve within the political class in Britain and Ireland, as well as in academia and some sections of civil society, but it is a failure in the imagination of those who are comfortable in their own intellectual silos. This is also an uncomfortable “truth” for Provisional Republicans especially who find refuge in simplistic black-and-white narratives of “British oppression” and “nationalist resistance.”47 As the renowned liberal intellectual Michael Ignatieff has written: Imagination—the capacity to leave our own skins—rescues us from the bell jars of victimhood. It is what keeps a society of competitive individuals from becoming a jungle; it is what prevents a polity from becoming ground down in the suppressed civil war of interest group competition. It enables us each to leave our race, gender, language, ethnic origin behind and become citizens together.48 There has been only a perfunctory attempt to reconcile the divided communities in Northern Ireland, making it plausible for dyed-in-the-wool republicans to articulate a view of the Troubles as unfinished business in their journey towards a united Ireland.

CONCLUSION

Regular military operations have long since ceased in Northern Ireland. Officially at least, the British Army is responsible only for providing assistance to the civil authority, when requested, in much the same way it

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does in mainland Britain. Given the resurgent threat from dissident republicans after 2007, this assistance comes mainly in the guise of the provision of ammunition technical officers (ATOs), who head the army’s bomb disposal teams. ATOs have seen steady use of viable explosive devices, despite the transformation in the physical landscape of postconflict Northern Ireland. Some years ago, the then armed forces minister, Nick Harvey, revealed in response to a question raised in the House of Commons that ATOs had responded to 360 incidents in 2008, 500 in 2009, 490 in 2010, and 450 in 2011; by mid-2012, the figure stood at 160.49 However, while the united stand taken by the Stormont administration against dissident republican terrorists has undoubtedly helped to curtail such activities, it has not fully eliminated them. The presence of military-minded irreconcilables continues to haunt the political stage in much the same way Banquo’s ghost interrupts the gluttonous activity around the banqueting table in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The particularist elision of guilt in republican narratives is commensurate with the more general failure of imagination in the rhetoric of reconciliation. This should not come as a surprise, particularly if one considers how these narratives emerge from the ethnonationalist penchant for mythmaking. As Ignatieff reminds us, we continue to “live in a moral world of concentric circles of decreasing impingement: first ourselves, then those we love, only much later, and much more imperfectly, our fellow creatures.” While this might well be a sign of the “imperfect moral impingement that others make upon us,” writes Ignatieff, it is “as much a fact about us as our selfishness.”50 As this chapter has suggested, for as long as present-mindedness continues to perpetuate the myths of British impartiality or, indeed, repression while being structurally biased in favor of republican and loyalist blamelessness, the role of the military in the Troubles will continue to be obscured and misunderstood. This is one of the principal reasons that a rigorous historical examination of Northern Ireland’s troubled past is still badly needed. NOTES I am grateful to Cillian McGrattan for reading and commenting on an early version of this chapter and to the many former RUC officers and British Army and UDR/RIR soldiers who assisted me with my research.

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1. Operation Banner was the military code name under which all military operations in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 2007 were conducted. 2. Kevin Boyle and Tom Hadden, Northern Ireland: The Choice (London, 1994), 67. 3. Until recently the only books on military operations were written by either journalists or retired officers. See Desmond Hamill, Pig in the Middle: The Army in Northern Ireland, 1969–1984 (London, 1985); Lieutenant Colonel Michael Dewar, The British Army in Northern Ireland, rev. ed. (London, 1985); and Chris Ryder, The Ulster Defence Regiment: An Instrument of Peace? (London, 1991). The most substantive analysis from an academic perspective is Andrew Sanders and Ian S. Wood, Times of Troubles: Britain’s War in Northern Ireland (Edinburgh, 2012). A shorter analysis of the strategic, operational, and tactical contours of Operation Banner can be found in Aaron Edwards, The Northern Ireland Troubles: Operation Banner, 1969–2007 (Oxford, 2011). 4. Sir Alistair Irwin and Mike Mahoney, “The Military Response,” in James Dingley, ed., Combating Terrorism in Northern Ireland (Abingdon, 2009), 198–226. 5. Figures taken from the Michael McKeown dataset hosted on CAIN. For an accompanying paper, see Michael McKeown, “Post-Mortem: An Examination of the Patterns of Politically Associated Violence in Northern Ireland during the Years 1969–2001 as Reflected in the Fatality Figures for Those Years” (2001; revised for CAIN June 2009). http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/victims/mckeown/ mckeown 01.pdf. 6. MoD, Comments by the Chief of the General Staff, Sir David Richards, in “Bloody Sunday Report Published.” Archived at www.mod.uk/ DefenceInternet/DefenceNews/DefencePolicyAndBusiness/BloodySunday ReportPublished.htm. Accessed 15 May 2012. 7. For research on the memorialization of the police, see the excellent article by Catherine Switzer and Brian Graham, “‘From Thorn to Thorn’: Commemorating the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland,” Social and Cultural Geography 10, no. 2 (2009): 153–71. Interestingly the Police Service of Northern Ireland does not have a mechanism for capturing the “lessons” of the Troubles, relying instead on a loose connection to retired officers through the RUC George Cross Foundation. There is also a link between the Historical Enquiries Team, a “cold case” unit established to examine over 3,200 unsolved Troubles-related murders, and the retired officers who investigated the crimes under review. Interviews with former RUC Officers from CID and Special Branch, October 2010 and April 2011. 8. John Nagle, “From Mourning to Melancholia? The Ambivalent Role of Commemoration in Facilitating Peace-Building in Northern Ireland,” Irish Journal of Anthropology 11, no. 1 (2008): 28. 9. Ibid.

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10. Sara McDowell, “Armalite, the Ballot Box and Memorialization: Sinn Féin and the State in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland,” Round Table 96, no. 393 (2007): 736. 11. Graham Dawson, Making Peace with the Past? Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles (Manchester, 2007). 12. For more on the divisive nature of commemoration, see Aaron Edwards, “Drawing a Line under the Past,” Peace Review 20, no. 2 (April–June 2008): 209–17. 13. Kris Brown, “‘Recipe for Disaster?’: Trust, Memory and Space in a Post-Conflict City—A Case Study of the Tri-Service Homecoming Parade in Belfast 2008,” Round Table 98, no. 403 (2009): 435. 14. Switzer and Graham, “‘From Thorn to Thorn,’” 166. 15. McDowell, “Armalite, the Ballot Box and Memorialization,” 734. 16. See Henry Patterson, “Sectarianism Revisited: The Provisional IRA Campaign in a Border Region of Northern Ireland,” Terrorism and Political Violence 22, no. 3 (2010): 337–56. 17. For a historical account of Britain’s “small wars,” see Aaron Edwards, Defending the Realm? The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars since 1945 (Manchester, 2012). The most extensive research undertaken on the experience of troops in Northern Ireland has explored the oral histories of those who served there. See, e.g., Ken M. Wharton, A Long Long War: Voices from the British Army in Northern Ireland, 1969–98 (Solihull, 2008). 18. Dawson, Making Peace with the Past?, 53. 19. For more on this point, see Paul Dixon, “Britain’s ‘Vietnam Syndrome’? Public Opinion and British Military Intervention from Palestine to Yugoslavia,” Review of International Studies 26, no. 1 ( January 2000): 99–121. 20. McDowell, “Armalite, the Ballot Box and Memorialization,” 735. As the United Kingdom’s “centre for remembrance,” the National Memorial Arboretum is dedicated to the memories of all of those who gave their lives in service of their country since 1945. 21. McDowell, “Armalite, the Ballot Box and Memorialization,” 735. 22. Ibid. 23. As Cillian McGrattan has argued, Sinn Féin’s attempt to establish hegemony in the highly politicized debate on “dealing with the past” has come at the expense of initiating genuine reconciliation between the ethnically divided communities. Cillian McGrattan, Memory, Politics, Identity: Haunted by History (Basingstoke, 2013). See also Aaron Edwards and Cillian McGrattan, “Terroristic Narratives: On the (Re)Invention of Peace in Northern Ireland,” Terrorism and Political Violence 23, no. 3 (June 2011): 357–76. 24. Jenny Edkins, “The Rush to Memory and the Rhetoric of War,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 31, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 246. 25. Switzer and Graham. “‘From Thorn to Thorn,’” 166.

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26. An impressive analysis of the conflation of historical narratives and the ethnicized identity politics in this deeply divided society can be found in McGrattan, Memory, Politics, Identity. 27. J. G. A. Pocock, “Time, Institutions and Action: An Essay on Traditions and Their Understanding” (1968), in J. G. A. Pocock, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge, 2008), 197. 28. Statistics taken from the Defence Agency for Statistical Analysis. Archived at www.dasa.mod.uk/applications/newWeb/www/apps/publications/ pubViewFile.php?content=280.07&date=2012-05-17&type=html&Publish Time=09:30:00. Accessed 31 May 2012. 29. MoD, Operation Banner: An Analysis of Military Operations in Northern Ireland, Army Code 71842 (London, July 2006). 30. ROE are formulated at the ministerial level in London and set out for troops the circumstances under which they can or cannot use lethal force. 31. For more on this point, see Colonel Alex Alderson, “The Army’s ‘Brain’: A Historical Perspective on Doctrine and Development,” British Army Review, no. 150 (Winter 2010–11): 60–64. 32. John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago, 2005). 33. The National Archives, DEFE, 13/838, Interrogation by the RUC in Northern Ireland, CGS to Secretary of State, 14 May 1974. 33. Presidential Speech by Gerry Adams TD at Sinn Féin Árd Fheis, Waterfront Hall, Belfast, 15 September 2011. Archived at www.sinnfein.ie/ contents/21492. 35. For more on the hegemonic trappings of the Sinn Féin narrative, see McGrattan, Memory, Politics, Identity. 36. John Keegan, A History of War (London, 1993), 385. 37. See Paul Dixon, Northern Ireland: The Politics of War and Peace (Basingstoke, 2008). 38. Dawson, Making Peace with the Past?, 120. 39. Ibid., 121. 40. Aaron Edwards, “Misapplying Lessons Learned? Analysing the Utility of British Counter-insurgency Strategy in Northern Ireland, 1971–76,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 21, no. 2 (June 2010): 303–30. 41. David Benest, “Aden to Northern Ireland, 1966–76,” in Hew Strachan, ed., Big Wars and Small Wars: The British Army and the Lessons of War in the Twentieth Century (Abingdon, 2006), 130. 42. Hew Bennett. “After the Release of Colonial Records—What about Northern Ireland?,” Guardian, 20 April 2012. 43. Margaret Macmillan, The Uses and Abuses of History (London, 2009). 44. For more on this debate, see Cheryl Lawther, “Unionism, Truth Recovery and the Fearful Past,” Irish Political Studies 26, no. 3 (September 2011):

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361–82; and Aaron Edwards, “Fearful of the Past or ‘Remembering the Future and Our Cause’? A Response to Lawther,” Irish Political Studies 27, no. 3 (September 2012): 457–70. 45. Kieran McEvoy, Making Peace with the Past: Options for Truth Recovery Regarding the Conflict in and about Northern Ireland (Belfast, 2006); and Brian Gormally, Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland “from Below”: An Evaluation (Belfast, 2009). 46. Lawther, “Unionism, Truth Recovery and the Fearful Past,” 366. 47. Interview with Danny Morrison, 28 February 2012. Morrison was the longtime director of publicity for Sinn Féin. Interestingly, he expressed surprise when I laid bare the statistics of weapons seizures, which indicated that just as many guns and explosives had been seized in Protestant areas as had been lifted in Catholic areas. 48. Michael Ignatieff, “The Liberal Imagination: A Defence,” Toronto Star, 21 January 1998. 49. United Kingdom House of Commons Debates (Hansard), vol. 545, col. 830W, 24 May 2012. 50. Ignatieff, “The Liberal Imagination.”

CHAPTER 4

“ C L I M B I N G OV E R D E A D B R A M B L E S ”? Politics and Memory within Ulster Loyalism

James W. McAuley

At times it seems that every inch of Belfast has been written-on, erased and written-on again: messages, curses, political imperatives, but mostly names, or nicknames—Robbo, Mackers, Scoot, Fra— sometimes litanized obsessively on every brick of gable wall, as high as the hand will reach, and sometimes higher, these snakes and ladders cancelling each other out in their bid to be remembered. Remember 1690. Remember 1916. Most of all, Remember me. I was here. —Ciaran Carson, Belfast Confetti

The Black Studies scholar and activist Martha Jones once described memory as the “place where past and present collide.”1 That clash involves a range of social processes including not just those of “remembering,” but also of “forgetting” and sometimes of politically constructed 96

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amnesia.2 Perhaps most important, memory often involves a presentation of past events that is highly selective, distorted, and altered to fit contemporary circumstances.3 This understanding often also serves as the justification for contemporary actions and the legitimation of contemporary beliefs, attitudes, goals, and political actions.4 Hence memory is best understood as a social construct, presented through representations that determine our views of the past but are simultaneously framed and sustained by the present. Moreover, as Maurice Halbwachs has famously argued, all memories are best understood as social, “for they are recalled to me externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any time give me the means to reconstruct them.”5 Memories and representations help form, fabricate, and shape social identity, but identity in turn is determined by membership in a group and that group’s views and values.

COLLECTIVE AND SOCIAL MEMORY

As John Darby reminds us, “there has never been a shortage of myths about the Irish conflict,”6 and while the shelves of Irish history texts in most libraries and bookshops point to the extensive knowledge we have of past events, it is only quite recently that there has been a broader recognition that for the Irish “all history is applied history.”7 The resulting focus brings to the fore emerging narratives that seek to locate social identities by providing both the language and the boundaries to explain how people engage in remembering and forgetting and the symbolic representation of what is, and what is not, remembered. Much of the work in this area has been harnessed under the term “collective memory,” or more recently, “social memory.” The burgeoning interest in social memory over the past three decades has seen the importance of the concept grow across several disciplines, particularly in relation to deepening our understanding of how identity is formed, nurtured, and reproduced. The starting point for much of this has been the writings of Halbwachs and his categorization of memory as “autobiographical,” drawn from personal experience; “historical,” namely, the “dead” past as found in historical records; and “collective,” an “active” understanding of the past that informs our present-day identities.8

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Building on this, several writers have recognized that memory has both individual and social dimensions and that remembering and remembrance are not processes restricted to some individual experience but also take place at the societal level through the formation and projection of collective memory.9 This is maintained and reproduced “through a community of interests and thoughts” by drawing on specific understandings of the past to configure specific forms of collective memory (or non-memory) and of collective remembrance (or non-remembrance).10 Importantly, to be meaningful, memory, remembrance, and commemoration need individuals and groups to carry out acts of remembering. This happens, of course, at different societal levels, from international (such as the commemoration of those killed in wars) to specific communities, neighborhoods, or even streets. As Paul Connerton puts it, “Groups provide individuals with frameworks within which their memories are localised.”11 Collective memories provide interpretations and representations of the past that are recognized as legitimate by the group, which subsequently bases its actions on that understanding. This also provides a framework on which individuals can hang and interpret their own life histories and memories and then engage in processes that identify with and reinforce group identities.12 As we shall see in the case of Ulster Loyalism, collective memory gives form and direction to “experience, thought and imagination in terms of past, present and future.”13 Thus social memories provide the tools to filter and reconstruct the past, to interpret contemporary events, and to determine what is seen as possible in the future. Moreover, while collective social memory often engages in highlighting continuity with the past (a central feature of loyalist ideology), it can also alter contemporary views of the past to make a better fit with the perceived needs of the present.14 Shared group memories have been understood and classified in a number of different ways from different disciplinary perspectives.15 In broad terms, however, all recognize collective memories as those that are commonly shared across an identified community and that contribute to binding together that community through easily recognized representations and understandings of the past. Hence collective memory helps construct a social reality that is “transmitted and sustained through the

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conscious efforts and institutions of groups.”16 Connerton explains that the importance of memories is not that they are “true,” or reflect an accurate recollection of past events, but rather “that they form part of the whole ensemble of thoughts common to a group, to the groups with which we are in relationship at present or have been in some connection in the recent past.”17

LOYALISM AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY

Personal memory is an important building block in the construction of loyalist social solidarity, through which the formation of the distinct ethnopolitical identity of Loyalism is understood and reinforced. These are corraled by social memories to inform a broader process of selfidentification and to locate individual identities and understandings of the wider political and social worlds within broader collective political identities and memories. These political memories and understandings find expression in a variety of ways. At one level they are transmitted through folk knowledge and commonsense understandings of the world. Crucial to this are the ways in which constructed memories legitimize the power relations, including sectarianism and national identity, that characterize Northern Irish society in the everyday. At a different level, collective memories are often preserved through what Pierre Nora has called sites of memory, such as museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, and monuments.18 All collective memories are concerned with narratives of history and identity that are imbued with, and act directly upon, social relations of power rooted in the present. Within Loyalism this is writ large in the production of artifacts (wall murals, Orange banners, and paramilitary memorials, to name a few) that are seen as integral to the transmission of a distinct cultural history with marked social and political boundaries. Such institutional forms of memorialization express distinction and difference through the output of a cultural politics. Perhaps the clearest example of this is seen in the Orange Order, but there are many such cultural expressions of collective memories across Loyalism.

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Collective memory signifies the narratives of past experience constituted by and on behalf of specific groups. The institutions that support and reproduce collective memories, in turn, help to create, sustain, and reproduce the “imagined community” of Loyalism with which individuals identify and through which they feel a sense of historical continuity, place, and social belonging. Within the expression of this sense of belonging, as Peter Novick explains, it is common to give primacy to memories we see as core to our collective identity, and those specific memories, “once brought to the fore, reinforce that form of identity.”19

LOYALISM AND REMEMBERING

In line with much of what has been outlined above, the collective memories of Loyalism shape how individuals, groups, and collectives understand everyday events and how they connect to key political proceedings and the social world around them. Loyalist group identities are maintained not only by the strength of cultural reproduction but also by the understood legitimacy of communal ethnopolitical memories in determining reactions to contemporary events. The strength of loyalist social memory produces an unswerving view of the past rendered meaningful from the standpoint of the present. I illustrate this by reference to specific sites of collective memory, highlighting both how representations of the past are constructed and sustained through commemoration rituals and how social memory is transmitted and passed from generation to generation within Loyalism. I draw on several examples of acts of commemoration and remembrance utilized by contemporary Loyalism, including the Orange Order, loyalist wall murals, commemorations held by paramilitary groups, and the centenary events surrounding the signing of the Ulster Covenant in 1912. Throughout the contemporary period increasing attention has been given to the numerous wall murals that have appeared across Northern Ireland, particularly in the urban areas of Belfast and Derry. Indeed, documentation and analysis of Northern Irish wall murals are now numerous, among which the works of Bill Rolston retain primacy.20 In addition to the obvious function of demarcating physical boundaries,

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Loyalist wall mural, East Belfast. Source: Author.

murals promote identifiable ethnic symbolism, often by commemorating self-selected historical events and the actions of people “for the cause,” thus strengthening the bonds of the imaginary community they are seen to address. The construction of Loyalism as an imagined community can also be demonstrated in the subject matter chosen for the Orange banners used to identify individual private lodges and commonly seen in parades. So, for example, by far the most frequent image on Orange banners is that of William III, either in events leading up to the Williamite War or, most often, in victory at the Battle of the Boyne. Almost all representations of William show him in a stylized manner sitting astride a white charger. Less frequent but still plentiful on banners are depictions of events from Orange history, such as Oliver Cromwell’s presence in Ireland, the cottage of Dan Winter (where the order was founded), the signing of the Ulster Covenant, or the Battle of the Somme. Finally, many banners focus on religious topics, often portraying a Bible and a crown, which expresses the order’s commitment to Protestantism and the monarch.

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Another example of the construction of community within Loyalism can be seen in the mural at Thorndyke Street in East Belfast. On one level it is a magnificent example of community art; some 150 feet long, it is made up of twelve main panels each of which is about thirty feet high. On another level it is a highly politicized representation of the collective memories of Loyalism. It was commissioned by the East Belfast Historical and Cultural Society to convey the story of Ulster Protestants and to counter those “Republicans [who] peddle the myth that . . . the Protestant/ Loyalist/ Unionist community have no culture and no history.”21 Given this overt goal, it is important to consider which historical events are selected to represent the collective memories of Loyalism. The mural depicts the following in order: the Ulster Covenant; the Ulster Scots (Scots-Irish) connection; Oliver Cromwell in Ireland; the Siege of Derry; the Orange Order; the Home Rule Crisis; the Battle of the Somme, 36th Ulster Division; the 1970s on (the sectarian Irish Republican campaign); a united community (1974 Ulster Workers’ Council strike); the B Specials; Cluan Place; and the United Kingdom, or loyalty to queen and God. There are probably few surprises in the events identified as central to “loyalist history,” but it is important to point to how these are linked by a seamless narrative that draws on these collective memories to yoke the past to the present. Thus at the official opening of the mural, in September 2004, the main orator drew attention to the panel depicting the Siege of Derry with the following words: “Republicans continue to attack our homes, our culture and all that we hold dear. Our slogan beneath the mural states ‘the city is saved’, in 1688 it was. Ladies and Gentlemen we ignore the plight of our fellow Loyalists in Londonderry at our peril. The people of east Belfast must support all isolated Protestant communities no matter where they are.”22

LOYALISM AND FORGETTING: A BRIEF ASIDE

There was another, much smaller commemorative plaque in Thorndyke Street commemorating William “Liam” Tumilson, who was killed in action during the Spanish Civil War, fighting with the International Bri-

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gade against Franco’s fascist forces. Tumlinson was a Protestant, deeply politicized by the economic depression and the Outdoor Relief riots of the early 1930s, who became a lifelong socialist and subsequently as a member of the Republican Congress in 1934 traveled with a delegation from the Shankill Road to the Wolfe Tone commemoration in Bodenstown, an event that continues to rank high on the list of republican commemorative events.23 It was not until 17 April 2011 that an event publicly recognizing Tumlinson’s life took place, with the unveiling of this small memorial. Among other representatives of republican and loyalist former prisoners’ groups, Dawn Purvis, former Progressive Unionist Party leader; members of the Irish Republican Socialist Party; Trade Unionists; and local community workers attended the unveiling. That such an event even took place is evidence of change in Northern Irish society, but the commemoration of an anti-fascist fighter from the Spanish Civil War lies far outside the dominant frame of identity understood by most working-class Protestants. Indeed, the plaque was subsequently removed by loyalist paramilitaries. For the vast majority from that background, commemorative events, public gatherings, displays, and presentations continue to draw on the central collective memory of Loyalism. These commemorations reinforce division, buttress the existing sense of social solidarity, and strengthen group identity. 24

LOYALIST MEMORY AND POPULAR CULTURE

Another conduit for the reproduction and transmission of loyalist identity and collective memory is popular culture. Although a still underresearched aspect of recent history, the period from the outbreak of overt conflict in 1968 on has witnessed a remarkable output of highly localized expressions of popular culture across Northern Ireland. Such expressions of identity are central; as Jim McGuigan reminds us, the “symbolic experiences and practices of ordinary people” are important in fully understanding politics and the political world.25 Moreover, as Stuart Hall points out, popular culture marks a key political arena of consent and resistance in the struggle to assert hegemony.26

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Within loyalist popular culture, for example, there is now a vast range of songs, much of which is available in songbooks or has been recorded and is available on CD or DVD. Loyalist songs tend to fall into three main categories: those that commemorate key events in loyalist history, those that remember important individuals, and those that seek to strengthen the bonds across the imagined community of Loyalism. Music, however, is only one medium for the transmission of loyalist popular culture. Other forms include news sheets, books of prose, badges, and a host of other paraphernalia, including posters, mugs, chocolate bars with loyalist wrappers, T-shirts, cuff links, stickers, and much more. It also increasingly involves social media networks—the use of Facebook, Twitter, and so on. The loyalist presence on the Internet is now considerable if somewhat erratic in upkeep.27 Today the collective memories of Loyalism are transmitted through spatial, digital, visual, and acoustic signifiers, all of which set about memorializing and commemorating a specific cultural past.

COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND THE ORANGE ORDER

No review of social memory within Loyalism can be complete without consideration of the role of the Loyal Orange Institution (more commonly referred to as the Orange Order). The order is a large voluntary organization, the origins of which lie in the sectarian conflict and violence of late eighteenth-century agrarian Ulster.28 Although much smaller than it once was, it still provides a central focus of social and political life for many Protestants, and its most public face remains its tradition of parades and marches, with over three thousand taking place every year in Northern Ireland,29 which are seen by members as their most candid expression of a Protestant unionist identity.30 The official discourses of the Orange Order focus on the concept of faith and expressions of loyalty to the crown and state, but most publications and outputs usually emphasize the religious roles and functions of the order.31 This is not a straightforward representation, however. In Northern Ireland, religion, of course, remains a “key ethnic marker,” and for the order, religion, politics, and constitutional status are all deeply

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entwined.32 Hence collective memories surrounding the defense of the Union are seen as central to the defense of Protestantism, while the defense of Protestantism is regarded as core to the continuance of the Union. Membership in the Orange Order therefore reflects not just an expression of religious affiliation but also a clear demonstration of ethnic belonging and political support for the Union.33 Much of the strength of the Orange Order rests on its emphasis on continuity and the reproduction of cultural memory. Membership is often the result of strong patterns of socialization creating crossgenerational support for the order. Membership is also often regarded as an expression of communal solidarity, whereby the social memories and ritual within Orangeism provide the scaffold on which social and political identities rest. In turn, these are bound together through a cultural narrative that links the contemporary politics of Orangeism with Unionism’s past by reemphasizing the stability and longevity of the order’s defense of the Protestant/unionist community, which suggests that the broad Protestant/unionist community, and Orange culture in particular, continues to be assailed by Irish Republicanism.34 While it is recognized that the “shooting war” is over, for many within Orangeism the terrain of conflict has shifted to cultural competition and disputes over the public display of cultural representation.35 At its extreme some express the belief that Protestants are subject to a culture war36 and a campaign of “ethnic cleansing”37 as part of a wider Sinn Féin–led strategy to destroy representations of Britishness in Northern Ireland.38 Hence the order now believes that it is engaged in a cultural war, and there remain overt concerns within Orangeism that its core values are under concerted challenge and that many of the symbols of Britishness are under threat. The cultural war is multifaceted, and assaults on the symbols of Protestant Unionism are seen as wide ranging, involving both ideological confrontation and physical attacks on Orange-owned premises and symbols.39 Orange Order members continue to express distrust of the “other” community and remain fearful of physical, ideological, and cultural loss and the erosion of the Protestant/unionist/British identity that is the essence of the political psyche of Loyalism. Critical to this self-identification of Loyalism are those political memories that express

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eternal vigilance and continuity with past conflicts as a crucial mechanism to counter constant threat in the contemporary world.

THE COLLECTIVE MEMORY OF LOYALISM

The collective memories of Loyalism help construct commonsense understandings that give meaning to everyday experiences, sustain loyalist identity, and give coherence to loyalist fears. Underpinning this sense of identity is a series of foundation myths, involving the origins of the Protestant “nation” in Ireland and the creation of the Northern Irish state, which is seen to rest on a distinct Ulster identity. Feelings of cultural separateness and political difference remain at the core of loyalist identity. Building on the narratives outlined above, it is possible to recognize a sense of loyalist community bound by a common identification and reinforced by a range of communications. The connections are manifested in a variety of ways, for example, meetings, correspondence, newsletters, everyday conversations, set-piece speeches, and other forms of social contact. Loyalism finds expression through both distinct senses of commonality and purpose at the macro level and what are often very localized senses of belonging and experiences at the micro level. Social actors construct the loyalist community, and their subsequent political and collective actions give expression to loyalist identity and belonging. Loyalist identity thus harnesses identifiable political memories. In so doing, it draws on commonly understood historical reference points to assemble links with the present and uses social memories in conflicting ways to justify contemporary political positioning and actions. Further, collective memories provide loyalists with a framework for understanding the Troubles and the postconflict period that differs widely from that of other social and political groupings. Central for many is the belief that Loyalism had achieved victory over Irish Republicanism.40 Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, for loyalists the overarching themes of the postconflict period draw heavily on existing collective memories involving the recent past, including a resolute defense of Protestant Unionism, the defeat of militant Republicanism, a distinct sense of victimhood, the need for continued vigilance, active attempts to link with the past, continuing fear of “betrayal,” peace through strength,

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and a continuing engagement in the culture wars, within which remembrance and commemoration play central roles.41

THE ULSTER COVENANT AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY

One of the largest public manifestations of loyalist collective memory in recent times occurred in September 2012, when some thirty thousand marchers and over two hundred bands took part in a parade to commemorate the centenary of the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant, which had originally been signed by around 500,000 people (218,206 men and 228,991 women in Ulster and another 19,612 in Britain). It is difficult to overstate the importance of the event in the formation of loyalist collective memory. Indeed, some loyalists argue that the legitimacy of loyalist opposition in the contemporary period is drawn directly from precedent set by the “inclusion of the words ‘by all means necessary’ in the Covenant of 1912.”42 Part of the commemoration involved the reenactment of events of the previous century. In 1912 Sir Edward Carson signed the Covenant at the city hall on a table draped with the Union flag, saying, “This is the moment when we pledge ourselves to the defence of Ulster. I will be first to sign.” The events were reproduced in 2012, when Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Peter Robinson of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), alongside Ulster Unionist Party leader Mike Nesbitt and Belfast’s DUP Lord Mayor Gavin Robinson, consciously and conspicuously replayed the occasion, suggesting that those “who signed the Covenant and the Declaration were facing into very difficult and dangerous times. This was something that bound them together to take whatever steps were necessary to defend the Union and here we are, one hundred years later, and the Union is stronger than ever.”43 The strength and depth of collective memory evoked and the perceived continuity summoned from across the century were not lost on unionists. Robinson reflected on the significance of signing the Ulster Covenant: One hundred years ago today the Lord Mayor of Belfast, Sir R. J. McMordie, stood on this marble with the leaders of Unionism and

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affirmed themselves to ensure a rightful and a just future for this province of ours. . . . I hope we reignite that flame of passion that people had 100 years ago for this place.44 Others expressed the notion of permanency in more straightforward terms. Ken Robinson, a former Ulster unionist MLA, told reporters of how his grandparents had signed the Covenant, explaining, “It’s right and centre of the family history. . . . [T]o see their signatures and be able to show my grandchildren my grandfather’s signature is fantastic.” Edward Stevenson, grand master of the Orange Order, also highlighted the significance of the occasion, and for him the conclusion to be drawn was obvious: “We must maintain the steadfastness and Loyalty of our forefathers as we look forward to the next one hundred years of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom.”45

COMMEMORATION

It is important to note that collective memories are contested within Loyalism. One clear example concerns the “ownership” of the cultural memory of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), the loyalist militia formed in 1913 to oppose the growing political campaign for Home Rule. As the campaign against Home Rule intensified, ad hoc military drills began in many Orange Lodges. These became more organized and structured as the UVF increasingly appeared on the streets. It quickly recruited some ninety thousand volunteers, albeit largely poorly equipped and supplied. After April 1914, however, when the UVF acquired over twenty thousand weapons and several million rounds of ammunition from Germany, it became a meaningful military entity. The outbreak of World War I saw the large-scale direct transfer of membership from the UVF to the British Army, its members largely forming the 36th (Ulster) Division. The horrendous casualties they subsequently suffered, particularly in attacks on heavily fortified German positions at the Somme on 1 July 1916, have become deeply entrenched in loyalist political memory and folklore.46 Many loyalists, members of the UVF in particular, claim ownership of these memories.47

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Indeed, the modern UVF, the paramilitary group active from 1966 on, has often claimed direct lineage to the original organization. In particular, they seek to trace their contemporary paramilitarism to the willingness of the pre–World War I UVF to engage in militant and sometimes violent forms of political opposition, which marked the beginning of organized loyalist resistance.48 The centrality of collective memory surrounding the Battle of the Somme in formulating loyalist identity is now firmly established.49 Indeed, one leading Orangeman recently claimed that “the Somme is written into the DNA of the Unionist community.”50 The claim to such a lineage finds overt expression in some of the set-pieces organized by the contemporary UVF, such as band parades whose participants commonly wear replica uniforms of the original UVF. The full significance of the symbolism in the construction of loyalist identity and the importance of the perceived continuity across time was clearly demonstrated by a speech given at a UVF/Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) Somme commemoration event: The Ulster Volunteer Force was a political army. Its objective was to maintain and defend our cherished British citizenship. Its leadership took political analysis from Carson, Craig and other Unionist leaders. Together, the Volunteers and the Political Leaders secured victory. Today we face the same enemy with the same strategic plan—a coalition of Military Potential and Political Activism. The Volunteers and the Political Activists must stand united in a common purpose.51

CONCLUSION

All memories, including the forgetting or denial of particular events, are selective and take place in a particular social context. Individual remembering takes place in and is often evoked by this social context. Thus memories are central to the construction of collective identities through processes whereby people and groups “reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them,” and they do so “with the needs of

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contemporary culture clearly in mind.”52 Brian Walker has shown the central importance of historical myth and memory in the social construction of Unionism and Loyalism.53 This is directly reflected in the ways in which the past is memorized and memorialized, and by the choice of those events that are given primacy and made public through commemoration. These memories provide meaningful ways of understanding the world to both individuals and groups, often through commonsense explanations that encourage particular expressions and understandings of remembrance and commemoration. It is in this context that the invention of loyalist traditions takes place and that political memory is constructed in particular ways. Further, it is through these processes that the continued formation of the imagined community of Loyalism and its inclusive sense of identity is determined. By openly drawing on identifiable discourses and symbolism, security against external and internal threat is seen to be guaranteed. Importantly, this remembering often involves “a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present.”54 While there is now a generation with little or no direct experience or personal recollection of the conflict, the importance of collective memory in orienting political reaction in Northern Ireland should not be underestimated in the shaping of contemporary perceptions, especially for those loyalists who regard themselves as engaged in a cultural war over the Union.55 Although recollections are often partial or even contradictory, social memory flattens out acts of remembering to select those that are seen as most relevant and unambiguous in meaning. Thus direct connections are made between identity and the collective memory, whereby both are dynamic and continually under construction and reconstruction. Thus Loyalism has offered a slightly different emphasis or construct at different historical junctures, such as the formation of the state, the period of the “Protestant parliament” during the years of overt conflict beginning in 1968, the run-up to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, and the postconflict era. Nonetheless, the broad processes involved in constructing loyalist collective memory remain constant. Over four decades ago, the poet John Hewitt made clear some of the difficulties surrounding commemoration and remembrance, when in “Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto” he wrote, “for your memory is a cruel web/ Threaded from thorn to thorn across/ A hedge of dead

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bramble, heavy/ With pathetic atomies.”56 While there is a rapidly forming consensus within Northern Ireland that issues surrounding remembrance of the past must be dealt with, there is little agreement concerning what that might mean in cultural, political, structural, or organizational terms. Alongside many others, before that position is reached there remain many dead brambles for loyalists to climb over.57 NOTES 1. Martha Jones, “Mining Our Collective Memory,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 6 (2004): 71. 2. David Middleton and Derek Edwards, Collective Remembering (London, 1990); Barry Schwartz, “The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory,” Social Forces 61, no. 2 (1982): 374–402; Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York, 1995). 3. Middleton and Edwards, Collective Remembering. 4. Jeffery Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (London, 2007); James V. Wertsch and Henry L. Roediger, “Collective Memory, Conceptual Foundations and Theoretical Approaches,” Memory 16, no. 3 (2008): 318–26. 5. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992), 38. 6. John Darby, Scorpions in a Bottle: Conflicting Cultures in Northern Ireland (London, 1997). 7. Anthony T. Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground (London, 1977). 8. Jeffrey Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology 24, no. 111 (1998): 105–40. 9. See, e.g., Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, 1989); and Barbara A. Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead, 2003). 10. Connerton, How Societies Remember. 11. Ibid., 37. 12. James E. Young, “Germany’s Memorial Question: Memory, CounterMemory, and the End of Monument,” South Atlantic Quarterly 96, no. 4 (1997); Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps, Collective Memory, and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago, 2003). 13. Jens Brockmeier, “Autobiographical Remembering as Cultural Practice: Understanding the Interplay between Memory, Self, and Culture,” Culture and Psychology 8, no. 1 (2002): 21. 14. Middleton and Edwards, Collective Remembering.

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15. Olick and Robbins, “Social Memory Studies”; Wertsch and Roediger, “Collective Memory.” 16. Maurice Halbwachs and J.-Michel Alexandre, La mémoire collective: Ouvrage posthume publié (Paris, 1950), 38 (English translation, The Collective Memory [New York, 1980]). 17. Connerton, How Societies Remember. 18. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire,” representations 26 (Spring 1989). 19. Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London, 2001). 20. See, e.g., Martin Forker and Jonathan McCormick, “Walls of History: The Use of Mythomoteurs in Northern Ireland Murals,” Irish Studies Review 17, no. 4 (2009): 423–65; Jack Santino, Signs of War and Peace: Social Conflict and the Use of Public Symbols in Northern Ireland (New York, 2001); Judy Vannais, “Postcards from the Edge: Reading Political Murals in the North of Ireland,” Irish Political Studies 16 (2001): 133–60; Oobna Woods, Seeing Is Believing? Murals in Derry (Derry, 1995); Bill Rolston, Drawing Support: Murals in the North of Ireland (Belfast, 1992); Bill Rolston, Drawing Support 2: Murals in the North of Ireland (Belfast, 1995); Bill Rolston, Drawing Support 3: Murals in the North of Ireland (Belfast, 2003); Bill Rolston, “Changing the Political Landscape: Murals and Transition in Northern Ireland,” Irish Studies Review 11, no. 1 (2003). 21. East Belfast Historical and Cultural Society, “Speech at the Grand Opening of the Thorndyke Street Murals” (2004), 1. 22. Ibid. 23. Raymond J. Quinn, A Rebel Voice: A History of Belfast Republicanism, 1925–1972 (Belfast, 1999). 24. Jane Leonard, “How Conflicts Are Commemorated in Northern Ireland,” Central Community Relations Unit, archived at www.ccruni.gov.uk/ research/qub/leonard97.htm, accessed 10 June 2010; John Wilson and Karyn Stapleton, “Voices of Commemoration: The Discourse of Celebration and Confrontation in Northern Ireland,” Text 25, no. 5 (2005): 633–64; Brian Graham and Yvonne Whelan, “The Legacies of the Dead: Commemorating the Troubles in Northern Ireland,” Society and Space 25 (2007): 476–95. 25. Jim McGuigan, Cultural Populism (London, 1992), 4. 26. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and the Diaspora,” in Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity (London, 1990); “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?,” in Stuart Hall and Paul duGay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (London, 1996). 27. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, “Reframing Online: Ulster Loyalists Imagine an American Audience,” Identities, Global Studies in Culture and Power 16, no. 1 (2009): 102–27. 28. Eric Kaufmann, The Orange Order: A Contemporary Northern Irish History (Oxford, 2007); Clifford Smyth, “Orangeism and Unionism: A Special

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Relationship?,” in Ronnie Hanna, eds., The Union: Essays on Ireland and the British Connection (Newtownards, 1995). 29. Dominic Bryan, Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual, Tradition and Control (London, 2000). 30. James W. McAuley, Jonathan Tonge, and Andrew Mycock, Loyal to the Core? Orangeism and Britishness in Northern Ireland (Dublin, 2011). 31. Clifford Stevenson, Susan Condor, and Jackie Abell, “The MinorityMajority Conundrum in Northern Ireland: An Orange Order Perspective,” Political Psychology 28, no. 1 (2007): 105–25. 32. John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland (Oxford, 1995), 212. 33. James W. McAuley and Jon Tonge, “‘For God and for the Crown’: Contemporary Political and Social Attitudes among Orange Order Members in Northern Ireland,” Political Psychology 28, no. 1 (2007): 33–52. 34. Orange Standard, August 2000. 35. Belfast News Letter, 13 July 2007; Orange Standard, July 2007. 36. David Hume, “War of Culture Still Being Waged,” News Letter–The Twelfth, 13 July 2007. 37. Orange Standard, March 1999. 38. This has been a constant theme in the “in-house” publication of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, the Orange Standard. See, e.g., May 1996; June 1996; September 1996; December 1997; January 1998; October 2001; December 2002; August 2004; October 2006. 39. Orange Standard, March 2008. 40. Peter Shirlow, Jon Tonge, James McAuley, and Catherine McGlynn, Abandoning Historical Conflict? Former Political Prisoners and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (Manchester, 2010). 41. James W. McAuley and Jonathan Tonge, “The Old Order Changeth— or Not? Modern Discourses within the Orange Order in Northern Ireland,” in Katy Hayward and Catherine O’Donnell, eds., Political Discourse and Conflict Resolution: Debating Peace in Northern Ireland (London, 2010), 109–25. 42. Billy Mitchell, “Principles of Loyalism: An Internal Discussion Paper” (Belfast, 2002), 40. 43. UTV, “Thousands Recreate Signing of Covenant.” Available at www .u.tv/news/Thousands-recreate-signing-of-Convenant/86ccf333-f15f-4bb1 -a307-2620f719407a; accessed 30 September 2012. 44. Belfast Telegraph, 29 September 2012. 45. News Letter, 29 September 2012. 46. See Fran Brearton, “Dancing unto Death: Perceptions of the Somme, the Titanic and Ulster Protestantism,” Irish Review 20 (1997): 89–103; David Officer and Graham Walker, “Protestant Ulster, Ethno-History, Memory and Contemporary Prospects,” National Identities 2, no. 3 (2000): 293–307.

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47. Kris Brown, “‘Our Father Organization’: The Cult of the Somme and the Unionist ‘Golden Age’ in Modern Ulster Loyalist Commemoration,” Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs 96, no. 393 (2007): 707–23. 48. See, e.g., Great Wars Historical and Culture Society, The Ulster Volunteer Force, 1912–2002 (Belfast, 2002), DVD. 49. See Brown, “‘Our Father Organization’”; Brian Graham, “The Past in the Present: The Shaping of Identity in Loyalist Ulster,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 3 (2004): 483–500; Brian Graham and Peter Shirlow, “The Battle of the Somme in Ulster Memory and Identity,” Political Geography 21 (2002): 881–904. 50. Orange Standard, 30 June 2009. 51. Billy Mitchell, “Somme Commemoration Speech,” Monkstown, 25 June 2000 (copy in possession of author). 52. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (London, 1991). 53. Brian Walker, Dancing to History’s Tune: History, Myth and Politics in Ireland (Belfast, 1996); Brian Walker, Past and Present: History, Identity and Politics in Ireland (Belfast, 2000). 54. Homi Bhabha, “The Managed Identity: Foreword, Remembering Fanon,” in Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (London, 1986), xvi. 55. James Fentress and Chris J. Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992). 56. John Hewitt, “Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto” (1972), in Frank Ormsby, ed., The Collected Poems of John Hewitt (Belfast, 1991). 57. See, e.g., Brandon Hamber, Dorte Kulle, and Robin Wilson, Future Policies for the Past, Democratic Dialogue, Report 13 (Belfast, 2001); Brandon Hamber and Gráinne Kelly, A Place for Reconciliation? Conflict and Locality in Northern Ireland, Democratic Dialogue, Report 18 (Belfast, 2005); Kieran McEvoy, Making Peace with the Past: Options for Truth Recovery Regarding the Conflict in and about Northern Ireland (Belfast, 2006).

CHAPTER 5

T H E PA S T N E V E R S TA N D S S T I L L Commemorating the Easter Rising in 1966 and 1976

Margaret O’Callaghan

This chapter looks at aspects of Irish nationalist and republican commemorations of the Easter Rising of 1916 in 1966, two years before the outbreak of civil unrest in Northern Ireland, and at the height of conflict in 1976. But while the focus is on the commemorative practices of the Irish Republican movement, it leads out into wider questions about the politics of commemoration, the politics of the past in divided societies, where competing versions and representations of the past are often inscribed in commemorations, and the complex issues that all this raises for history writing in such societies. The nineteenth-century Irish nationalist memorializing and commemorating tradition, formulated out of a succession of appropriations of the past to publicly galvanize demands for Irish independence, was itself an inherent feature of the Irish Republican Brotherhood Rising of April 1916. Commemorating past generations of designated republican heroes furnished the revolutionaries of 1916 with genealogy, ideology, 115

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and historical context. Thus in commemorating that Easter event fifty years later Irish nationalists reiterated their allegiance to a tradition of unbroken—and for some incomplete—struggle for Irish freedom. Ten years later, however, in the heat of the Northern Ireland conflict, the commemoration had gained new purchase as a means of integrating the then-contemporary Provisional IRA campaign and a gamut of Official IRA and breakaway campaigns into narratives of resistance to British state power in Ireland. The northern republican commemoration of 1916 in 1976 also represented a threat to the independent Irish state, as the various IRAs sought to appropriate and claim as their inheritance “republican memory” in modern Ireland. The Irish state too saw itself as the inheritor of the republican past, but key actors were intensely wary of the uses to which the contemporary IRA wished to put what they claimed was their continuity with the Irish revolutionary past. Thus commemorating 1916 in 1976 was a very different matter from commemorating 1916 in Belfast or Dublin in 1966. The raising of genealogical questions about who owned the Irish flag, and who owned the revolutionary tradition, was far more starkly heightened on the latter occasion. This chapter examines how the act of commemorating acquired new resonances in conflict and contrasts the commemoration of Easter 1916 in 1966 and 1976 and its relation to wider commemorations in peace and war. Questions of legitimacy, mandate, and genealogy were raised by these commemorations and are considered in what follows, before moving on to explore what happened in 1966 and 1976.

COMMEMORATION AND CONFLICT

It is a truism that societies moving out of conflict look to the past for societal healing that can take place through remembering, commemoration, or the pursuit of hidden truths about the fate of victims at the hand of the state or of paramilitaries. Some, however, argue that in societies described as moving out of conflict, a shift away from focusing (or fixating) on the past is desirable. In that view “the past” embodies all that nexus of residual feeling, memory, and belief out of which the conflict

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at least partially originated in the first place. Patrick Pinkerton’s position on commemoration in Northern Ireland since the peace process is clear: it is dangerous and liable to lead to a reopening of conflict. It should therefore be abandoned. The political semiotics of a loyalist memorial in Belfast prompts him to outline the risks inherent in the activity of commemoration.1 He argues persuasively against Jenny Edkins’s notion of subverting commemorative meaning through occupation and draws on the work of Derrida to demonstrate that commemorative practices by definition entrap, cannot be dismantled, and should not therefore be indulged. Intellectually the argument is compelling. Drawing upon narrow sectional versions of the past to galvanize present political positions can indeed be dangerous, rebarbative, and lethal; it would be good to live in a society in which such practices were abandoned. But we actually live in one in which versions of the past, often distorted, or as Pinkerton argues, constituted in the present, are constantly used to marshal group identities in deeply divided societies. While we may disapprove of such reconstituted versions of the past, it is nevertheless essential that we analyze how they function and demonstrate how they have worked and continue to work in varying political landscapes. As Pinkerton’s work shows, the texts of commemoration have themselves to be deconstructed. But we must look at these texts of commemoration in tandem with other versions of the past that function in postconflict situations; they are in fact constitutive of the conflict. Debates about the past are not confined to the politicized constructions of commemoration. If commemoration has at best a dubious relation with the history it seeks to appropriate, then it is also true that a desire to pursue aspects of what happened in the past is a part of the post–peace process in Northern Ireland. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is often cited as a model of a desirable form of potentially healing engagement with a troubled past, as is the Court of Human Rights at The Hague in a very different manner.2 Both are said to be about establishing what happened in a time of conflict, on the assumption that the truth itself, or at least parts of the truth, can help individuals and societies to heal. In the case of The Hague the legal process also seeks to punish. Reluctant to engage in so extensive a model of

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truth recovery as in South Africa, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, after years of discussion about how the past could be approached, set up the Eames-Bradley Consultative Group on the Past in Northern Ireland in 2006. Chaired by the highly respected former Church of Ireland Primate of Armagh, Robin Eames, and the former Catholic priest, Denis Bradley, who had played a key role at stages of the Northern Ireland peace process, it was limited in scope and limited too in its remit. The Eames-Bradley report was widely condemned upon publication for one of its key recommendations:3 the payment of £12,000 compensation to the surviving relatives of dead victims.4 The definition of what constituted a victim was fraught, and went back to all the unresolved issues of the 1998 settlement: the fact that divergent groups had never really agreed on what the conflict had been about, whether it was indeed a war, and whether paramilitaries who died “in action” could retrospectively be designated as victims. Who, precisely, was a victim? Some of the Eames-Bradley recommendations have constituted debates about how to deal with the past that are ongoing; some of the proposals are designed to show “how memory can be mobilised in the service of peace.” In Northern Ireland groups like Healing Through Remembrance have sought to do what is called memory work,5 as have many of the peace process interventions, by trying to normalize and stabilize “the peace” in disadvantaged areas, principally by reintegrating former prisoners into their own communities. Transforming former prisoners and combatants into community workers and local activists involves a variety of publicly financed projects that ask them too to address the past.6 Cynically, one could suggest that the purpose of many of these initiatives is to occupy individuals who have lost status with the end of their former paramilitary roles. Many former IRA volunteers have been processed through Sinn Féin into legitimate politics, but many have not. The rage of those republicans who see Sinn Féin as having betrayed all that armed struggle was about is perhaps best represented in the disillusioned interview-memoirs of sometime commander of the Belfast Brigade, Provisional IRA, and hunger striker Brendan “Darkie” Hughes and others. But these reflect the wider sentiments of those republicans left behind by the peace.7 Many former loyalist para-

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militaries have been even more unsuccessful in making the transition into mainstream politics.8 By conducting investigations into unsolved violent deaths, the Historical Enquiries Team in Northern Ireland represents yet another way of addressing the past and the needs of victims; the reopening of “cold cases,” it is supposed, may bring belated justice to the dead. Similarly, the tribunal presided over by the former senior civil servant Sir Ken Bloomfield was tasked with tracking down “the disappeared” in the hope of returning their remains to their families for burial. Yet another attempt to deal with the contested past is the series of special reports into specific incidents or notable atrocities during the Troubles. From the vast and wide-ranging Bloody Sunday Enquiry, which reported finally in 2012, to the Smithwick Tribunal in the Republic of Ireland, established to inquire into the alleged culpability of the Irish police at Dundalk Garda Station in the deaths of two Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers, these constitute eloquent testament to the importance of “legacy issues.” It is of course vital to recognize that choosing what to investigate is in itself a political act, and that each inquiry reached the political agenda for specific political reasons. In this respect the refusal by the British government of a full inquiry into the Pat Finucane case— in which, allegedly, British Intelligence colluded in the killing of the prominent lawyer for republicans by loyalists—is instructive.9 “The past” is not being neutrally excavated; rather particular historical episodes are investigated for reasons of Realpolitik or political horse trading in the present. The actual inquiries have been almost all official Britishor Irish- or European Union–sponsored if not initiated, and they exist in uneasy communication with a whole range of subaltern attempts by individuals, groups, and subgroups to make sense of the past in their own manner, often through the kind of commemorative activities or monuments outlined by Pinkerton. Commemoration of local deaths and atrocities remains the most favored manner of remembering the past in local communities, and such activity frequently leads to protest and outrage by “the other side.” While Pinkerton may well be correct about the dangers of commemoration and the unwisdom of the commemorative act, it is clear that commemorative activity, the desire to memorialize in some quarters

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and the vested interests of politicians in molding commemorative practices, is sufficiently strong to be able to continue under its own momentum. Commemoration and remembering can, however, be linked in more disturbing ways. Attempting to pursue the facts of the past, often the past of up to forty years ago, through tribunals of inquiry is, by any standard, a difficult and complex brief, especially in a legal framework partially in the public light. Rebecca Graff McRae,10 using the work of Jenny Edkins, has shown that commemoration in a postconflict situation is just as likely to be a way of perpetuating and recalibrating divisions as it is likely to lead to reconciliation. Edkins writes of the cooptation of memory by sovereign state power in a variety of contexts. But it is not just state power that can co-opt memory. All conflicting interests in Northern Ireland draw upon their respective genealogies or their refurbished and renovated perceptions of them to recalibrate and reformulate their perceived political interests in the present. Trauma is not just present after an event, and “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland were not an event but a series of events with a multiplicity of points of observation over three decades, so it is valuable to look at particular points to appreciate how trauma and memory and the utilization of commemoration at different times has worked in the mesh and weave of the conflict. The Northern Ireland Troubles were, and remain in retrospect, at least partially, a propaganda war, but they were also wars about meaning, perspective, and narration. At the center of narration was the practice of commemoration.11 Commemoration is not history, and memory is not history. But public commemoration and private memory, however socially conditioned and different, may both be ways in which “the historical” is experienced by the individual and by the group.12 What the postmodernist approach can undervalue is the social, the economic, transmitted and transformed historical memory in family and group context, and the political. It is valuable to recall the state’s desire to control meaning by controlling public commemoration. The appropriation and packaging of traumatic happenings like wars and slaughter by the state are currently being illustrated in Ireland and elsewhere in relation to World War I and in the various commemorations of events past and scheduled on the island of Ireland from 2012 to 2022.13 From the Third Home Rule Bill

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of 1912, which reopened the battle about Ireland’s constitutional future, through the Ulster Covenant, which sought to ensure the continuance of the union between Britain and Ireland, through the Easter Rising of 1916, which declared a sovereign Irish republic and the Anglo-Irish War, which sought to vindicate that declaration, down to Civil War—all of this ground is being traveled by historians and others, as the Irish government in particular seeks to mold into reconciliatory shape the commemorative practices already in process. The memory industry has burgeoned in recent years. At its most grandiose, Jay Winter tells us, commemoration is the new religion of the West, and commemorative spaces are our new temples.14 The construction of the memory of both world wars through a plethora of monuments in the present tells us as much about now as about then. The huge popular interest in family history has provided the British Imperial War Museum with its largest public project ever, as it seeks to gather all memorabilia related to the tens of thousands of men from Great Britain and Ireland who died in World War I.15 The Irish state initially sought to frame its projected commemoration of the centenary of the 1916 Rising in a compatible space framed by the Great War, but it did not prove as simple a process as originally envisaged and has been more singular and Irish focused than might have been expected.16 It is too soon fully to analyze its complex trajectory, except to say that it was seen as a success for the Irish state at the time. But what this chapter seeks to investigate is the capacity that states have to control the meaning of the past and mold the meanings of commemoration in societies subject to fundamental contestation about legitimacy.

THE 1966 COMMEMORATION OF THE EASTER RISING AND THE DEBATE ON IRISH HISTORICAL REVISIONISM

The origins of the Troubles in Northern Ireland are contested. One argument, advanced by Conor Cruise O’Brien, is that the Irish government–directed commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1966 galvanized a new generation of young Northern Irish Catholics to seek to undo the partition settlement that

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was one of the unintended outcomes of the Irish revolution.17 He argued essentially that the conflict in “the North” was generated by a broader republican ideology that was island-wide. This suggests that nationalist or republican ideology, promoted by the Irish government in the officially sponsored commemorations of 1966, drove the northern conflict, or at least provided the ideological underpinning of the Provisional IRA campaign after 1969. It is clear, moreover, that this view is mostly based on what happened in the Republic of Ireland, “the South,” in 1966. This powerful analysis is usually advanced without reference to what happened in Northern Ireland in 1966, though it is evident that O’Brien himself reflected on what happened there in that year more than did his supporters or critics. An examination of what actually occurred in Ireland in 1966 around the commemorations North and South, both government sponsored and freelance, suggests a more complex picture than that delineated in O’Brien’s account.18 It is, however, important to explore O’Brien’s important thesis, not just because it was a view espoused by an Irish government minister and the leading Irish intellectual of the 1970s, but because these ideas shaped a generation or more of so-called revisionist thinking on Northern Ireland in the rest of Ireland.19 Finding out what had happened in Northern Ireland in 1966 was a beginning. Research reveals that there was considerable northern nationalist commemoration of the Easter Rising in 1966.20 The northern commemorative project was, however, ignored or marginalized by the Dublin government’s commemorative project. Sean Lemass’s Fianna Fáil administration sought to direct the official commemoration towards consolidating his key goals at the time, the normalization of relations with the Unionist government of Northern Ireland, as a crucial element in the ongoing abandonment of Irish state economic protectionism, the stabilization of relations with Britain as part of the same project, preparatory to joining the European Economic Community, and the promulgation of a message to the rising generation in the republic that its historic mission was to make the republic an economically viable state: “every generation has its task,” as the slogan went.21 The Irish government’s intended message in 1966 was clearly that fighting had been the task of an earlier generation, Eamon de Valera’s generation and that of Lemass himself. Lemass also wished to ensure

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that the last surviving officer from the Rising of 1916, Eamon de Valera, was reelected president of Ireland for a second term that year. This was a victory for de Valera and the party he founded, and of which Lemass was leader, Fianna Fáil. Standing outside the General Post Office in Dublin at the official state parade in 1966, de Valera alone in official Dublin placed Northern Ireland at the center of the commemoration. In a quavering voice, frail and almost sightless, he asked that Northern Ireland retain its existing structures, disaffiliate from Westminster, and rejoin the Irish “nation” by attaching its regional government to Dáil Eireann—mirroring thereby the current relationship with Westminster. His rhetorical, and at that point unrealistic, sentiments were remarkable for their expression if not their endurance among the Irish political elite in 1966. But commemorative projects cannot be corralled or limited by the intentions of the state, and, in Dublin and throughout Ireland, in those weeks around Easter 1966, in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s mordant phrase, “ghosts walked.” Recent research has indicated, however, that while the retrospective freighting of the Irish state’s project in 1966, backed by the full weight of O’Brien’s retrospective accusations, may be overstated, commemorative practices in those years did in fact prove generative in ways that have not been so easily assimilated by Irish state public “common sense.” Significantly, and in a way often retrospectively ignored in favor of highlighting the O’Brien thesis, in Northern Ireland in 1966 those designated “subversive groups”—republicans outside the Irish state, old IRA men in Belfast, Cathal Goulding’s new-style IRA in Dublin and their Sinn Fein associates—saw the opportunity to stage their own alternative commemoration, with Belfast as their temporary capital. The Irish government controlled, or attempted to control, the commemorative project in the Republic of Ireland, thus marginalizing and, apparently, rendering “subversive” republican activists impotent. Belfast, on the other hand, the contested first city of the partitioned North, neglected and forgotten by the Irish state, provided these other republicans with a stage. Sinn Féin president, Tomás Mac Giolla, attempted to ensure that republicans were mobilized to put on a big display in Belfast and other key locations, whereas constitutional northern nationalists like Eddie McAteer feared a reawakening of intercommunal tensions.

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So, though the principal northern nationalist republican commemorative event took place in Belfast in 1966, groups like the Gaelic Athletic Association and other smaller nationalist formations felt obliged to state that they too were still a part of the Irish nation, even if the Irish state considered them marginal and problematic. They staged pageants like “Seachtar Fear, Seacht Lae” (Seven Men, Seven Days),22 as well as a range of parades, musical events, and public lectures on the men of 1916 and their role in shaping an, in their view, as yet incomplete modern Irish nation. In these public enactments northern nationalists sought to transcend symbolically the fact of partition, and derived courage as a formation from their communal activities. Both nationalists and republicans sought to emphasize that the existing Irish state was not coterminous with the Irish nation.23 The commemorative performances, and permitting republican commemorations in the first place, caused political difficulties for Terence O’Neill’s Unionist government and provided extreme Unionism, as manifested in the person and actions of the Reverend Ian Paisley, with a platform that Paisley had been seeking since the late 1950s to entrench Unionism in a galvanized anti-reformist mind-set in changing times.24 In 1966 the residual republican movement in Belfast had been pressed by the southern leadership to turn West Belfast into a Sinn Féin capital for the day. Marginalized by state commemoration in Dublin and elsewhere in the republic, the Republican movement focused its energies on a push to make northern nationalists remember their place in the Irish nation, even if the Irish state wished to forget them.25 As noted, the moderates of Eddie McAteer’s old Nationalist Party were wary of staging commemorations in 1966. The Westminster elections of March 1966 returned Gerry Fitt, longtime Dock ward Republican Socialist, for West Belfast and began the process of bringing the concerns of Northern Ireland onto the floor of the British House of Commons. The people of West Belfast who paraded in 1966, then, did not vote for a republican candidate standing on an abstentionist platform who would refuse to take up a seat if elected, opting instead for Fitt’s new agenda, couched in the language of civil liberties. Paisley meanwhile consolidated his position as an opponent of rapprochement with “the South,” the new ecumenism, and a new political dispensation, by stirring up Protestant

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public opinion against O’Neill’s willingness to permit republican and nationalist parades in 1966. The 1966 commemorations had, at once, created a new sense of purpose and theater among sections of the northern nationalist population and provided Paisley with a secure platform from which to denounce Unionist compromise in the face of demands for equal rights. Sections of O’Neill’s own party echoed Paisley’s detestation of permitting the celebration of “rebel” causes and later contributed to O’Neill’s difficulties in 1968 and 1969.26 Paisley’s Protestant Telegraph, launched in February 1966, preached the gospel of confrontation, hatred, and no surrender.27 The Easter commemorations also supplied loyalists with a tangible enemy, and led to the re-formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), in a shabby emulation of their “ancestors” in 1912. Henry Patterson has shown how difficult it was for the Unionist Party to reform, and arguably O’Neill’s electorally successful containment of the Northern Ireland Labour Party constricted a potentially valuable middle route for liberal nationalists and unionists at this time.28 The northern commemorative practices of 1966 thus intensified divisions, though it would be wrong to move too far and see them as having generated conflict. They were, however, at least a factor in the increased polarization of northern politics in the late 1960s due to the challenge they were seen to present to the Unionist state, even though they remained carefully corralled in the spaces of securely nationalist areas— not in the public space of the center of the city. What were the activists saying at commemorative activities in 1966, and how did this differ from republican commemorations in 1976? Who presided over Easter commemorations in 1966, and were the same people presiding over them in 1976? If not, what had happened to the activists of 1966, and by whom had they been replaced?29 The rhetoric of certain individuals in 1966 prefigured later political, and in some cases military, actions. Malachy McBurney spoke in Dungannon of the crackdown by the Dublin government on IRA men in their jurisdiction. He questioned its entitlement to commemorate a republic which he and his brother Frank claimed to be a fake. The coalition of northern nationalist political interests that formed the broad-based directorate of 1966 was drawn geographically from all of the northern counties and

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ranged from the McBurneys through Liam (Billy) McMillan, who stood as a republican candidate with considerable lack of success in West Belfast in 1964. Old Belfast republican families like the McGlades and the Keenans were members of the Felons’ Club, and in Belfast they joined with McMillan, Jimmy Steele, and Liam MacDonagh. Charles McGleenan, former abstentionist MP for South Armagh, dominated the republican strain within Armagh memorializing, but republicans did not hold a monopoly on commemoration, as small local groups pursued their own agendas from a rainbow of different nationalist positions. Southerners like Niall Fagan from Leixlip in Kildare called for British withdrawal within ten or fifteen years and stated that it “is an honest and straightforward proposal which if acted upon, will prevent Ireland becoming the scene of the next bloody upheaval in the world situation.”30 Patrick (Leo) Martin, chairman of the Belfast commemoration committee, said, “There were those in the country who said that the country was free but they were forgetting about the six counties. The freedom they enjoyed in the twenty six counties was due to the sacrifice of blood made by the brave men of 1916.”31 The Proclamation of the Irish Republic was read by Malachy McBurney, and Seamus Costello32 asserted that the claim by Irish politicians that Ireland was free meant “that they have accepted the existence of partition with its consequent evils of emigration, unemployment and sheer poverty.” “They would have us believe,” he continued, “that the selling of our national assets to the first foreigner who has the money is a hallmark of freedom.”33 On the other side, Ian Paisley’s rally in the Ulster Hall celebrated the “defeat of the rebels” in 1916. O’Neill’s government had let the 1966 commemoration go ahead in nationalist areas but paid a price in terms of Paisley’s new prominence. In June Peter Ward, a Catholic barman, was murdered after leaving the Malvern Arms public house in Malvern Street on the Shankill Road, the center of Protestant West Belfast. He had been mistaken for one of the organizers of the Falls Road and Casement Park commemoration. Terence O’Neill, who had been commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, in the British embassy in Paris, felt compelled to cut short his visit on hearing of the death; he saw it as the responsibility of the newly reconstituted UVF and banned it forthwith.34

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THE 1976 COMMEMORATIONS

The year 1976 witnessed the heaviest death toll, after 1972, of the Troubles, the end of an IRA ceasefire, the removal of special category status for paramilitary prisoners, the high tide of the Irish coalition government’s hard-line policy against the IRA, and a shift in that government’s attitude towards the commemoration of the Easter Rising. The Irish government’s policy directions were bound up in its revised interpretation of the northern crisis, and its position in relation to the commemoration of 1916 was central to this. In 1976 it determined once and for all to eliminate any lingering ambiguities about the relationships between the Rising, the Irish state, the IRA campaign, and political legitimacy. Dublin could do nothing, however, about the manner in which 1916 would be commemorated north of the border. On 5 May 1976, two weeks after their 1916 commemorative performances, the Sinn Féin Ulster Executive issued a statement declaring that “the use of the men of 1916 by the British against the Republican Movement had been the strangest twist in the propaganda war against the Irish people.”35 This referred to the words of Sean MacEntee, a Belfast man, former minister in successive Fianna Fáil governments from the 1930s to the 1960s, and, appropriately enough in the circumstance, father-in-law of Conor Cruise O’Brien.36 The Sinn Féin spokesperson was among those who experienced what he called “a living hell in a British prison.” He then quoted MacEntee’s statement to the U.S. government, upon release from prison, in the early twentieth-century Troubles: As the British have been quick to seize upon Sean MacEntee’s remarks we, in direct reply to their question about the Republican movement—are they the heirs of the men of 1916— . . . in the words of Sean MacEntee and his fellow men of 1916 . . . [we] proclaim ‘the right of each people to defend itself against external aggression, external interference and external control. It is this particular right that we claim for the Irish people.’ This was the nub of the new issue to which the northern crisis had given rise within Irish nationalism and republicanism: who “owned” and who would control Irish republican memory in conflict?

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By 1976 the unofficial, or non–Irish state, republican coalition had split in the forcing house of “the Troubles.” The loose confederation of veteran republicans which had initiated the 1966 commemorations was now gone, divided increasingly into ideologically opposed formations. The Official and the Provisional IRA each sought to legitimize what they represented as their struggle against the British state in Northern Ireland, thus thrusting them also into direct confrontation with the Irish state and a vicious struggle about the ownership of Irish Republican cultural capital. A prime site for this struggle was the annual commemoration of the 1916 Rising. No longer simply a way to differentiate the northern aspiration for unity from the Irish state’s desire to see the 1916 Proclamation as its founding charter, Easter commemorations now also functioned as a means by which the rival northern republican paramilitary organizations conducted their respective struggles for primacy. In the face of this militarized northern theater the Irish state grew increasingly wary of staging the usual 1916 commemorations; they recognized their inability to control meaning and interpretation. In Northern Ireland there were seventeen Provisional Republican and thirteen Official Republican marches to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1976. On Sunday, 18 April, both groups marched to hold large commemorative ceremonies at the republican plot in Belfast’s Milltown Cemetery.37 The Provisional parade began at 1:30, the Officials following an hour and a half later. Meanwhile, the Socialist Commemoration Committee planned a rally for Andersonstown on Easter Monday. This gathering was supported by the People’s Democracy, the Irish Committee for a Socialist Programme, the Revolutionary Marxist Group, the Socialist Workers’ Movement, and the Socialist Women’s Group. Ten years earlier all the antecedents of these small organizations had marched together; thus one consequence of the conflict was the splintering of what had formerly been a broad nationalist-republican-socialist coalition. The United Ulster Unionist Movement announced that “it is likely that, as on many previous occasions, leading members of the IRA, or their so-called political wing, Sinn Féin, will present themselves on public platforms in blatant defiance of the law and in an obvious attempt to incite to further violence their animalistic followers.”38

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Accompanied by nine pipe bands, 400 members of the 1,500-strong march were dressed in black or green paramilitary uniforms. The 1916 Easter Proclamation was read along with the Easter statement from the Provisional IRA Army Council. Four men in black uniforms then stepped from the crowd and in response to orders fired three volleys over the republican plot with .45 automatic pistols; stewards took away the empty shells, while women took away the uniforms and weapons. Provisional Sinn Féin president, Ruairi O’Bradaigh, delivered the oration, as a British Army helicopter hovered overhead. The Republican movement, he declared, stood on “the threshold of victory.” Accusing the British government of missing an opportunity to negotiate a peace in the previous year during the IRA ceasefire, he promised that the struggle would continue until the republicans’ three demands had been met: a declaration of intent to withdraw from Ireland, an amnesty for republican prisoners, and the right of the Irish people to decide their own future. O’Bradaigh’s address drew on the writings of Frantz Fanon and the end of colonialism in Algeria. As a result of the botched secret negotiations, the choice now had been reduced to the perpetuation of British rule or its end. The British presence in Ireland was the core of the problem, as the English historian A. J. P. Taylor had pointed out, a Federal Socialist Republic the only solution. Loyalists, insisted O’Bradaigh, could not liberate themselves. They could be liberated only by a British withdrawal. The republican purpose was “not to drive out anyone who was born in Ireland but to build a new society.” He concluded by applauding the Belfast Brigade which “operating in the eye of the storm would continue to lead the way in the fight for freedom.” To those who claimed that their standards were lower than those of the men of 1916, he responded that “the same was said then in comparison with the men of 1798.” He said that there would never be need for another generation to make such comparisons, as this was the “final phase of the struggle to ensure an end of it all.”39 As the crowd of several thousand began to disperse, two Saracen armored cars approached from nearby Glen Road flanked by Royal Marines in full riot gear. Skirmishing broke out at the cemetery gates, which were knocked down by the Saracens, and a nearby building was set on fire. The building was still in flames as the Official Republican parade

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British troops storm the gates of Milltown Cemetery, Belfast, Easter Sunday, 1976. Source: Field Day Review.

made its way into Milltown. Some of the thousand or so marchers, accompanied by various pipe bands, carried banners emblazoned with “Civil Rights Now,” “Workers Unite,” and “One Family One House,” After the statement from the Official IRA Army Council, Sean Garland, national organizer of Sinn Féin (Gardiner Place), delivered the oration. Condemning sectarianism and authoritarianism in the North, he observed that while “the fangs of the sectarian Unionist reptile” had been unleashed these had not succeeded in breaking the unity of the people. “The Provisional monster” had likewise damaged that unity, without completely destroying it. “Thousands of people had been killed and maimed and this had brought military repression in its wake.” Economic recession had been masked by the armed campaign of the Provos. The inspiration of Tone, Davitt, Pearse, and Connolly, claimed Garland, led the Official movement to the belief that a new economic program was necessary; abandoning abstention and armed struggle and a critical

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participation in political activity were the best way to achieve this. He paid tribute to “the Soldiers of the Republican movement murdered by the forces of the Right and the Ultra Left.” He attacked the Provisionals as “an ally of the very forces which [they] claimed to oppose: they had provided the excuse for interrogation, torture and oppression.” He also “rejected the Costellos and the McAliskeys [of the IRSP] out of hand.” Indeed, most of Garland’s address—such parts as were audible under the sound of army helicopters—consisted in denunciations of the Provisionals, who he noted had last attacked the Officials for a week during which “they failed once again to force people to leave their homes, but in the end eight were killed and forty were injured.” He then turned to the IRSP, which he labeled a neo-fascist gang, responsible for the deaths of three of the Officials’ “best and most dedicated men”: Sean Fox, Paul Crawford, and Liam McMillan. Garland’s core message was that the Officials alone were nonsectarian. They recognized no differences between Catholic and Protestant and insofar as there were any differences insisted that they should not be exploited. The aim of the Officials was to achieve peace, smash sectarianism, and promote prosperity. Supporters were urged to shun the “hooligan element” as they left Milltown.40 In Newry too there were competing parades to the republican monument. The Provisional gathering, addressed by Anthony O’MalleyDaly, first said a decade of the rosary and stood for a reading of the 1916 Proclamation and the lament of a lone piper. The Officials dispensed with the rosary. O’Malley-Daly insisted that decent loyalists need not fear a purge by the IRA, though he excluded members of the RUC, Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), and UVF from this category. He also excluded those that “tortured our men and girls in hell-holes in this country and across the water.” Demanding a phased British withdrawal, he claimed that they “would have been out long ago only for the collaborators and the Quislings in the South, who have sustained the British government and have thrown the banners of the men of 1916 into the dust.”41 In contrast, the Officials’ spokesperson, Sean O’Coinnigh, declared: We realise that there is no real prospect of revolution around the corner and we say that those who promise it are trying to convince

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the people of something that is impossible. We have opposed by word, deed and example the viciousness of sectarianism. We make no apology for our constant appeals to the Protestant working class organisations to throw off the shackles of the opportunists who would use them for selfish and cynical ends.42 He further called for the disbandment of both the UDR and the RUC. Vice president of Provisional Sinn Féin, Daithi O’Conaill, addressed a gathering at Stranorlar in Donegal. Just released from Portlaoise Prison, his key theme, like that of O’Bradaigh in Milltown, was how close to a settlement with the British government the Provisionals believed they had come the previous year. The government, he said, had been given “ample opportunity during the past twelve months to resolve its dilemma without further bloodshed. All that was asked of it was to state clearly what many of its members had been saying privately.” It was now up to the British government to decide how many of its soldiers “must die before the moment of truth was faced and a British withdrawal announced.”43 At the Official Republican event in Cork, Malachy McGurran reiterated the anti-Provisional message: Despite those who perverted the non-sectarian message and democratic values of the Easter Rising, and who have blackened the name of Republicanism by murdering and maiming our Protestant and Catholic fellow-workers in the North, we in Republican Clubs and Sinn Fein stand by the Republic that Pearse and Tone and Connolly died for.44 At Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, Maurice Conway of Tyrone echoed O’Bradaigh and O’Conaill on the need for an imminent British withdrawal, adding that “Dublin politicians realise that with the coming of this new Ireland, they would be swept into the dustbin of history and regarded by coming generations as the worst traitors this country has known for many many years.” Both the Officials and the IRSP also gathered at Glasnevin in the midst of a very large Garda presence. Kevin Smyth, vice president of the Six County Executive of Republican Clubs, in a litany similar to all other Official speakers, condemned the sectari-

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anism of the Provisional IRA, “back-room dealing” between what he called the mainstream sectarian parties, and “power sharing which is an attempt to make sectarianism respectable.” Their demands, he said, were for a nonsectarian unarmed police service, the outlawing of all forms of discrimination through a Bill of Rights, and the end of the Emergency Provisions Act. The Army Council of the Provisional IRA did not formally call off its ceasefire at the ceremonies, and there were reports of continued contacts with Stormont Castle officials, but the consensus seemed to be that in the absence of the deal that they had so confidently expected in late 1975 this marked a turning point. It was in many ways the end of the southern leadership of O’Connaill and O’Bradaigh. On Wednesday, 22 April, the coalition government in Dublin announced its intention to ban a Provisional Sinn Féin parade from Liberty Hall to the General Post Office, core site of the 1916 Rising, scheduled for the following Sunday.45 The movable nature of the Easter feast meant that there were commemorations both on the calendar anniversary of the 26 April Rising and on Easter Sunday or Monday on whatever date they might fall. Under the Offences Against the State Act, which “refers to meetings or processions held by arrangement or in concert with an unlawful organisation, or held for the purpose of supporting, aiding, abetting or encouraging an unlawful organisation or advocating its support,” the government had the powers to effect such a ban. It was the most high profile attempt by the Provisionals under the protective title of the Republican Commemoration Committee to be seen in a central space normally occupied by government commemorations at this time. The cabinet discussions on the ban are a separate and complex story. It was pointed out by a government spokesman that participants were not liable to prosecution; that was confined to speakers, stewards, and others concerned with regulating the parades, though there was a suggestion that civil servants or those employed by the state could risk losing their jobs if identified as being present. Legally the ban made both O’Bradaigh and O’Conaill, who had previously served sentences for membership in the IRA, and who were scheduled to speak, liable to sentences of three months’ imprisonment. Prior to the event O’Bradaigh said that he had been served with a notice at his home by

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two detectives. Similar notices had been served to the Kevin Street, Dublin, offices of Sinn Féin and to the party newspaper, An Phoblacht. O’Bradaigh complained that the coalition government had sought to diminish the significance of the Easter commemorations nationally since they came to power in 1973. Clearly, in the absence of a significant government commemoration, Sinn Féin wished to claim the streets of Dublin and the Rising as their own. Reportedly, seven roadblocks were set up north of the border and two to the south to delay supporters, who traveled from the north in large numbers. Minister for Justice Patrick Cooney led the hawks in cabinet with assistance from Conor Cruise O’Brien. Irish television confirmed, on the evening of Friday, 23 April, that following intervention by the office of the director-general, Oliver Maloney, planned coverage of the march by the current affairs program Feach had been canceled.46 Though over ten thousand people attended the parade and rally addressed by O’Bradaigh and O’Conaill, with Labour TD David Thornley on the platform, and though its route was changed to begin at the Department of Justice on St. Stephen’s Green, it received limited television coverage or analysis. As the Belfast Newsletter suggested, many viewed the march as a “challenge to the Eire government.” With the march having been announced in a press release from Provisional Sinn Féin on 25 February, the cabinet had ample time to consider its reaction. The Official Unionist Party commented, “It is a sad reflection on the blind appeasement policy prevalent in British Government circles that it seems prepared to allow the IRA to march here with impunity whilst even Eire can see the writing on the wall.” The northern command of the Provisional IRA organized what they hoped would be a massive demonstration in Dublin on 25 April—an attempted reenactment of the roles of the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers. Banning the march testified to the Fine Gael–Labour coalition government’s resolve to deny the Provisionals’ ownership of 1916. Ten bands from all over Ireland marched in the Dublin parade, with one from Glasgow “led by a party of youths in black uniforms and dark glasses.”47 The color party was shielded from the ranks of the assembled Garda as they “changed into civilian clothing and disappeared into the crowd.” Thornley, the brilliant if maverick Trinity College Dub-

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lin lecturer and RTE current affairs broadcaster, sealed his political fate by participating in the march. He claimed that he came solely to uphold the democratic right of public assembly, but his presence on a “tricolourcovered lorry platform” with O’Conaill and O’Bradaigh led to his expulsion from the parliamentary Labour Party and his consequent marginalization from mainstream politics in the republic. Addressing the crowd, Daithi O’Conaill said that “those who set out to defile Easter Week merit nothing but contempt.” In Ireland there were those who wanted to abolish British rule and those who wanted to maintain it. “We will abolish British rule come what may. Dublin or no Dublin.”48

CONCLUSION

By 1977 the key public speakers and organizers of the commemorations in Belfast in 1966 had scattered in a number of directions.49 Liam McMillan, who had become commander of the Official IRA, was killed the previous year during the feud with the breakaway INLA. Seamus Costello, who had been so prominent a speaker for the republican Left in 1966, had founded the INLA and its political wing, the IRSP. He too would be shot and killed within the year. Some speakers have faded into obscurity, but, on the Provisional side, it is clear that O’Bradaigh and O’Conaill, both less prominent than Tomás Mac Giolla in 1966, were attempting to control the public image of the now-Provisional movement. There is a whiff of desperation in the Provisional public statements, as they could not conceal their disappointment at what they erroneously believed to be the imminence of a historic settlement with the British authorities in the previous year.50 Recent material from the Duddy and O’Bradaigh archive makes it clear that this was their assumption at the time. Their puffed-up rhetoric in 1976 signals the shift then going on to replace them by the northerners, the “Belfast Brigade,” of whom O’Bradaigh spoke so highly, and perhaps so defensively. It is notable that none of the individuals who later succeeded the southern leadership cadre are at all visible in these public events in 1976, perhaps for obvious reasons. The Officials meanwhile were trying to shore up

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their shrinking base, by trumpeting their nonsectarian credentials, support for a Bill of Rights, and loathing of the Provisionals. The tens of thousands who flocked to the streets of West Belfast in 1966 in a broad-based Irish nationalist commemoration of 1916 had been replaced in 1976 by competing, Troubles-hardened, factions. Belfast, aspirational capital of an optimistic new politics in 1966, had ten years later descended into a desperate war zone, with a new dispensation of “Ulsterization,” criminalization and normalization just in train. Helicopters, Saracen armored cars, burning buildings, and militarized streets provided an ominous setting for commemorations in which factions formerly united in a working coalition now condemned one another while asserting both their own legitimacy and future intent. In Dublin the government countered the bid by the Provisional Sinn Féin to occupy the space abandoned by the state on O’Connell Street to commemorate the Easter Rising. The 1916 commemoration there was emblematic of just how internalized the revisionist critique of the 1966 commemoration had become. Irish government rage at secret British negotiations with Sinn Féin during 1975 found expression in its hard-line approach to parading and to the Provisionals within its own jurisdiction. The commemoration of 1916 in different places is a political-sociological moment—a snapshot of the politics and tensions of a particular time. In 1966 the Irish government confidently assumed that they could control the narration of the Rising and the future, and appeared to succeed in so doing. But for Terence O’Neill commemoration in conjunction with the tensions of the time proved a tipping point. Commemorations may not make things happen, but governments have limited capacities to control them. In 1976 the British ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, was assassinated in Dublin. Over the next thirty years the Irish government found it necessary not to hold any ostentatious Easter commemorations. In 2006, however, Stuart Elson, Ewart-Biggs’s successor, sat on the stand outside the GPO with members of the Irish cabinet, while leading members of Sinn Féin and former members of the Provisional IRA stood nearby.51 This ninetieth anniversary, led by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, under the combined liberation of the peace process and fears of the electoral challenge posed by Sinn Féin, would set a template for the centenary commemorations in 2016.

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In divided societies the past is contentious. There is a history of history being politicized on this island from at least the seventeenth century on, and, as Oliver MacDonagh pointed out years ago, the past is immanent in the present: it is a movable site of political strife on which the conflicts of distant ages as well as those of more recent times are repeatedly reenacted as well as remembered.52 As everyone knows, commemorations in Northern Ireland are as much—perhaps more—about the present as the past; there, at once urgent and repetitive, the press of politics will not permit the past to stand still. NOTES 1. Patrick Pinkerton, “Resisting Memory: The Politics of Memorialisation in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 14 (2012): 131–52. For a record of popular memorializing of Troublesrelated incidents, see E. Viggiani, “Public Forms of Memorialisation in Belfast,” http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/viggiani. 2. Douglas Murray, “What Has This Era of ‘International Justice’ Done to Prevent Genocide?,” Spectator, 25 August 2012. 3. R. Eames and D. Bradley, House of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee “The Report of the Consultative Group on the Past in Northern Ireland”: Second Report of the Session 2009–10, printed 9 December 2009. HC 171 incorporating HC 287i, ii and iii Session 2008–09. The report itself was published in January 2009 and was followed by a public consultation on the recommendations of the Consultative Group on 24 June 2009. 4. Initial public reaction to the report concentrated on the “recognition payment.” The Consultative Group intended that a one-off payment of £12,000 ‘be made to the nearest relative of each person who had died in the conflict as a recognition by the state that families on all sides had suffered through bereavement.” 5. For an excellent and very detailed review of the options for dealing with the past put forward by the Truth Recovery and Acknowledgement subgroup of Healing Through Remembering and their review of the mechanisms available for this purpose up to 2006, see Kieran McEvoy, Making Peace with the Past: Options for Truth Recovery Regarding the Conflict in and about Northern Ireland (Belfast, 2006); www.healingthroughremembering.org. 6. For ways of addressing contested murders from the past, see Douglas Cassel, Center for Civil and Human Rights, Notre Dame Law School, “Report of the Independent International Panel on the Alleged Collusion in Sectarian

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Killings in Northern Ireland,” sarmagh/collusion.pdf. The first inquiry conducted by Cassel was on the Glenanne cases in Armagh (2006). Out of this inquiry came the Historical Enquiries Team and the establishment of a special unit. Material in the Cassell report and further information from the Historical Enquiries Team and the Pat Finucane Centre forms the fascinating research base of Anne Cadwallader, Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland (Dublin, 2013); see also Henry Patterson, Ireland’s Violent Frontier: The Border and Anglo Irish Relations during the Troubles (London, 2013); Brian Conway, Commemoration and Bloody Sunday: The Work of Memory (London, 2010). 7. The Boston College Archive is a repository for interviews with former combatants, given on the understanding that the material would remain confidential until the death of the interviewee. The republicans interviewed by Antony McIntyre for this archive project were overwhelmingly republicans who disagreed with the peace process, e.g., “Darkie” Hughes and Dolours Price. The death of Hughes and David Ervine prompted Ed Moloney to publish a book based on their interviews. The Police Services of Northern Ireland decided that material in the archives could be germane to ongoing inquiries and initiated a process, upheld by the U.S. courts, to seek recovery and use of the material. See Ed Moloney, Voices from the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland (London, 2010). 8. Peter Shirlow, The End of Ulster Loyalism? (Manchester, 2012). 9. The murder of Pat Finucane retains its political significance as his family rejects the limited inquiries that have taken place to date and demand a full inquiry that they insist is necessary. The Pat Finucane Centre is currently a key institution for researching claims of British intelligence and security force collusion with loyalists in preceding decades. 10. Rebecca Graff McRae, Remembering and Forgetting 1916 (Dublin, 2010). 11. Ian McBride, ed., History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001). 12. Recent work on memory both neurobiological and psychological asserts its fallibility. One approach to this fallibility is to both recognize its existence and recognize that the form memory takes, even if strictly speaking inaccurate, is in itself worthy of analysis. It may, however, be of dubious assistance in finding out what happened after the event. See Simon Prince and Geoffrey Warner, A New History of the Start of the Troubles (Dublin, 2011). 13. See, e.g., a brief list of recent events and conferences: National Library of Ireland conference, “The Third Home Rule Bill Crisis: Centenary Perspectives,” 25 and 26 May 2012; Hugh Lane Gallery Exhibition, Understanding 1916—Approaching 1916, National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, 28 April 2012; Community Relations Council of Northern Ireland Lecture Series 2012 on Centenary Commemorations; Royal Hospital Kilmainham Con-

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ference organized by Universities Ireland Historians Group “Reflecting on a Decade of War and Revolution in Ireland 1912–1923: Historians and Public History,” 23 June 2012; History Ireland Hedge School, “The Ulster Covenant,” 15 September 2012; Letterkenny, Institute of British Irish Studies Conference, Belfast, 22 September 2012. Commemorative events at all levels since 2012 can be numbered in the thousands. 14. Keynote address, Royal Hospital Kilmainham Conference, Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995). See too Wiles Lectures, Queen’s University of Belfast, 2016. 15. Luke Smith, Digital Lead, First World War Centenary Programme at Imperial War Museums. The museum is developing what it calls citizen history “by engaging a mass public in researching and sharing the life stories of those who served in the First World War.” See also the Historial de la Grande Guerre, the international museum of the Great War in Peronne, Somme, France. 16. See Graff McRae, Remembering and Forgetting 1916, for an exploration of how the Irish state and the Irish presidency have attempted to incorporate World War I into Irish public memory as a gesture of reconciliation with Ulster Unionists and a reappraisal of the allegedly suppressed memory of World War I in official Irish memory. 17. Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Ireland (London, 1972). 18. Mary E. Daly and Margaret O’Callaghan, eds., 1916 in 1966: Commemorating the Easter Rising (Dublin, 2007). 19. For a partial exploration of the meanings of Irish historical revisionism, see Alan O’Day and George Boyce, eds., The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (London, 1996); and Ciaran Brady, ed., Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism, 1938–1994 (Dublin, 1994; rev. ed. 2002). See too “Irish Modernity and ‘the Patriot Dead’ in 1966,” in Daly and O’Callaghan, 1916 in 1966, 1–17. 20. Margaret O’Callaghan, “From Casement Park to Toomebridge: The Commemoration of the Easter Rising in Northern Ireland in 1966,” in Daly and O’Callaghan, 1916 in 1966, 86–147. 21. This argument is compellingly put by Carole Holohan in “More than a Revival of Memories? 1960’s Youth and the 1916 Rising,” in Daly and O’Callaghan, 1916 in 1966, 173–97. 22. “Seven Men, Seven Days” centered on a very particular view of Irish history, with the seven signatories of the Proclamation of 1916 as the culmination of the Irish nationalist tradition. 23. See Daly and O’Callaghan, 1916 in 1966, 86–147, for the texture of speeches in Northern Ireland from April to August 1966. 24. Graham Walker, A History of the Ulster Unionist Party (Manchester, 2009).

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25. Henry Patterson, The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of the IRA (London, 1997; lst ed. 1989); Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party (Dublin, 2009); Roy Johnston, Century of Endeavour: A Biographical and Autobiographical View of the Twentieth Century in Ireland (Carlow, 2006); Séan Swan, Official Irish Republicanism, 1962–1972 (Dublin, 2007). 26. Catherine O’Donnell, “Pragmatism versus Unity: The Stormont Government and the 1966 Easter Commemoration,” in Daly and O’Callaghan, 1916 in 1966, 239–71. 27. Margaret O’Callaghan and Catherine O’Donnell, “The Northern Ireland Government: The ‘Paisleyite Movement’ and Ulster Unionism in 1966,” Irish Political Studies 21, no. 2 (2006): 203–22. 28. Henry Patterson and Eric Kaufmann, Unionism and Orangeism in Northern Ireland since 1945 (Manchester, 2007). 29. United Irishman, Officials monthly, June 1966–May 1980. 30. Irish News and Belfast Morning News, 11 April 1966. 31. O’Callaghan, “From Casement Park to Toomebridge.” 32. Seamus Costello, later a founding member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP) and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), initially sided with the Official IRA in the 1969 split but disagreed with their decision to ceasefire in 1972. He was assassinated in Dublin in 1977. 33. O’Callaghan, “From Casement Park to Toomebridge.” 34. Roy Garland, Gusty Spence (Belfast, 2001), 57–59. 35. Irish News, 6 May 1976. 36. Tom Feeney, Sean MacEntee: A Political Life (Dublin, 2009). 37. Irish Times, 16 April 1976. 38. Irish Times, 19 April 1976. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. See O’Callaghan, “From Casement Park to Toomebridge.” 46. On the Broadcasting (Amendment) Act of 1975, see Conor Cruise O’Brien, Memoir: My Life and Themes (New York, 2000), 355. 47. Irish News, 26 April 1976. 48. Irish Times, 26 April 1976. 49. Some, like Eddie Keenan, had been interned. 50. Duddy Archive, National University of Ireland, Galway; Niall O’Dochertaigh, “IRA Ceasefire 1975: A Missed Opportunity for Peace,” FieldDay Review 7 (2011): 50–77; Robert W. White, Ruairi O’Bradaigh: The Life and Politics of an Irish Revolutionary (Bloomington, IN, 2006).

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51. Owen Boycott, “Dublin Still Split on Easter Rising: Plan to Mark 1916 Revolt Still Rouses Controversy about Origins and Self Image of Irish Republic,” Guardian, Monday, 10 April 2006. 52. Oliver MacDonagh, States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict 1780–1980 (London, 1985); see also Jim Smyth, “Anti-Catholicism, Conservatism, and Conspiracy: Sir Richard Musgrave’s Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland,” Eighteenth Century Life 22, no. 3 (November 1998): 62–73.

CHAPTER 6

R E M E M B E R I N G A N D F O RG E T T I N G The Official Republican Movement, 1970–1982

John Mulqueen

What we choose to remember is dictated by contemporary concerns, it has been suggested. Remembering—and forgetting—may involve promoting certain strands of the past and downplaying others. And, Ian McBride observes, there can be “fierce clashes between rival versions of a common past.” Competing with the Provisional Republican movement during the 1970s, Official Republicans chose to forget certain aspects of Ireland’s radical tradition in order to meet their current ideological and policy requirements. As republican prisoners embarked on hunger strikes in the H-Blocks, the Official movement opposed the Provisionals’ interpretation—or “social memory”—of Irish Republican struggle. But with widespread sympathy for the hunger strikers among northern nationalists, and beyond, the Provisionals’ political wing, Sinn Féin, would be propelled with increasing success into the electoral arena.1 The fortunes of the Officials’ political wing in the North, on the other hand, which deleted “Republican” from its title, would prove to be very different. 142

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This chapter is a social memory case study: the transformation within Irish Republicanism that saw the Official Republican movement evolve into the Workers’ Party. The Official movement’s ideological journey in the 1970s involved a process of remembering and forgetting following the 1969–70 split between Officials and Provisionals. Official Republicans remembered a left-wing republican tradition inspired by James Connolly and forgot a two-hundred-year-old physical-force republican tradition: the armed struggle of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to secure a thirty-two-county republic would be supplanted by agitation on economic issues. The reassessment that led left-wing republicans to develop a Marxist-Leninist strategy began in 1962 following the most recent IRA military failure.2 The Officials’ political wing would evolve into a Moscow-oriented communist party in all but name and develop a close relationship with the Soviet Union.3 In forgetting republican militarism, the Officials developed a contentious understanding of Irish Republicanism that would be at odds with how the Provisionals remember the Northern Ireland Troubles. Overshadowed by their Provisional rivals, the Officials’ paramilitary and political activities during the Troubles have largely not been subjected to academic analysis. Adrian Guelke, however, has observed that in the early years of the Troubles the Official Republican movement was “an important political and paramilitary actor” in Northern Ireland.4 In 1972 the British ambassador to Ireland warned London that there would be trouble if a Soviet embassy opened in Dublin: the Soviet secret service, the KGB, and the Official IRA would pose a joint threat to Irish security.5 In 1977 the Officials’ political wing in the North, Republican Clubs The Workers’ Party, could still win city council seats in the Provisional heartland of West Belfast.6 In the wider analysis of the conflict, since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, Official Republicans have been overlooked, or merit mention mainly because of Official IRA actions committed before its 1972 ceasefire.7 However, filling a gap in the literature to some extent, an extremely detailed study, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party, was published in 2009.8 The Officials have, perhaps predictably, been omitted from the narrative of the Troubles by adversaries. Gerry Adams in his autobiography does not mention the Official IRA’s engagement with the British Army during the Falls Road curfew events. Likewise, in

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recalling his prison experiences, Adams does not recognize the role of Official prisoners during the Long Kesh protest of 1974 when both Official and Provisional IRA compounds were burned down.9

REASSESSMENT

As the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising approached in 1966 the IRA’s chief of staff, Cathal Goulding, outlined his vision for the Republican movement. The IRA had always engaged in action regardless of popular support, he said, but now republicans should be aware of the political needs of those they sought to represent. Significantly, Goulding stated that the movement aimed to “get through” to the Protestant working class.10 Nonetheless, telling a court in 1966 that he had spent a total of fifteen years in prison for being an active republican, he placed himself within the physical-force republican tradition: “If you find me guilty of these [arms] charges, you are finding every Irishman of every generation from Tone to the men of 1916 guilty of the same thing, because they used the methods I am seeking to use now for the very same reasons.”11 Left-wing republicans in the 1960s remembered their predecessors in the 1930s who had speculated about the revolutionary possibilities arising from agitation on economic issues.12 The onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s, with its ideological polarities, had ensured that the Republican movement avoided any campaigns relating to economic questions that were perceived to be communist inspired. Connolly’s socialism could not be discussed in the movement’s monthly, the United Irishman, and the Democratic Program of the first Dáil had been considered too radical to be circulated. However, Seán Cronin recalls, the IRA’s reassessment in the 1960s saw its adherents returning to the ideas of Connolly and Liam Mellows, looking at economic issues and reading the 1916 Proclamation and the Democratic Program “for meaning rather than rhetoric.”13 This was recognized in 1966 by the secretary of the Irish Department of Justice, Peter Berry, who advised that the Republican movement’s policy of physical force might be left in abeyance for some years

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in order to seek electoral support. IRA leaders, he pointed out, had attended classes conducted by communists.14 Meanwhile, the IRA’s priorities had been assessed by the Irish police, the Garda. IRA prisoners were instructed to demand “political” conditions, including the right to wear their own clothes, exemption from prison work, and the right to freedom of association. An IRA document stated, “Other Volunteers have fought and died to obtain these conditions which are recognised as Political Treatment. It is your duty to guard what they have won.”15 In 1967 the British ambassador in Dublin, Andrew Gilchrist, reported that the organization was on the wane in the Irish state.16 Renewed IRA activity in 1968, however, saw him changing his view of the threat posed by republicans. The leadership’s revolutionary ambitions had been proclaimed by Seán Garland at the annual Wolfe Tone commemoration. Gilchrist read the United Irishman’s report of this event under the headline, “No Longer Will the Army of the Irish Revolution Stand Idly By.”17 According to this left-wing understanding of Republicanism, the IRA should become the “army of the people” to defend political gains.18 The Republican movement’s political wing, Sinn Féin, invoked Connolly’s goal in 1967 by declaring its objective to be a socialist republic.19 Sinn Féin president Tomás Mac Giolla highlighted the revolutionary potential of the civil rights mobilization on the streets in the North when he told his party’s 1968 annual conference, or Árd Fheis, that the civil rights movement had shaken the Unionist Party “to its foundations.”20

ARMED STRUGGLE

Goulding’s political direction increasingly alarmed traditional republicans; the Provisionals in 1970 declared their hostility to communism. They listed the issues which for them had provoked the schism. These included the ambition to end parliamentary abstention, promotion of what they understood as “extreme socialism,” and failure the previous year to defend the northern Catholic minority—whom they saw as “our people.” The Provisionals contended that cooperating with communists could result in dictatorship.21

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Officials and Provisionals in 1970 commemorated the 1916 Rising separately. Goulding, now the Official IRA chief of staff, argued that new forms of struggle would arise as new political and economic crises developed. Therefore, republicans should support campaigns on economic issues and view the ending of parliamentary abstention as a tactical move.22 The Officials’ Easter remembrances witnessed an innovation: they issued Easter lily commemorative badges with an adhesive, or sticky, back. The Officials’ nickname henceforth would be “Sticks” or “Stickies.” The Provisionals would be known as “Provies” or “Provos.”23 Official Republicans invoked their memory of armed struggle when the Official IRA engaged the British Army in Belfast during the Falls Curfew events in July. Up to three thousand soldiers were involved in this exercise, which the Officials described as the biggest battle in Ireland since the 1916 insurrection.24 The curfew, which was imposed to facilitate arms searches, proved to be a political disaster. The army would now be perceived by the nationalist minority to be on the side of the unionist majority.25 The Officials compared the behavior of troops during the curfew to the notorious Black and Tans in 1920–21 during the War of Independence.26 Remembering the IRA’s armed struggle during the 1950s, Goulding would strike a defiantly left-wing note in his oration at the annual Seán South commemoration in Limerick on 3 January 1971. Republicans, he declared, could not exclude any particular tactic; therefore, parliamentary abstention had been a luxury the movement could not afford.27 Unlike the Provisionals, whose energies were directed against the Northern Ireland government, Official Republicans were also openly hostile to the Irish state. The United Irishman remembered the martyrdom of IRA volunteers in their conflict with the Dublin government during the Second World War.28 In 1971 the Official Republican leadership identified the key issue dividing Irish Republicanism. Readers of the United Irishman were told that republicans should work for a socialist revolution. Political agitation and armed struggle went together, according to this argument, and since the Provisionals relied on a solely military strategy they could not succeed as revolutionaries.29 Official IRA attacks on the army in Belfast would be accompanied in the South by explosions at the Mogul mine in County Tipperary and a British

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pensions office in Cork. The mine incident had been an attempt to follow the example of left-wing republicans in the 1930s by intervening on the workers’ side in an industrial dispute. Martin O’Leary died as a result of injuries received in the explosion.30 During the oration at his funeral Goulding declared that O’Leary would be remembered as the first martyr in a new phase of republican revolutionary struggle.31 The Official Republican movement, in January 1972, recalled the IRA’s failure to secure popular support for its military campaign to end partition in the 1950s. It criticized the militaristic tactics of the Provisionals as the Troubles escalated.32 The Officials stated: It has never been and is not now our intention to launch a purely military campaign against British forces in the North. We have seen the failures of past campaigns based on military action only and have set our faces against such campaigns which are doomed to failure. We do not see, nor do we want a repetition of the fifties.33 The Official IRA bombing of the officers’ mess at the headquarters of the British Army’s Parachute Regiment in Aldershot in February killed seven people: six civilians and a chaplain. The Officials claimed responsibility for the attack as a reprisal for the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry, when thirteen civilians were shot dead by paratroopers at a civil rights march.34 A wave of condemnation followed this bombing, and the attempt to provide political justification by linking it to the Bloody Sunday events rang hollow. Aldershot highlighted the political damage arising from the Official IRA competing with the Provisionals. If the Official IRA needed to retain what it saw as military credibility with a republican constituency this proved to be counterproductive for its political wing, agitating on civil rights in the North and economic issues in the South. The Official IRA made headlines again when paratroopers killed Joe McCann, one of its most famous volunteers, in April. The next day the Officials killed two soldiers in Derry and an officer in Belfast, in a weekend of rioting and attacks on army posts. Over three thousand people took part in the funeral procession and thousands more lined the route to the cemetery. McCann had found fame, not least because

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Life magazine featured a photograph of him in action following the introduction of internment in the North. The photograph appeared on the cover of the United Irishman beside the headline, “Army of the People.”35 In another allusion to British harshness in Ireland, Goulding told mourners at McCann’s funeral that “terrorism” had been Britain’s “age-old reaction to Irish demands.”36 The British prime minister, Ted Heath, wanted to know why no arrests had been made at the funeral and questioned the army’s policy in relation to arresting IRA leaders who appeared at public events.37 The Officials now produced a McCann poster, based on the photograph which had appeared in Life, remembering him as a “soldier of the people.”38 A U.S. State Department intelligence note observed that the McCann killing, and the issuing of the hotly disputed Widgery report on the Bloody Sunday shootings, led to renewed support for the IRA.39 Official Republican condemnations would not be restricted to British government policy. Shortly afterwards Goulding condemned the Provisional IRA’s ongoing bombing campaign as “inhuman” in an interview with the Soviet daily Pravda.40 The Official Republican leadership then made a landmark decision; they chose to publicly state that they would prioritize political struggle over armed struggle. In May, after acrimonious debate, the Official IRA declared a ceasefire in the North. However, it would still undertake what it deemed “defensive” and “retaliatory” actions there, and attacks on the security forces continued up to the end of 1974. But this formula allowed the Dublin-based leadership to gradually apply a more stringent interpretation of the terms of the ceasefire and rein in northern units keen to continue armed struggle against the army and police.41 Addressing a Republican Clubs conference in Carrickmore, County Tyrone, in July, Mac Giolla (the Official Sinn Féin president) admitted that the movement had made mistakes. Republicans, he warned, did not stand “on the brink of victory, but on the brink of sectarian disaster.” He reminded his audience that the movement’s immediate demands in the North included the ending of internment and an amnesty “for all political prisoners.”42 The British and American governments’ memory of “terrorism” would of course be different from Goulding’s. In September the U.S. embassy in Dublin informed its British counterparts that Goulding in-

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Issue of the United Irishman featuring a photograph of Joe McCann during a gun battle with British troops following the introduction of internment in August 1971. Photograph © Victor Patterson. By permission.

tended to visit the United States. The Americans agreed that a visa would not have been issued if their immigration authorities had known that he had been imprisoned in Britain for arms offenses.43 Goulding’s visa was revoked, and the State Department advised the U.S. embassy in Dublin on how to deal with any press queries in relation to the decision: a connection between Irish and Palestinian terrorism should be made. It should be emphasized that in the wake of the Black September

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killings in Munich the United States could not admit an alien with what the State Department described as Goulding’s record of “terrorist activities.”44 Meanwhile, the Official Republican movement demanded the release of all “political prisoners” in Northern Ireland, and the Republican Clubs and the Civil Rights Association pursued this campaign.45 Prisoners had loomed large in Official Republican agitation. Following the August 1969 violence in Belfast several Officials had been jailed in England for arms offenses.46 Again, current republican struggle would be linked with earlier generations. War of Independence hero Tom Barry, who in 1920 had led the IRA flying column in the Kilmichael ambush, participated in a protest over the imprisonment of Official Republicans. The United Irishman quoted Barry as saying that these “political prisoners” deserved the support given to those jailed “for fighting the Black and Tans.”47 In Belfast, in May 1972, two Official prisoners took part in a hunger strike with Provisionals to demand “political status.” The secretary of state for Northern Ireland granted special category (or “political”) status for paramilitary prisoners the next month.48 This decision would have far-reaching consequences.

COMMUNISM

The Provisionals had expressed fears regarding the influence of communists over Irish Republicanism. The Official leadership now promoted Marxism-Leninism within the movement, attempting to forget what it called “romantic” nationalism in favor of a materialist ideology focused on the working class.49 The Republican Clubs were legalized in 1973. Eighty-three candidates contested the northern local elections, winning 3 percent of the vote, with ten councillors elected. The Republican Clubs then polled 1.8 percent in the election for the new Northern Ireland Assembly.50 And in a significant ideological departure, in November the Official Republican movement’s alignment with Moscow-led communism became public at its Árd Fheis.51 The Officials’ support in the South would be measured in the 1974 local elections, when the rival (Official and Provisional) Sinn Féin par-

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ties each won seven council seats. The Officials obtained 1.6 percent of the vote and the Provisionals 1.5 percent.52 Support for both was microscopic. However, the Official Republicans would prove their determination to pursue political struggle and abandon physical-force Republicanism. For the leadership 1974 would be an important year as relations developed with the newly opened Soviet embassy in Dublin, which claimed the Official Republican movement had potential as a liberation movement (albeit one enjoying the advantages of operating in a Western European liberal democracy).53 Despite the fact that the Official IRA armed struggle against the security forces in the North had all but ceased,54 British analysts perceived the Officials as being part of an international terrorist network. Correspondence between the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) and Whitehall in relation to the Official Republican movement’s Festival of Anti-Imperialist Struggle in May discussed the question of how to prevent foreign visitors from attending this conference for “terrorist organisations.”55 The movement did not forget the Official IRA’s prisoners. The “anti-imperialist festival” agenda prominently featured a message of solidarity to visitors from the prisoners.56 The traditional republican position in relation to Northern Ireland had not been forgotten either. Mac Giolla condemned what he called the “colonial” northern state and its “repressive” security forces.57 Republican paramilitary prisoners would now remember the example set by their predecessors in previous decades. In October, in a dramatic confrontation with the prison authorities, Official IRA prisoners in the Long Kesh camp joined with the Provisionals in burning their compounds. Official Republicans again demanded the release of “all political prisoners.”58 Outside the prison, however, the organization sought to completely distance itself from the Provisionals. Following the bombing in November 1974 of two pubs in Birmingham, in which twenty-one people died, the British government rushed the Prevention of Terrorism Bill into law.59 Despite their condemnation of the Provisional IRA’s bombing campaign, Official Republicans were deported from Britain under the new legislation. A high-ranking member of the Officials’ support group in Britain, Clann na hÉireann, became the second Irishman to

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be deported under the act; he denounced the Provisionals’ physicalforce strategy when he arrived in Dublin. Leading members of Clann had also been questioned by police following passage of the antiterrorist legislation, and two other members of the Clann executive were also deported.60 While the Official Republican leadership had restated the republican ambition to end partition in 1974, an internal document pointed towards abandonment of this policy. A Marxist-Leninist analysis was offered in “The North: From Civil Rights to Class Politics,” which contended that the power-sharing executive agreed on at the Sunningdale talks, and the proposed Council of Ireland, marked the unity of the Irish bourgeoisie within the European Economic Community (EEC). This document argued that uniting the working class should be the Official Republican movement’s priority, not territorial unity. The author contended that industrial agitation would be the bridge to class politics in the North. According to this argument, the movement had to be prepared to make any concessions to convince the Protestant working class that its economic interests coincided with those of the Catholic working class. The author made a very optimistic prediction: “Sunningdale saw the unity of the Irish bourgeoisie. The next decade will see the unification of the grave-diggers of capitalism: the Irish working class.”61 Having openly accepted the leading role of the Soviet Union in international affairs, Official Republicans would now use rhetoric employed by Stalinist ideologues during schisms within communism. Séamus Costello had fought to reverse the 1972 ceasefire decision and had been gradually marginalized within the Official movement. In December 1974 he set up the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP) and its military wing, and a significant number of Officials in Belfast defected. The Official IRA commander in the city came under pressure to ensure this rival group did not get off the ground—unlike the Provisionals, in this line of thinking—and a feud with Costello’s followers developed.62 The United Irishman condemned IRSP members as ultraleftist, or Trotskyist.63 Readers of the Officials’ theoretical journal were reminded that what was described as “the enemy within” had attempted ultra-leftist disruption before in other communist parties.64

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In October 1975 the Provisional IRA launched a series of attacks on Official Republicans in Belfast. As many as ninety Provisionals may have been directly involved in the first wave of attacks, during which sixteen people were wounded and one, Robert Elliman, was killed. Eleven people would die in this feud: seven Officials, one Provisional, and three civilians.65 The Provisionals’ victims included six-year-old Eileen Kelly.66 The Republican Clubs contended that the Provisional IRA had decided to maintain its ceasefire with the security forces by allowing its volunteers to attack Official Republicans. Shortly after this outbreak of violence ceased the Officials argued that there had been collusion on the ground between the Provisionals and the army. Again, the Official Republican movement employed language reminiscent of the Stalin era: the Provisional IRA had unleashed a “murderous fascist pogrom” against republicans.67

“POLITICAL STATUS”

The movement’s new ideological emphasis would not be confined to propaganda. The abandonment of traditional republican priorities advocated in the “Class Politics” document would be highlighted in relation to the prisoners’ “political status” issue. In January the Gardiner report had argued that special category status amounted to the virtual loss of disciplinary control by the Northern Ireland prison authorities. Later in the year the northern secretary of state, Merlyn Rees, announced that special category status for those convicted of “terrorist” offenses would be phased out and a new parole scheme introduced. The Official prisoners in Long Kesh stated their position: “We will not barter political status.”68 The Official Republican leadership now displayed a ruthlessness in pressing ahead with its priorities. In his address to the 1976 Árd Fheis Mac Giolla stated that peace was the objective in the North—“the most revolutionary demand at this time.” New goals were summarized in the movement’s slogan “Peace, work and class politics.” It had forgotten the “army of the people” and would now forget about “political status” for paramilitary prisoners. However, the Official IRA prisoners in Long

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Kesh saw things differently. In their message to the Árd Fheis they outlined their understanding of the NIO’s strategy: “Merlyn Rees has announced the ending of political status for prisoners in Long Kesh. In this way he hopes that the political reasons for Long Kesh will be blurred in the public mind.”69 A statement in the United Irishman some weeks later outlined the leadership’s new position in relation to imprisonment. According to this argument, there were no “special” prisoners whose privileges might not be extended to others; all prisoners in a capitalist system were “political.” The leadership’s own experience of imprisonment was recalled here. Republican prisoners in the 1950s, the argument went, had become more politically aware as a result of mixing with the general prison population.70 Meanwhile, what the NIO described as long-planned prison reforms were coming to fruition. From March 1976 newly convicted paramilitary prisoners would be housed in cells, wear prison clothes, and work or undergo training. According to the NIO, paramilitary violence had not been politically motivated: “The ending of special category status is not only an essential step back towards a proper prison administration. It is a corollary of the Government’s emphasis on the gangsterism and hooliganism that characterises much IRA and Loyalist terrorism.” Recognizing paramilitary opposition to the phasing out of special status, the NIO noted what it saw as the “bellicose declarations” of the Provisional IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries. This commentary was optimistic about the government’s initiative, and claimed that the Provisional prisoners in Long Kesh had reluctantly withdrawn cooperation with the authorities under orders from outside.71 As the authorities phased out special category status, it did not become an issue within the Official Republican movement in the North. One former Official IRA prisoner active in the Republican Clubs at this time remembers that former prisoners were not particularly concerned about the matter. Special category status was described as “elitist.” But, more important, in relation to the Provisionals’ opposition to the phasing out of “political status” the Officials had a strategic argument: “we have to be different.” This former prisoner sees this realization as a defining moment for the movement: the Officials could not be seen to follow “in the Provos’ slipstream.”72 In September the first Provisional sentenced under the new regulations refused to wear a prison uniform

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(the resulting standoff eventually led to the H-Block hunger strikes).73 Despite the absence of controversy within the Republican Clubs, there would be increasing disquiet among Official Republican prisoners in Long Kesh over the phasing out of special category status. However, their numbers were due to fall to 35 by the end of 1977, from a peak of 106 two years earlier, and the leadership decided a confrontation with some of its own prisoners would not be worth the potential embarrassment. Following what Official prisoners perceived as an anti-leadership protest in Long Kesh, a compromise was agreed on. Official IRA prisoners with special category status would retain it, and that would be the end of the matter.74 The prisoners’ bulletin, An Eochair, which had been published outside the prison, appeared once more in 1977, and then publication ceased. The leadership of the Official IRA, run on MarxistLeninist lines, had compromised with a small but determined group. The Official Republican movement had hosted another “antiimperialist” festival in July 1976. Mac Giolla welcomed the recent national liberation movement victories in Vietnam and Angola, and the conference heard that economic issues such as the ownership of natural resources were an integral part of the struggle against “imperialism” in Ireland. Much had changed in the two years since the previous festival. On this occasion Official IRA prisoners were not remembered.75 Some visitors to the festival were again refused entry by Irish and British authorities. Later the same week, following the assassination in Dublin by the Provisional IRA of the British ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, Official Sinn Féin said the killing could only lead to repressive measures by the Irish government.76 Denying the tactical wisdom of assassinating a prestigious British figure illustrated how much Official Republican thinking had changed during the Troubles. Ten years previously Goulding had located himself in the republican physical-force tradition and expected IRA volunteers to continue the struggle for “political” treatment in prison.

THE WORKERS’ PARTY

The Provisionals had warned of the dangers posed by communism to Irish Republicanism, and the Official Republican movement would now

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define itself as Marxist. An Official IRA representative informed the Italian communist newspaper l’Unità, as a “communist,” that the Official Republican movement should be seen as a Marxist anticolonial movement.77 The movement followed its declaration of opposition to “political status” for paramilitary prisoners by dropping references to IRA trappings. The Irish Democratic Youth Movement replaced Fianna Éireann, and the term “Group B” would now be favored over “IRA.”78 The determination to sever open associations with the Official IRA would extend to jesuitical denials of links between the party and its military wing. Following the January 1977 Árd Fheis Mac Giolla said that his organization, now renamed Sinn Féin The Workers’ Party (SFWP), had set itself against militarism, declaring, “We have completely disassociated ourselves from all paramilitary organisations. We are totally opposed to militarism and terrorism, and we have rooted out that element from our organisation.” Militarism had been long abandoned, of course, and terrorism and the employment of violence were not quite the same thing. The Irish Press pointed out at this time, correctly, that the Official IRA had an important defense role in the North.79 In July four people were killed in Belfast, on the same day, in a feud between the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA. The Officials shot three men dead, including two civilians, following the assassination by the Provisionals of a prominent member of the Republican Clubs.80 And just as the party could not disassociate itself completely from “political prisoners,” it could not escape the consequences of association with the Official IRA either. The British embassy in Dublin observed that the most recent republican feud had probably damaged SFWP’s image as a purely political organization. Mac Giolla repeated standard denials: “Two years ago I made it clear that we were absolutely rooting out from our ranks anybody who had any elements of continuing terrorist or militarist tactics. . . . [L]ast year I made it abundantly clear once again.”81 Once more he was jesuitical in his choice of words. Later that month the party wrote to the British embassy in Dublin to protest the detention of Republican Clubs councillor Bernie McDonagh. He had been charged with possession of explosives, following the discovery of ammunition and explosives in his advice center. The language of class politics would now be

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used to define McDonagh’s role: he had struggled for “peace, democracy and redevelopment in West Belfast.”82 The party’s military wing, however, did not restrict itself to defense. The IRSP leader Costello would be assassinated later in 1977; the Official IRA, to coin a phrase, had not gone away.83 SFWP highlighted economic issues. In its view, state control represented the answer to all economic ills; industrialization would be deemed progressive because it strengthened the working class. This deterministic argument featured in a controversial pamphlet, The Irish Industrial Revolution, which appeared at the 1977 Árd Fheis, with a banner proclaiming, “Working for peace, planning for progress.” The pamphlet’s publication represented a seminal moment for the Officials. But they remained unpopular with the electorate, and could only win six council seats that year in the North. Sixteen candidates stood in the 1977 general election in the South, winning merely an average of 4.4 percent in the contested constituencies.84

Cover of the controversial 1977 pamphlet The Irish Industrial Revolution. By permission of the Workers’ Party.

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The party opposed “imperialism” while vigorously condemning Provisional IRA “terrorism.” Mac Giolla told the 1978 Árd Fheis that the organization belonged to a tradition of struggle by “an oppressed people” against “imperialist exploiters.” And if this rhetorical statement sounded familiar to republicans, his party’s priorities were totally different from those of the Provisionals. Despite what he described as the security forces’ “brutal record” in the North, delegates were told that the majority there saw the army and the police as “their only protectors against the mad Provos.” In this context, Mac Giolla remembered the killing of Eileen Kelly in 1975. He argued that half the world’s population lived under socialism and that the party had a very powerful ally in its anti-imperialist struggle: the “tide of history” no less. According to Mac Giolla, if terrorism divided and distracted the Irish working class, job creation benefited everybody. And so “industrialise for jobs” was the theme of the 1978 Árd Fheis.85 Towards the end of the year the United Irishman remembered the “pogrom” of 1975 following the conviction of a man for the murder of Elliman. This conviction provided an opportunity to outline the party’s position on the prisoners demanding special status. An editorial argued that Elliman’s killer should not receive “political status.” Provisional bombers were not prisoners of war, according to this argument, but other demands relating to prison clothes, freedom of association, and prison work should be conceded. The paper contended that the special status demand was “not realisable” and that the protesting prisoners— living in “disgusting conditions”—were being used as pawns “in a Provo publicity game.”86 Manipulated or not, the protest escalated. Republican Clubs contested the Fermanagh/South Tyrone by-election in 1981 following the death of Provisional IRA hunger striker and MP Bobby Sands. Advocating class politics, the candidate won 1.8 percent of the vote. Ominously, for the party promoting working-class unity, its Belfast councillors then lost their seats as the political atmosphere in the North became increasingly tense.87 The Soviet Union now inspired the party’s speechwriters. American “imperialism” featured prominently in the rhetoric as the Soviets’ Cold War disarmament agenda received energetic support. Garland speculated in 1980 about a third world war, which, predictably, would be a consequence of the policies pursued by “hawks” in London and Wash-

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ington, DC. Árd Fheis delegates were told that the British and American governments aimed to halt what he saw as “the tide of progress begun in Petrograd in October 1917.”88 In another departure from the republican past, Workers’ Life replaced the United Irishman in May 1980. For outward appearances the main link with the republican past remained the titles “Sinn Féin” and “Republican Clubs,” and the leadership urged their deletion. The organization became the Workers’ Party in 1982.89

CONCLUSION

The NIO’s criminalization policy assumed that paramilitaries could not muster popular support, but the Provisionals would disprove that theory during and following the H-Block hunger strikes. The Officials’ remembering and forgetting process in relation to prisoners epitomized their ideological somersault during the 1970s: they had secured the support of IRA icon Barry over the prison conditions of Irish Republicans in England but ended up effectively aligned with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher when she denied “political status” to republican hunger strikers. The Provisionals’ relationship with the northern nationalist community would be transformed by the death of ten hunger strikers, remembered as martyrs in an Irish tradition of prison struggle.90 There would now be next to no rivalry for ownership of the social memory of Republicanism. In forgetting physical-force Republicanism and embracing Marxism, the Official Republican movement did not succeed in reaching out to the working class in the North, Catholic or Protestant; “peace, jobs and class politics” fell on deaf ears. Forgetting republican demands in relation to territorial unity, however, did not prevent the Workers’ Party, starting from a thin base, from gradually securing an increased share of electoral support in the South.91 Republicans remembering Wolfe Tone in 1968 had heard Garland outline the importance of creating a political organization. But the Workers’ Party project would be wrecked in 1992 when six of its seven parliamentary deputies in the South forgot their communist past and established a new organization in the aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin Wall.92 The Official Republican movement and its revolutionary party had not been swept to victory by “the tide of history.” In forgetting physical-force Republicanism,

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it had, however, set a precedent that its republican opponents would remember: the Provisional IRA eventually followed the example of the Official IRA, ironically, and implemented a ceasefire in order to bring an end to the Northern Ireland Troubles. NOTES CAC NAI NARA NLI TNA UCDA

Abbreviations Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge National Archives of Ireland, Dublin National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC National Library of Ireland, Dublin The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey UCD Archives, University College Dublin

1. See Ian McBride, “Memory and National Identity in Modern Ireland,” in Ian McBride, ed., History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), 5–15. On the Provisional-led H-Blocks struggle to restore “political status” for paramilitary prisoners, see Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (Oxford, 2003), 187–212. The Officials’ position on the hunger strikes is outlined in Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party (Dublin, 2009), 397–99, 422–23. 2. Henry Patterson, The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of the IRA (London, [1989] 1997), 96–139. 3. Eunan O’Halpin, Defending Ireland: The Irish State and Its Enemies since 1922 (Oxford, 1999; paperback ed. 2000), 315–17; Richard Dunphy, “The Contradictory Politics of the Official Republican Movement, 1969–1992,” in Richard Deutsch, ed., Les républicanismes irlandais: Actes du colloque de Rennes (Rennes, 1997), 117–38. 4. Adrian Guelke, Northern Ireland: The International Perspective (Dublin, 1988), 40. 5. British ambassador to Foreign Office, 26 February 1972, in TNA, PREM 15/1046. 6. Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 378–79. 7. The role of the Official Republican movement is overlooked in Paul Arthur, Special Relationships: Britain, Ireland and the Northern Ireland Problem (Belfast, 2000). It receives little attention in Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon, and Henry Patterson, Northern Ireland 1921–2001: Political Forces and Social Classes (London, [1995] 2002); and in Sabine Wichert, Northern Ireland since 1945 (Harlow, [1991] 1999). The Official IRA’s landmark moments are noted in

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Jonathan Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast, 1992; ppbk ed. 2005); Richard Bourke, Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas (London, 2003); English, Armed Struggle; and Henry Patterson, Ireland since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict (Dublin, 2006). 8. Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution. The ideological trajectory of leftwing republicans from 1962 to 1977 is studied by Patterson in Politics of Illusion, 96–179, and this discussion remains the most analytical treatment of the Official Republican movement. See also Seán Swan, Official Irish Republicanism, 1962–1972 (n.p., 2007). 9. Gerry Adams, Before the Dawn: An Autobiography (London, [1996] 2001), 140–42, 237–40. A different Official Republican memory of the Falls Curfew events is recalled by the Workers’ Party, The Story of the Falls Curfew (Dublin, 2010). 10. Belfast Telegraph, 16 February 1966, 8; 17 February 1966, 8. 11. Irish Times, 20 April 1966, 1, 4. 12. Richard English, Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (London, 2006), 333–36; English, Armed Struggle, 87–88. 13. Seán Cronin, Irish Nationalism: A History of Its Roots and Ideology (Dublin, 1980), 184–91. On “red scare” tactics and economic agitations during the 1940s and 1950s, see Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000 (London, 2004; ppbk ed. 2005), 489–90, 491–93. 14. Berry memorandum on IRA, 9 December 1966, and Department of the Taoiseach to Berry, 6 December 1966, in NAI, TAOIS 98/6/495. 15. Garda document, “Review of Unlawful and Allied Organisations: December, 1 1964, to November 21, 1966,” 15–16, in NAI, TAOIS 98/6/495. 16. Gilchrist to Commonwealth Office, 1 August 1967, in CAC, GILC/ 14B. 17. Gilchrist to Commonwealth Office, 1 August 1968, in TNA, FCO 23/192. 18. United Irishman, July 1968. 19. Patterson, Politics of Illusion, 113. 20. Gilchrist to Foreign Office, 12 December 1968, in CAC, GILC/14A. 21. An Phoblacht, February 1970. 22. U.K. embassy (Dublin) to Foreign Office, 20 March 1970 and 3 April 1970, in TNA, FCO 33/1197. 23. Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 150–51. 24. Geoffrey Warner, “The Falls Road Curfew Revisited,” Irish Studies Review 14, no. 3 (2006): 325–42; Thomas Hennessey, The Evolution of the Troubles 1970–72 (Dublin, 2007), 37–48. 25. J. J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1989), 433–35.

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26. Official IRA Army Council statement on the Falls Road Curfew, quoted in United Irishman, August 1970. 27. United Irishman, January 1971. On Seán South and the 1950s campaign, see English, Armed Struggle, 72–76. 28. United Irishman, June 1970. 29. United Irishman, May 1971. Lauding the “army of the people” up to the Official IRA ceasefire in May 1972, the Officials denounced what they termed the “Provisional alliance” and questioned its motives. Brian Hanley, “The Rhetoric of Republican Legitimacy,” in Fearghal McGarry, ed., Republicanism in Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2003), 173–75. 30. U.K. embassy (Dublin) to Foreign Office, 9 July 1971, in TNA, FCO 33/1600. 31. Irish Times, 9 July 1971, 1, 16; Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 243–44. 32. U.K. embassy (Dublin) to Foreign Office, 5 January 1972, in TNA, FCO 87/1. 33. Quoted in M. L. R. Smith, Fighting for Ireland? The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement (London, 1995; ppbk ed. 1997), 88. 34. For an overview of the Bloody Sunday events, see the entry for Jack Duddy, the first to be killed on that day, in David McKittrick et al., Lost Lives: The Story of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Belfast, 2001), entry 243, 143–46. See also Bardon, Ulster, 686–88. 35. Irish Times, 17 April 1972, 1; 18 April 1972, 1; and 19 April 1972, 1; McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, entries 334, 336–40, 175–78; Alan F. Parkinson, 1972 and the Ulster Troubles: “A Very Bad Year” (Dublin, 2010), 116–18. On the international impact of the McCann photograph, see John Mulqueen and Jim Smyth, “‘The Che Guevara of the IRA’: The Legend of ‘Big Joe’ McCann,” History Ireland 18, no. 1 (2010): 46–47. 36. Oration by Goulding at funeral of McCann, quoted in United Irishman, May 1972. 37. Northern Ireland Office to Downing St., 11 May 1972, in TNA, FCO 87/3. 38. Mulqueen and Smyth, “‘The Che Guevara of the IRA.’” 39. State Dept. intelligence note, 28 April 1972, in NARA, RG 59, box 2655, folder Pol 23-9 U.K. 40. U.K. embassy (Moscow) to FCO, 28 April 1972, in TNA, 87/24. 41. Smith, Fighting for Ireland?, 88–90; Patterson, Politics of Illusion, 153–56; Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 195–99. 42. The Workers’ Party, Where We Stand: The Republican Position, Carrickmore 1972: A Lesson to Be Learned (Dublin, 2000), 31. 43. U.K. embassy (Dublin) to Foreign Office, 19 September 1972, in TNA, FCO 87/4.

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44. State Dept. to U.S. embassy (Dublin), 16 September 1972, in NARA, RG 59, box 2383, folder Pol 14 Ire. 45. Intelligence assessment of “current position” of Official IRA, in TNA, CJ 4/195. 46. Irish Times, 5 March 1970, 1; TNA, J 297/57. 47. United Irishman, January 1971, 8. 48. Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 210–14; David McKittrick and David McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles: The Story of the Conflict in Northern Ireland (Belfast, 2000), 137. 49. Education bulletin and program outline, Clann na hÉireann, in TNA, DPP/2/5294. 50. Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 223–25. 51. “Seán Garland” and “Tomás Mac Giolla,” in “Irish Personality Notes,” in TNA, FCO 87/601. The Officials’ monthly reported the Moscow visit. United Irishman, December 1973. 52. Statistics in “Security Brief ” for visit of minister for foreign affairs, Dr. Garret FitzGerald, to North America, in UCDA, P215/164, 27. 53. Interview with Seán Garland, 29 July 2010. 54. On the Official IRA’s role following the 1972 ceasefire, see Kacper Edward Rekawek, “How ‘Terrorism’ Does Not End: The Case of the Official Irish Republican Army,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1, no. 3 (2008): 365–71. 55. Northern Ireland Office to Ministry of Defence, 23 May 1974, and Home Office to Northern Ireland Office, 26 May 1974, TNA, FCO 87/286. 56. John de Courcy Ireland papers, UCDA, P29/C/10 (b). 57. United Irishman, August 1974. 58. An Eochair, nos. 8, 9 (1974). 59. Bardon, Ulster, 722–23. The antiterrorist legislation was rushed through the House of Commons. See Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre (London, 1991; ppbk ed. 1994), 393–98. 60. Irish Times, 5 December 1974, 9; 19 December 1974, 10; 22 January 1975, 9. 61. “The North: From Civil Rights to Class Politics,” unpublished MS, private collection, in the care of Prof. Eunan O’Halpin, Trinity College Dublin. 62. Henry McDonald and Jack Holland, INLA: Deadly Divisions (Dublin, [1994] 2010), 25–53; Patterson, Politics of Illusion, 164–65; Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 282–300. 63. McDonald and Holland, INLA, 54–86, 102–8. 64. Teoiric: Theoretical Journal of the Republican Movement, no. 4 (1975): 2. 65. McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, entry 1507, 590; Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 315–24. 66. McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, entry 1508, 590. 67. Republican Clubs, Pogrom (Belfast, 1975), 2, 4, foreword.

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68. Thomas Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland 1920–1996 (Dublin, 1997), 213; Bourke, Peace in Ireland, 232; An Eochair, no. 12 (1976): 1. 69. United Irishman, February 1976. 70. Ibid., March 1976. 71. Northern Ireland Office, 4 March 1976 and 1 April 1976, in TNA, FCO 87/551. 72. Interview with former Official IRA prisoner, 4 March 2010. 73. English, Armed Struggle, 190–92. 74. Private information. 75. United Irishman, August 1976. 76. Irish Times, 20 July 1976, 14; 24 July 1976, 11. 77. Irish embassy (Rome) to Anglo Irish Division, Foreign Affairs, 2 August 1976, and letter from Official IRA representative to l’Unità, 27 July 1976, in NAI, DFA 2007/57/2. 78. Patterson, Politics of Illusion, 165; Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 332–34. 79. UK embassy (Dublin) to Foreign Office, 31 January 1977, in TNA, FCO 87/601. 80. McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, entries 1953–56, 731–32. 81. U.K. embassy (Dublin) to Foreign Office, 18 August 1977, in TNA, FCO 87/601. 82. Sinn Féin The Workers’ Party to U.K. embassy (Dublin), 30 August 1977, in TNA, FCO 87/601. 83. Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 402–3. 84. Ibid., 325–30, 336–43, 343–44. 85. Sinn Féin The Workers’ Party, Árd Fheis 1978, Oráid an Uachtaráin, in NLI, Ir 300, p. 63. 86. United Irishman, December 1978. 87. Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 423–27. 88. United Irishman, May 1980. 89. Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 437–38. 90. Patterson, Politics of Illusion, 193–94. 91. For a critical overview of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party, see Jim Smyth, “The Lost Revolution,” History Ireland 18, no. 1 (2010): 56–57. 92. Patterson, Politics of Illusion, 257–58.

CHAPTER 7

M I L LTOW N C E M E T E RY A N D T H E POLITICS OF REMEMBRANCE

Jim Smyth

On 16 March 1988, freelance loyalist operative,1 Michael Stone, lobbed two hand grenades into a throng of mourners gathered at the (Provisional) republican plot in Milltown Cemetery, Belfast. Stone considered himself a soldier, used military terminology, and, at a “professional” or technical level, admired his IRA enemies. As he entered the cemetery an hour or so before launching his attack the spectacle of the IRA funeral so fascinated him that, by his own account, he almost forgot why he was there. “If I was killed on active service,” he afterwards recalled thinking, “I would like to know I would be given all the trappings they were receiving.”2 The grenade explosions were followed by bursts of gunfire from one of Stone’s two semiautomatic pistols. He missed his intended targets, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams and Adams’s senior colleague, Martin McGuinness. But as he retreated, at a startlingly leisurely pace, back down the Bog Meadow towards the MI motorway and—according to plan—a waiting getaway car, he kept up his gun and grenade barrage. 165

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Three unarmed pursuers, including an IRA man, were killed before Stone was captured and beaten by the crowd. Extricated by a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) patrol, Stone was whisked off along the motorway, and into the courts, prison, and militant loyalist legend. He chose the occasion of his attack, one of the largest IRA funerals in the history of the Troubles, and the place, the hallowed ground of Milltown, with great deliberation. Emotions ran high as three IRA volunteers, Danny McCann, Sean Savage, and Mairead Farrell, shot and killed by the Special Air Service (SAS), while unarmed, in Gibraltar ten days earlier, were interred in the republican plot. Stone chose this emotive event and symbolically charged site of mourning as befitting retaliation for the IRA bombing of the Enniskillen War Memorial on Remembrance Sunday in November 1987, a bombing which left eleven civilians dead and dying in the rubble. To the Ulster Protestant, unionist, and loyalist mind, Enniskillen reached far beyond almost routine IRA terrorism into the depravities of desecration. Remembering and honoring their war dead, remembering especially the sacrifice of the 36th Ulster Division at the Battle of the Somme in the “other” 1916, is integral to Ulster Protestant identity. Stone targeted Milltown because it is, he observed, in a most interesting and astute analogy, the republican “Cenotaph.”3 Nothing illustrates more vividly than these two terrible acts of violence, at Enniskillen and Milltown, that the sites, rhetoric, and ritual of memorialization do not merely reflect or represent the conflict, they are part of it. Irish Republicans hold no monopoly on valorizing their fallen. In detail nationally inflected, martial ceremonial transcends national boundaries. So too does its human appeal. In 1979, while viewing on television the funeral of Earl Mountbatten, the most high profile casualty of the IRA’s “Long War,” the author Anthony Cronin, whose Irish Times “Viewpoint” column never hid his republican (though not Provisional Republican) convictions, succumbed, momentarily, to a Stonelike transference of sentiment: As I write the funeral of Lord Mountbatten is being televised. It is elaborate, solemn, beautifully managed and, on a certain level, moving. . . . [A]s I watch I feel that it would require only a little Keatsian suspension of belief, attitude or point of view, a little loss

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of identity, to enter totally into the spirit of this elaborate and elegiac pageantry, to feel lifted and annealed by the strain of the slow march, the Gothic harmonies of Westminster Cathedral [sic], the solemn saluting, the clear and lingering notes of the last post.4 The ritual performance and display enacted at Milltown, the flag-draped coffin, the guard of honor, and, on Easter Sundays, “the clear and lingering notes of the last post,” are familiar in scores of national contexts. But there the ceremonial is also expressive of an intensely local provenance and significance. Milltown is located at the end of the Falls Road, the central artery of the heartland of Catholic West Belfast, whose history is, in Tony Hepburn’s arresting phrase, “a past apart.”5 From the early nineteenth century on, an embattled, resilient, highly self-aware, minority community in Protestant Ulster’s industrial metropolis, Belfast Catholics were always (when not joining the Royal Irish Constabulary [RIC] or enlisting in the British Army) at once “agin’ the government” and, by force of circumstance and geography, set at an angle to the mainstream nationalist movement. Viewed from that standpoint, their main cemetery, Milltown, is a place apart. Milltown, in fact, began as a statement of Catholic apartness. In the 1860s Belfast’s burial grounds, filled to capacity, were deemed unsanitary and a potential threat to public health. To meet the problem the town corporation acquired land off the Falls Road to provide a municipal cemetery on what was then on the outskirts of the city. The new cemetery, due to open in August 1869, would cater to the three major religious denominations, Catholic, Protestant, and dissenter, with three dedicated mortuary chapels and three separate entrances. Crucially, a nine-foot-deep wall was sunk into the soil, dividing the fifteen acres allotted to Catholics from the other sections in order to preserve the integrity of the consecrated ground. That did not, however, satisfy the requirements of the bishop of Down and Connor, Patrick Dorrian. Dorrian demanded that the Catholic Church have absolute control over burials in its section of the new, as it would come to be called, City Cemetery. He could not permit the desecration of consecrated ground by the interment of those—suicides, excommunicates, unbaptized stillborn babies—not in communion with the church at their time of death. He further insisted upon the partial payment of corporation fees to the

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Catholic chaplain and the sole right of employment and dismissal of cemetery workers within the church’s jurisdiction. The corporation refused, and the dispute was then brought before the Judicial Committee of the Irish Privy Council in Dublin, where Bishop Dorrian was represented by the Protestant home ruler and lawyer, Isaac Butt. Tellingly, Dorrian took a more uncompromising line than did his Dublin coreligionists some forty years earlier. Catholic burial rites had been a matter of contention since the Reformation, when churches and churchyards were expropriated by the established Church of Ireland. Catholics continued to be interred in those churchyards, which, although under Church of Ireland jurisdiction, remained consecrated ground. Catholic services were, however, subject to regulation by, and the bereaved liable to the payment of fees to, the established church. Long-festering resentment at this state of affairs finally broke to the surface in Dublin in 1823, just as the campaign for Catholic Emancipation began to gather early momentum, and in November 1824 a committee of the Catholic Association reported that it could find no legal obstacle to Catholics obtaining “parcels of land” for the purpose of laying out a new graveyard. Land was duly purchased near Kilmainham in 1828, and consecrated, as the Goldenbridge Cemetery, on 15 October 1829. Glasnevin followed on 21 February 1832.6 It is instructive in light of Bishop Dorrian’s later behavior that in both cemeteries “all religious denominations were free to inter their dead, and to perform whatever religious ceremonies they wished.”7 Glasnevin even retained an episcopal chaplain on a yearly stipend, charged with officiating at Church of Ireland services. Two reasons perhaps best explain Dorrian’s more intransigent approach. First, the frictional sectarian arithmetic of nineteenth-century Belfast encouraged a defensiveness less evident, with good reason, among Dublin’s majority Catholic population, and second, the prevailing ethos of Cardinal Cullen’s austere, postfamine, Catholic dispensation did not provide for even the small ecumenical amenities of the O’Connell era. Besides, at the time of the dispute over the City Cemetery, Belfast had since 1829—albeit as a gift from the marquis of Donegal—an exclusively Catholic burial ground at the ancient sacred site of Friar’s Bush.8 In November 1869, as a result of the Privy Council finding in favor of

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the corporation, Dorrian opted out of the City Cemetery and opened a new Catholic cemetery (to replace the now closed and overcrowded Friar’s Bush),9 across the road at Milltown. The first body buried there was that of a Catholic priest, Fr. Patrick Clark. Bernard “Barney” Hughes, prominent Catholic businessman and founder of Hughes bakery, attended the Privy Council proceedings.10 From the outset, then, Milltown asserted Belfast Catholic distinctiveness and self-reliance. When Michael Stone called Milltown the republican Cenotaph he equated the republican plots with the Catholic cemetery, a convenient but misleading conflation, perpetrated also by this chapter. Rather, the rich diversity of Milltown’s dead—British Army, First World War–era French sailors and Second World War–era Polish airmen, unmarked paupers and showoff bookmakers, De La Salle brothers and the great politically silent (perhaps politically indifferent) majority, RIC and even four RUC officers—faithfully reflects the less than pristine republican pedigree of Belfast’s Catholic community. For much of its history the predominant political ethos of that community was in fact sectarian, Hibernian, and constitutional nationalist. Early nineteenth-century Belfast Ribbonism, in which the strains of anti-Orange sectarian rancor outdid verbal republicanism, evolved into the Catholic nationalist Ancient Order of Hibernians. Above all that robust tradition is epitomized by “Wee Joe” Devlin, Redmondite MP for West Belfast, who saw off handily a challenge from Eamon de Valera at the polls—one of only a handful of Parliamentary Party candidates who survived the Sinn Féin electoral tsunami of 1918.11 As late as 1970 Conor Cruise O’Brien gives an account in his diary of a visit to the Falls Road after the curfew: “We were shown a house where an old woman lived alone, which was searched in her absence by troops[,] . . . things flung on the floor, nothing broken. Portrait of Joe Devlin on the wall.”12 Devlin’s Milltown grave boasts an imposing headstone. Thus, from the advent of Fenianism in the early 1860s down to the outbreak of the Troubles just over a hundred years later, Republicanism remained a minority, if tenacious and tight-knit, political subculture within the larger minority political subculture of Catholic Belfast. Yet it is precisely the location of the republican plots within such historically resonant precincts, precincts jealously demarcated from the civil

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authority, which distinguishes the plots from other, official, state- and semi-state-sponsored sites of mourning, like the Cenotaph, Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, the French Panthéon, or, for that matter, the Garden of Remembrance and Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. Funerals as political theater recur in Irish republican mobilization from the beginning. The first recorded set-piece republican funerals were organized by the United Irishmen in Dublin in 1797.13 However, the first great funeral as national event, that of Young Irelander, Thomas Bellew McManus, took place, also in Dublin, on 10 November 1861. Around eight thousand mourners marshaled by men on horseback marched military-style behind the cortege; tens of thousands lined the route to Glasnevin. The McManus display offers an exemplary instance of the politics of remembrance in action. The Fenian leader, James Stephens, effectively hijacked management of the proceedings from the Young Ireland veterans of the 1848 rising. More than a propaganda coup, the funeral boosted Fenian recruitment and popular support, putting the dead to work for present political purposes.14 In his oration at the graveside of the Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in 1915, Patrick Pearse, who also anointed Wolfe Tone’s Bodenstown grave “the holiest place in Ireland,”15 enunciated an armed struggle version of the Burkean Trust between the living and the dead: “the fools, the fools, the fools!— They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.” Half a century later Seán South’s funeral in January 1957 once more demonstrated a republican talent for mounting evocative public spectacle. Over thirty years of conflict the Troubles consigned thousands to their graves. There can be no hierarchy of loss or grief, but, in terms of the politics of remembrance, comparatively few of those funerals were high-profile public, or as in the case of that of Bobby Sands, major media, events. In a sense the template for the solemn procession to Milltown was laid down in 1867, two years before the cemetery opened. The funeral of William Harbison, “Head Centre” of the Belfast Fenian Brotherhood, who died of heart failure in Belfast prison, resembled the funeral of Bellew McManus six years earlier. Thousands marched in military formation; many thousands more lined the route to Ballinderry some eight miles or so outside the city. But, in order to avoid the Protestant stronghold of Sandy Row and reach the safety of the Falls Road,

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the route was circuitous.16 This was Belfast, not Dublin. Although not himself buried in Milltown the first of the republican plot-memorials (bombed by loyalists in 1937) is named in honor of William Harbison. Two, at least, of the Troubles-era funerals stand out, those of Joe McCann and of Member of Parliament for Fermanagh, South Tyrone, and hunger striker, Bobby Sands. A daring, charismatic figure, “Big Joe” McCann led the Official IRA’s C company in the Markets area of South Belfast. Also known as “Joe the Fox” for his skill in evading the security forces, his luck ran out on 15 April 1972, when he was gunned down, unarmed, by British Army paratroopers. McCann’s death provoked three days of rioting and gun battles in which three British soldiers were killed. His funeral, his beloved Irish Wolfhound leading the procession, attended by prominent nationalist and republican politicians, constituted a massive show of strength by the Official IRA.17 McCann’s posthumous reputation furnishes an intriguing example of the internecine politics of remembrance. Within weeks of the funeral the Official IRA called a ceasefire, beginning its long fade into Group B of the Workers’ Party and supposed nonexistence.18 As it entered mainstream politics the Workers’ Party had no wish to advertise its paramilitary past, and by 1982 Jim Flynn, assassinated in Dublin by the INLA, and the last Official fatality of the Troubles, was claimed publicly not by the Official IRA but by the British support group, Clann na hÉireann. In contrast to the martial display mounted for McCann, the organization to which both men had belonged, now, according to Brian Hanley and Scott Miller, “held [Flynn] at arm’s length in death.”19 The Provisional IRA offer of a guard of honor for McCann—which was refused—indicates the high esteem in which he was held across the bitter republican divide. In 2010 the Milltown Cemetery–Republican Plots website indulges ancient animosities by referring misleadingly to the Officials as the NLF (National Liberation Front),20 an acronym which nowhere appears on the Official memorial. McCann, however, is exempted from censure. “His relationship with the Dublin leadership,” claim the author(s), “was not a good one. He was much too militant for them.” So, it seems, “Big Joe” was never really a “Stickie” after all.21 In the 1997 plaque unveiled in Joy Street marking the spot where he was killed, the revolutionary socialist Starry Plough flag which appears in the iconic photograph of McCann, on which the plaque is based, is replaced

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Funeral procession for Bobby Sands, Belfast, May 7, 1981. Photo: AP/Peter Kemp. By permission of Associated Press.

by the Irish tricolor. In another plaque, dedicated by former Officials at the corner of the Springfield and Falls Roads in August 2009, the Starry Plough is reclaimed. As in the old Soviet Union, so too in Ireland, the past can be unpredictable 22 McCann’s was the largest funeral seen in West Belfast since at least the 1920s; that of Bobby Sands in 1981 was larger again, an immense spectacle of tens of thousands of mourners, photographed, filmed, and reported by journalists from across the globe. So vast were the numbers, so moving the prospect, the security forces dared not intervene as, en route to the cemetery, a uniformed IRA firing party paid final salute.23 In retrospect it seems clear that the hunger strikes—nine more funerals were to follow—represent perhaps the turning point in the course of the Troubles, the bend in the road, leading, among other things, to the rise of Sinn Féin, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, designed in no small measure to thwart that rise, and the long arduous journey towards the peace process. Is it too much to claim that, in visual terms, that pivotal moment is fixed by the images of those extraordinary scenes recorded at Milltown Cemetery, 7 May 1981?

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Sands’s remains were interred in the Provisional, or “new,” Republican plot. Today Milltown is host to six republican plots in all. The first, the Harbinson Memorial, erected in 1912, has a Celtic cross mounted atop a boxy, four-sectioned plinth. Along with the name of William Harbinson is inscribed a roll call of Belfast’s other “Fenian dead.” Between 1921 and 1944 the site served as the plot for Belfast’s IRA dead, including Lt. Gen. Joe McKelvey, executed by the Free State in 1922. The Antrim Memorial, built with Irish limestone, laid out in cruciform, dedicated in 1966, exemplifies republican appeals to the historical continuity of their struggle. The date of dedication marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rebellion. The roll of honor begins with the County Antrim United Irishman Sam McAllister, and one of the two bronze sculptures which adorn the cross depicts a 1798 pike-man in the ranks of more modernly equipped rebels. The site of the memorial, the Tom Williams plot, is on ground originally purchased and preserved for Williams, an IRA volunteer executed in Belfast prison in 1942. The first republican fatality of the Troubles, a Fianna boy, Gerald McAuley, was also the first to be interred in that plot. McAuley was shot and killed in August 1969 while defending Bombay Street from a loyalist mob, the very street where Williams, himself once a member of the Fianna, grew up. By 1972 as the conflict escalated and the appalling death toll rose remorselessly the burial ground had to close. It is now known as the Old Republican plot. In republican ideology history confers legitimacy. In the words of the 1916 proclamation: In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty: six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State. And that sense, or construction, of unbroken tradition, and indebtedness to the dead, is eloquently affirmed by the Harbinson and County Antrim Memorials. But since the IRA/Sinn Féin splits of 1969 and 1970 republican experience during the recent past, as in 1922–23, is one scarred by lethal divisions. These too are reflected in the intimate

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necro-geography of memorialization in Milltown. There are now four post-1972 plots, Provisional republican, by far the largest, Official republican, a few footsteps away, INLA/IRSP, within view of both, and the Irish People’s Liberation Organisation (IPLO). Each bears witness to the trauma and futility of intra-republican feuding. Alongside the standard epigraph, “Killed in action,” has crept the novel and squalid “Assassinated” (usually by “counter-revolutionaries”). Indeed, on Easter Sunday, 1977, Milltown itself was the scene of internecine strife when Official and Provisional marchers clashed at the gates of the cemetery, sparking the last deadly round of bloodletting between the rival organizations.24 The visual vocabulary of the memorials—Celtic crosses, Cuchulain, engraved flags, the Starry Plough—blends the Christian with the mythological, national, and revolutionary. The INLA/IRSP one even manages to combine the ancient symbol of Irish Christianity, the Celtic cross, with the symbols of contemporary republicanism, the Easter lily, and of late twentieth-century international revolutionary chic, a raised fist clutching an AK47 assault rifle against the background of a red star. Dotted across the cemetery’s gently sloping landscape are numerous headstones embossed with the more traditional Red Hand of Ulster, indicating family plots under the care of the National Graves Association, Belfast. Together with the memorials the individual graves constitute a sort of historical archive, rich in meaning and written in stone. The use of Irish-language inscriptions asserts cultural identity: Fuair siad bás mar mhair siad Ar son Dé agus Thír na hÉireann I bfláitheus Dé go raib a n-anama. (They died as they lived For God and the land of Ireland May their souls be in God’s heaven.) And, for the hunger strikers: Ag láimh Dé go rabh siad (May they rest at God’s hand)

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The punctilious attention to military rank—Volunteer, Staff Officer, Commandant—refuses the language of terrorism and criminality. In 1976 had Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Merlyn Rees toured Milltown, might it have given him pause about the tactical wisdom of abolishing special category/political status for Provisional IRA (and other) prisoners, thereby branding them “criminals”? Probably not. Would acquaintance with this counternarrative to state and media representation have ameliorated Margaret Thatcher’s verdict on the hunger strikers that “there can be no question of political status for someone who is serving a sentence for crime. Crime is crime is crime. It is not political, it is crime”? Certainly not. Although one can well imagine some emollient senior British civil servant picking up the signifiers. The inscriptions are historical texts as well as finely calibrated political statements. Those killed while unarmed, for example, are differentiated from those “killed in action.” Joe McCann is recorded as “murdered by Crown Forces,” the Gibraltar Three as “Executed by the SAS.” One headstone refers to the “Irish Republican Expeditionary Force [to England, 1939]”; grandiloquent as that may seem today, it is nonetheless a reminder of, and provides insight into, the legitimist psychology of Sean Russell’s IRA, which before launching the S-Plan bombing campaign issued a formal ultimatum to the British foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, demanding the withdrawal of British troops from the six counties. Growing up, and then as (an ill-informed) young historian, I was long baffled by the rather tolerant attitude of older Belfast republicans towards the Dublin government. Had they not been abandoned by partition? Then one day, visiting the grave of my maternal grandparents, Peter and Lavinia Burns, I got the beginning of an answer. Peter, a senior figure in the IRA in the 1920s and 1930s, is pointedly styled “Irish Volunteer, 1913–1921,” Lavinia as “pre-truce Cumman naBhan.” Their loyalty to General (as my grandmother insisted on calling him) Michael Collins (IRB), it appears, trumped any sense they might reasonably have held of betrayal, and in that allegiance (as I am now better informed) they reflected the majority stance of northern republicans.25  Margaret Thatcher once observed that Northern Ireland is “as British as Finchley” (her North London parliamentary constituency). Some time after that pronouncement I attended the funeral of my uncle, Peter Burns, an internee in the 1940s. At the graveside in Milltown as the Irish

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tricolor was removed from his coffin, I looked around at his old comrades, including fellow internee and Labour stalwart Paddy Devlin, and thought, “Yes, just like another day in Finchley.”26 Peter was in Crumlin Road prison in 1942 when Tom Williams was hanged and later, according to family lore, wrote the ballad “Tom Williams,” which attained iconic status in Belfast republican tradition. Williams was buried— “within these prison walls”—in an unmarked felon’s grave; in 2000 the National Graves Association, Belfast, successfully lobbied to have his remains exhumed for Christian burial, in the family plot in Milltown. The funeral provided the occasion for one of the bigger, more emotionally charged, commemorative-political demonstrations in the too funeralrich annals of the Falls Road. Williams’s execution, fifty-eight years earlier, became immanent in our own time.27 Along with four others convicted of the killing of an RUC constable, Patrick Murphy, Williams’s cell mate Joe Cahill’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Cahill, a “forties man,” subsequently rose to prominence as chief of staff of the Provisional IRA in the early 1970s, international gunrunner and, in the mid-1990s, influential old-guard supporter of the peace process. In 2000 he carried Williams’s coffin. Cahill is himself, of course, buried in Milltown and, in 2006, there received the unusual tribute of a dedicated memorial plaque. The incident which led to Constable Murphy’s death, Cahill’s arrest, and Williams’s execution was an IRA operation designed to draw off police from enforcing a ban on the annual republican march, up the Falls Road to Milltown, to commemorate the Easter Rebellion. 1916, 1942, 2000, 2006: Generations of Belfast republican history inscribed in stone: Milltown cemetery, lieu de mémoire, site of mourning, place apart. NOTES I wish to thank Jimmy McDermot for bringing me and others on a guided tour of Milltown Cemetery on Saturday, 4 June 2011, and for sharing with us his knowledge, both wide and deep, of that storied place. Readers interested in the broader story of Milltown should look to Tom Hartley’s richly detailed Milltown Cemetery: The History of Belfast Written in Stone (Belfast, 2014).

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1. Stone had connections with both the UDA/UFF and the UVF. My account of his attack in Milltown draws mainly on Martin Dillon, Stone Cold: The True Story of Michael Stone and the Milltown Massacre (London, 1992). 2. Dillon, Stone Cold, 150. 3. Ibid., 141–42, 148. 4. “Pomp and Circumstance,” in Anthony Cronin, An Irish Eye (Bandon, 1985), 92. Mountbatten’s funeral service took place in Westminster Abbey, not (the Catholic) Westminster Cathedral. 5. A. C. Hepburn, A Past Apart: Studies in the History of Catholic Belfast, 1850–1950 (Belfast, 1996). 6. W. J. Fitzpatrick, History of the Dublin Catholic Cemeteries (Dublin, 1900), 8–11, 15–18. 7. Ibid., 15, 21. 8. Eamon Phoenix, Two Acres of Irish History: A Study through Time of Friar’s Bush, 1570–1918 (Belfast, 2001 ed.), 8. 9. Ambrose Macaulay, Patrick Dorrian, Bishop of Down and Connor, 1865–85 (Blackrock, Co. Dublin, 1987), 152–58. 10. Tom Hartley, Written in Stone: The History of Belfast City Cemetery (Belfast, 2006), 61–62. Hughes, however, is buried in Friar’s Bush in one of a handful of family plots which remained open after the rest of the graveyard was closed. Phoenix, Two Acres of Irish History, 9. 11. The authoritative account of Devlin’s career is A. C. Hepburn’s Catholic Belfast and Nationalist Ireland in the Era of Joe Devlin, 1871–1934 (Oxford, 2008). 12. Conor Cruise O’Brien, States of Ireland (New York, 1972), 231. 13. Jim Smyth, The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 1992), 155–56, 162. 14. Oliver P. Rafferty, The Catholic Church and the Protestant State: Nineteenth-Century Irish Realities (Dublin, 2008), 143–44, 155–57; R. V. Comerford, “Conspiring Brotherhoods and Contending Elites, 1857–63,” in W. E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland: v. Ireland under the Union I: 1801–70 (Oxford, 1989), 424–26. 15. Marianne  Elliott, Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence (New Haven, 1989), 416. This accolade would undoubtedly have amused that most cheerful of sinners, Wolfe Tone. 16. Joe Graham, “William Harbinson and the Belfast Fenians, 1867,” Rushlight Magazine (2003), http://joegraham.rushlightmagazine.com/williamharbinson.html. I am grateful to Breandan MacSuibhne for bringing this episode to my attention. 17. John Mulqueen and Jim Smyth, “‘The Che Guevara of the IRA’: The Legend of ‘Big Joe’ McCann,” History Ireland 18, no. 1 (2010): 46–47.

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18. This process is tracked meticulously in Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party (Dublin, 2009). 19. Ibid., 442–44. 20. The proposed National Liberation Front, modeled on the Communist Party, broad left, “popular front” strategy of the 1930s, advocated by the (soon to be) Official republican leadership in 1969 was never attempted in practice. The Provisionals, however, latched onto the term as a means of undermining the “true” republican credentials of their rivals. Hanley and Miller, Lost Revolution, 115–16. 21. “Stickie,” a contraction of stickyback, is slang for Official Republicans, alluding to the adhesive on the back of their Easter lilies. Their Provisional Republican rivals attached their lilies to their lapels with pins. 22. Some time after writing this I passed by the Joy Street plaque and discovered that the Irish tricolor has subsequently been replaced by the historically accurate Starry Plough flag. 23. Denis O’Hearn, Nothing but an Unfinished Song: Bobby Sands, the Irish Hunger Striker Who Ignited a Generation (New York, 2006), 374–76. BBC Northern Ireland estimates the numbers at 70,000, O’Hearn at 100,000. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/northern_ireland/understanding/ events/hunger_strike.stm. 24. Hanley and Miller, Lost Revolution, 378. 25. Jim McDermott, Northern Divisions: The Old IRA and the Belfast Pogroms, 1920–22 (Belfast, 2001), 134, 137–38. 26. In fact, Thatcher did not say that. The actual pronouncement occurred during Prime Minister’s question time in the House of Commons on 10 November 1981. A unionist asked Thatcher to confirm her view as expressed three years before, on a visit to Belfast, that “Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom,” to which Thatcher replied, “as much as my constituency is.” Her biographer Charles Moore comments, “This was altered, in mythology, to claim that Ulster was ‘as British as Finchely.’” Margaret Thatcher, the Authorized Biography: From Grantham to the Falklands (New York, 2013), 618. 27. For the “Authorized Version” of the Williams funeral, see “Tom Williams Comes Home,” An Phoblacht, Republican News, 20 January 2000.

CHAPTER 8

E X P E R I E N C I N G T H E T RO U B L E S

Cathal Goan

Time and distance may bring new perspectives on and understanding of past events. The conference at the University of Notre Dame devoted to the topic “Remembering the Troubles”—Northern Ireland’s thirty years of civil unrest and sectarian strife—seemed ideally positioned; it did offer time and distance. The choice of participants also underscored the ambition to canvass the widest range of perspectives in order to gain fresh insights into cause and effect in this particularly protracted and ugly business. As a visitor to Notre Dame for the semester and as someone who had lived through a significant part of those Troubles in Belfast, I was pleased to attend all the sessions and, in a curious out-of-body experience, to have my own memories and myths laid out alongside other contrasting and contesting ones. In this instance, one might expect that the passage of time would bring a perception of validation or vindication to a particular perspective on events in which one has been a participant or to which one has 179

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been a witness. Rarely—if indeed ever—does it bring the “closure” that is spoken of so frequently when we attempt to distinguish between progress and history and pretend that we have put certain things behind us. Few of us would argue with the desired outcome implicit in the idea of closure; we learn lessons, putting our sins and errors behind us; we forgive those who have wronged us, and humankind moves on never to repeat those sins and errors. Trust in each other is falteringly established; civilization advances. Or so the story goes. Our original sin of doubting our own motives, though, never goes away. If we doubt others, it’s because we doubt ourselves. There is no closure, it seems to me; at best, and with considerable effort, there is critical assessment and reassessment conducted with sufficient humility to recognize differing perspectives and truths, and generosity enough to concede the validity of others’ memories and the fallibility of our own. When I look back at my own teenage years, growing up in Ardoyne in North Belfast, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I know that I witnessed so many acts of violence and that I was too close to death and the dying on such occasions as to make that period of my life quite different from the routine experience of youth in Western Europe and in most of society in North America. That is not to say it would be exceptional in any sense in comparison to the experience of widespread murder and mayhem endured by so many in the Balkans in the 1990s, or to the quotidian experiences of young people living with contested regimes and territories in the Middle East and elsewhere. But living through the rioting, the shooting, the burning, the bombing, the assassinations— often very close to my own home—has left its mark on me in ways that continue to unsettle. It makes me acutely aware of the way we tell our stories, of the interest they arouse and of the manner in which new histories are created from shared tellings and recast myths, from the pooling of re-created memories and the establishment of new “facts.” Jim Smyth has asked me to contribute an essay by way of personal memoir of the period, and I am honored to have been asked and happy to participate—if only to see to what extent I can make sense of a narrative relating to my own experiences and more directly to those of my father.

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In So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell’s narrator observes: What we, or at any rate I, refer to confidently as memory—meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion—is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.1 No doubt a sense of shame and guilt distilled from adolescent memories of events in small-town Illinois in the early 1920s motivates the bleak assessment of the narrator. It sets down a marker for what is to follow here if only to distinguish between my own re-creation of events long gone and an account written within days of their occurrence in 1974 by my father. Our family might have been identified as a typical working-class Catholic family of the period in Northern Ireland. My father, Séamus Goan, was second-generation Belfast; both of his parents hailed from South Donegal. My mother, born Ita Rice, was from the CavanMonaghan area, and she had been drawn to Belfast in search of work in the pre–Second World War period. They had eight children of whom I was the fifth. They had married the year after the war ended, some two years after my father’s release from prison, where he had been interned without trial for almost four years. He had been a member of the IRA in his late teen years, and together with his older brother and several hundred other like-minded individuals he had been arrested after the outbreak of war and spent most of its duration on a prison ship in Strangford Lough or in Crumlin Road Gaol. I don’t recall ever not knowing that my father had been in prison; not that he spoke often or openly about it—in fact he rarely mentioned his incarceration and never went into detail about it. But it was something I always seemed to know about and, at some level or another, something of which I remember feeling quietly proud. I suppose we were and were seen to be a republican family. All the children had Gaelic given names. Although my

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parents did not speak the Irish language (my father had a reasonable knowledge of the language garnered while in prison), all the children were encouraged to learn it. Likewise Gaelic games were supported. My earliest sporting memories are of Casement Park, the GAA Stadium in Andersonstown where most of the Ulster intercounty games were played. When the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising was commemorated in Milltown Cemetery and Casement Park, my father attended. I cannot be certain to what extent he had continued his links to militant republicanism, if it all. Yet again I am reminded now of the questions I should have asked when he was alive. My clearest memory of that year, though, was his deep upset at the murder of Peter Ward, a young barman who was gunned down by the UVF in June 1966, ostensibly for no other reason than that he was Catholic. My father was also a barman, and he knew the Ward family well. I remember seeing him in a different light that Sunday morning when he learned of the killing the previous evening off the Shankill Road. He was not at all his usual collected self. He was angry and distressed and, above all, deeply emotional about the death of this young man whom I did not know. I think of the following few years now as a fuzzy clamor of raised voices and intensified activity in curbside painting and hanging of bunting. As voices were raised in support of civil rights, dire warnings of perdition and the loss of civilization abounded and territorial markings proliferated. When the events of August 1969 spilled into the streets, our district became embroiled in the “Troubles,” and neighboring streets, Brookfield and Hooker, were burned out by loyalist mobs. The memory of that time suggests a sense of defenselessness and certainly a collective view that the IRA—to the extent that it may have existed at all in Ardoyne2 at the time—had done nothing to protect the people of the district. I remember graffiti on gable walls bearing the legend “I Ran Away.”3 Within months of these events, Defence Committees had formed in Catholic areas like Ardoyne, and many of the men who had been interned with my father in the 1940s were grouping to form what emerged as the Provisional IRA early the following year. My older brother has told me of clandestine meetings my father had with people like Jimmy Steele, Joe Cahill, and Séamus Twomey.4 My father didn’t speak to me

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as a fifteen- and sixteen-year-old youth about those meetings, nor did he refer to them in subsequent years, but it seems clear to me that in the course of late 1969 and 1970, whatever strategies were to be adopted by his fellow former internees, he was not going to be part of them. The Troubles brought with them many contesting hierarchies, some of which persist to this day. There are experiences of victimhood and of suffering where the pain of those who have been directly affected by the actions of combatants on all sides will continue to be compared to establish the degree of suffering inflicted or the level of depredation of the perpetrators. Likewise Belfast’s citizens, across the sectarian divide, view their own black or gallows humor as comparable to or superior to the sharpest ironic or caustic wit in any warring corner of the world. Curiously, I also have a memory of an ill-defined ranking in the matter of people’s republican credentials. To the extent that my father was one of the “forties men”—those who had been imprisoned in the 1940s—who had earned their stripes, I believe I subscribed to a view that many of the new crop of republican activists were mere “Celtic” republicans. Celtic is a Scottish Football Association team with a large following all across Ireland. In the deeply sectarian world of Glasgow football loyalty, Celtic, a Catholic team, is set in unflinching rivalry with Rangers, its Protestant counterpart. Those loyalties along sectarian lines are replicated in Ireland. Describing most of the new recruits to the Republican movement as “Celtic” republicans underlined that they were followers of a foreign team, and a sectarian one at that, playing a foreign game. In the hierarchy of imagined Gaeldom, these people were a lesser breed.5 Just as the “forties men” were argued to be unworthy of the republican heritage of the previous generation, it seems this generation of republicans, in turn, were to be viewed as lesser in their idealism or nobility of purpose. As I read again the handwritten account of my father’s ordeal in 1974, I believe I detect some of that disdain in what he writes and just as importantly in how I react to it. My father had changed job from bartending in the late 1960s and had gone to work for Kennedys’ Bakery just off the Falls Road in West Belfast. This bakery subsequently merged with another West Belfast bakery, Hughes’, located on the Springfield Road. As a university student in Dublin, I returned to Belfast for summer vacation work that my father secured for me in Hughes’ Bakery. On the day of the events he

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describes below, I was working for Hughes’ on a bread delivery run outside Belfast. I have left his account as he wrote it in the immediate aftermath of the events of 31 August 1974, with some few silent changes to punctuation. I am writing this in Cloghbolie6 where I have come for a few days’ rest on doctor’s orders after an ordeal which I came through on Saturday 31st August and which I will now relate. On Saturday the 31st August 1974 at approximately 10.05 am, I drew up in my van (i.e. my employer’s van, a Ford Escort which I had driven for the past five years) outside Kennedys’ Bakery Shop on the Glen Road, Belfast, to deliver some cakes. It was not my usual job to deliver cakes, but for the past fortnight I had been relieving the Shops’ manager (Mr. Hugh Donnelly) for his holidays, and on calling at the Glen Road shop on a routine tour I was told by Mrs. O’Kane (manageress) that she could do with some cakes. I thereupon returned to the bakery and to one of our company’s shops at Ardmoulin Avenue where I knew there was a surplus in order to get cakes for the Glen Road shop. My reason for going into all this detail is to illustrate how circumstances and perhaps fate played such a big part in my undesired experience and ordeal because had things been normal at Glen Road I would not have been back there at 10.05, but been further on in my circuit. However, back to my story. As I have said I pulled up outside the shop and immediately I was approached by two young men, late teens or early twenties, and asked for the keys of my van. I brushed them to one side telling them that they were not getting my keys and proceeded to bring the cakes into the shop. On returning to the van the two young men were still there and persisted in demanding the keys. I was adamant in my refusal and they then commenced to threaten me with dire consequences using the fourletter word quite liberally. The tone then changed to “Look Mister, we want your keys and we’ll have to f…ing get them—please Mister give us your f…ing keys, we have a job to do and we’re already

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late.” I replied that I would not surrender my keys willingly to contribute to something that might result in loss of life. They then said that they had a gun and would be forced to use it. “We only want your van to shift something and you’ll get it back in an hour.” I could see they were nervous and excited and a few people had started to gather and so foolishly enough I handed over the keys. The two young men walked away with the keys and I went into the shop and asked Mrs O’Kane to make me a cup of tea. I went to the back of the shop to take the tea and when I came to the front again the van was gone and I didn’t see whether it was one or other of the young men concerned who drove it away. About five minutes later the two young men returned to the shop and stood there. I asked what they wanted now and they replied they were staying with me until the van came back. Since they seemed determined to stay, I told them to come into the back of the shop so as not to interfere with the business of the shop. While inside I pointed out to them the utter stupidity and foolishness of taking a Kennedy van, since due to bigotry, our company was being boycotted in a lot of Protestant areas and that if one of our vans was caught in any “subversive” act, the Unionist politicians and propagandists would make capital out of it, by saying that it was not hi-jacked at all but loaned willingly to the IRA. One of them replied that they were not a sectarian organization, when they needed a van it didn’t matter whose it was. They went on to tell me I was very foolish for refusing the keys and causing a scene and that I could be in trouble for it; since it wasn’t my van why should I worry. I made the point that I was not speaking for myself but for every man who was driving a Hughes or Kennedy van particularly those who had to go through strong UDA and UVF areas to get to their destination and who had been risking their lives daily during the past five years. Already one was a cripple for life through being shot in the head and others had had narrow escapes.

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One replied, “Look Mister do you think we like this? We have a job to do and we have to do it. Don’t think it is you personally; we needed a van and yours was the first to come.” After about twenty minutes two other men, late twenties or early thirties, came rushing into the back of the shop. “Your f…ing driving license and no monkey tricks.” “I haven’t it with me,” I replied. A gun was then produced. The gun was pushed into my neck; “Your f…ing driving license!” and then the one who appeared to be the big shot started searching me. My driving license was in a folder in my top jacket pocket. It was pulled and examined but they didn’t see the license although it should have been obvious despite the papers in the folder. After they had searched through my wallet and other documents in my pockets, the gun was again pushed into my neck. “Where do you live, what’s your name?” I gave my name and said, “I live on the Crumlin Road and . . .” I was about to say I had had more than my share of RUC, Orange and British Army intimidation when “big shot” interjected jeeringly, “And you have a f…ing son in Long Kesh. I don’t want to hear your f…ing sob stories.” I replied with what I had wanted to say originally and added that if they had no respect for men whose sons were in Long Kesh then I could expect little better. Once again the gun was jammed hard into my neck. “Where’s your f…ing driving license?” I then asked were they blind to everything since the driving license was already in their possession in the folder. They then departed with “big shot” warning the two younger to keep me till they got back. I don’t know if the young men were armed; they never produced a gun but I made no effort to escape. I was kind of sorry for them; they seemed to be more scared of the “mad dogs” than I was, but if I had dreamt what was to follow, I would have made a bid for it, armed or not. One of them said, “You shouldn’t have done that. Them fellows would have no hesitation in shooting you.” There was a fairly long silence since I hadn’t much desire to talk to my “gaolers.” Then one of them peered round the door of the

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shop and said to his companion, “Brits.” They then opened the door leading to the backyard and left it open. The next peer out brought the terse words, “Military Police.” I thought at that stage that one of the neighboring shopkeepers had notified either the Army or the RUC and I began to get uneasy. I asked them did they think that if the British Army were withdrawn would the “Fellow Irishmen” that Máire Drumm and David O’Connell talked about when they referred to the UDA and other similar organizations, all become Republicans.7 I remarked it was easy for Máire Drumm in Andersonstown and O’Connell8 in Dublin to talk glibly about fellow Irishmen when they weren’t in danger of being petrol bombed out of their homes or shot dead in a workman’s hut. One of them replied, “We have no love of Orangemen.” I said, “You’re not paying much heed to your leaders in that case, but maybe you are, since it’s only Catholics you intimidate.” “We’re not intimidating anybody.” “That’s right,” I said. “I love handing over vans and having your gun stuck in my neck.” “Look Mister, we have a job to do.” The next minute “big shot” and his companion rushed into the back of the shop. “Come on you, you’re driving this van.” “I’m not driving any van for you.” “You’re driving this f…ing van and don’t be messing us about. Your f…ing wife and children will get it if you don’t.” Once again the gun was stuck in my neck. I said, “Go ahead and shoot. Maybe one life would be better lost than a lot of lives.” “There’ll be no f…ing lives lost if you get on your feet and drive this van. If you don’t, it will be your f…ing wife will get it.” At this point Mrs O’Kane came in from the shop. “Look at the guns,” she said, “How much longer are the people going to put up with this?” “Shut your f…ing mouth.” “Oh and the language of them,” said Mrs O’Kane. At this point I got up off the chair and put my hands on Mrs O’Kane’s shoulders and said, “It’s alright, I’ll drive the van.”

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“Come on,” said “big shot.” “There’s a f…ing bomb in this van and we can’t wait here all day.” I went out between them. They both got into the passenger seat after escorting me to the driver’s seat. We started off down the Glen Road and after I had gone about 100 yards I slowed up and pulled into the side. “What to f… do you think you’re doing?” “I don’t think I’ll do it,” I said. “Get this f…ing van moving,” said “big shot.” “We don’t want any f…ing heroes,” and pulled the lever back in the pistol. I moved off again in second gear, travelling slowly. They probably realized that I was scared stiff and would do anything they told me. “Get a move on and no monkey tricks. Drive as you would drive normally only a bit more careful and don’t draw any attention,” said “big shot.” We came towards the ramps at the foot of the Glen Road. I blessed myself and made an act of contrition, at least I intended to, but I can’t remember. I think I only said a few words of it. We proceeded on down the Falls Road and then the horrible thought struck me. “What if there is a snap Army roadblock and these fellows order me to drive through it? Hobson’s choice. Shot by the British Army for doing it, or shot by the IRA for not doing it. Dear God is this thing behind me liable to go off going over a ramp?” On we went down the Falls Road until we approached the Grosvenor Road. “Turn right down the Grosvenor.” Halfway down the Grosvenor Road, “big shot” got out. His parting words were: “Listen mack, do everything this man (referring to the other fellow) tells you and I mean everything exactly or your f…ing family will get it.” We started off again. “Turn right at Sandy Row,” said my escort. “And down Hope Street, across Great Victoria Street into Bruce Street and on to Bedford Street.” Needless to say I did not get all these instructions at once but as we approached each turning point.

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At the corner of Bruce Street and Bedford Street my captor got out. “Now drive that lot and leave it at the BBC. It will go off at five past one.” By now it must have been 11.50. I started off to drive this lethal cargo on my own and then the real panic started. Now I knew quite well where the BBC was, but my mind was blank and I drove down Bedford Street and turned too early and drove into the NO ENTRY side of Ormeau Avenue and straight into a British Army PIG (Armored Personnel Carrier). I pulled into the side of the road. The driver of the PIG had blown his horn so I blew the horn after I looked back and saw they were stopped. When I pulled into the footpath I was just in front of another car with the driver sitting in it. I got out, ran back and shouted to the soldiers, “There’s a bomb in this van.” I ran towards the car parked in front of me and shouted at the driver. Then I looked across the road. Christ the BBC!—a good thirty yards across a wide street from where the van was parked. “I haven’t done exactly what I was told. What will the repercussions be?” I stood there dazed maybe a couple of seconds till a soldier came and took me by the arm. “Come this way, sir,” he said and brought me to a jeep and put me in the back and drove round a couple of blocks to the back of the BBC. I was then questioned about the size of the bomb. Did I smell anything peculiar? What time was it put aboard? Did I see it being loaded? What time was I told it would go off ? Could I identify the people who did it? Was I held prisoner for long? Some of the questions I was able to answer. To others I gave evasive answers. By this time my right leg had started to tremble uncontrollably. This has been happening the past two years whenever I am close to shooting or hear a bomb go off nearby. It must have something to do with the nerve in my right leg since I got the injections in my back for the sciatica which I had in my back and right leg two years ago last June. I was then taken to another military vehicle where the Bomb Disposal Officer questioned me about the size of the bomb. I told

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him I only got a glimpse through the rear window of the van. He asked me did I think it was 1,000 pounds and I said the van was a 6cwt one, 950cc engine, so I would have noticed a weight like that which I hadn’t. I was brought back again to the rear or side wall of the BBC where there were no windows and told to sit in the jeep. By this time my leg was going full steam even though I leaned hard on it to control it. One of the soldiers noticed it and offered me a cigarette but I prefer my own brand and didn’t take it. A police inspector came along and started to quiz me, name, address, etc. I told him the military had all the details. He then said the RUC detectives would want to see me when the military were finished. A few minutes later a loud hailer announced that there would be a controlled explosion in fifteen seconds, the robot device having been sent. I had noticed the military preparing for this when I was being questioned by the Bomb Disposal Officer. There was a fairly big explosion and then, a matter of seconds afterwards, there was a huge explosion. “Bang goes my little van,” I thought. I could have cried later when I saw it on the television. Boom, and there it was scattered all over the street. I had to wait at the jeep for about ten minutes more, then an officer came and asked me if I wanted to salvage any documents as there were quite a few scattered over the street. The only books that were really important were two containing information relating to the weekly cash takings of the shops. But all I could find was the charred remains of one. This I took home for a souvenir. I later gave it to the Shops manager. I am left with a mental souvenir. While we were searching one of the soldiers picked up a door handle very carefully. This he gave to an RUC man. I was then handed over to the RUC detectives and taken to Donegall Pass Station where I was once again questioned. Name, address, etc. Then, how many men were there? What time did it take place? How long was I held for? Were my captors armed? Could I describe them? What age group were they? I answered all the questions except the one about description of the men. To this

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I gave misleading descriptions. There was only one detective questioning me. Reading this one might wonder why I gave misleading descriptions of the men concerned. Was it through fear of reprisals? I don’t think so. Since August 1969, when I watched RUC men light petrol bombs for Orange hooligans to throw at my home and those of my neighbors, I have had a complete and utter detestation of the RUC. This attitude has been further hardened by evidence which I took down from men who had been tortured both by the RUC Special Branch and the British Army. I have campaigned for the removal of the RUC as a police force and so I could never co-operate with them. I was permitted to make phone calls one of which I made to my good friend and neighbor W. E. Trainor and the other to the company to let them know I was alright. I was left alone while making the calls. And I am quite sure they were listened to, not that it makes any difference. The detective then asked me did I want left home or where could he leave me. I asked him to leave me to the shop where my wife, Ita, was working. I had already arranged for Mr Trainor to pick me up there. Just as we were leaving, three more detectives arrived and they went upstairs with the one who had been questioning me. After a few minutes I was called upstairs and these three started to question me again. I said I had had a rough experience and answered all these questions two or three times. They used the usual old tactics. “If you describe these men and look at some photographs we have, you might possibly identify them, and then we could and would proceed in a manner that would not implicate you at all. You know if you help us, you might save some other man from going through the same experience as you. You’re lucky. You’re alive. The next bomb might go off when some poor innocent fellow is driving it.” They had a point there! But however much I detest this new low to which the IRA have sunk, I could never ever bring myself to

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putting anyone into the clutches of the RUC or British Army. They asked me again to look at the photographs. I refused to do so. They then asked me if I changed my mind after a day or so would I contact them then. This I have not done, so I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they come looking for me one of these days. The first detective then took me to see Ita. Mr Trainor was waiting at the shop. Poor Ita got a hell of a shock. Mr Trainor then agreed to take me to the Trench Park shop. I had wages for one of the staff in my pocket. We then called to the Glen Road shop to see Mrs O’Kane. She was delighted to see me. A very brave woman and like many more of her courageous type, she’s being asked to suffer too much; already her own husband has had two cars hi-jacked, though that was before this new cowardly satanic idea of the “proxy” bomb was conceived. I felt really upset and worried over the weekend. I couldn’t get out of my mind that I had left the bomb in the wrong place. People who force men to do what I had to do would hardly understand the panic that caused me to disobey their orders. They still had my driving license and I kept worrying would anything happen to any members of my family who would be known to the local unit of the IRA and identified by them for the people who would consider me to have failed them. However, I went to work on Monday morning but could not concentrate on anything and so I came home at lunchtime. I went to the doctor on Tuesday morning. He gave me some tablets for my nerves, told me to take two weeks off work and to get away some place for a rest. That is why I am here. Now, the reason I am writing this. Reverend Father Ailbe CP, a good and dear friend of my family, had agreed to drive me here and on Wednesday morning as we were preparing to leave a letter was pushed through the letterbox. Fr. Ailbe picked it up, looked up at me and raised his eyebrows and handed me the letter. I could hardly believe my eyes. On the back of the envelope for name and address of sender, it said Irish Republican Army. I felt the envelope and thought it felt like my license folder, which it was, and inside the folder was a roughly torn piece

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of paper with the words “Do what you are told next time” printed on it. This letter had come through the post. Now I don’t think there’ll be a next time and so I am writing this story so that if anything should happen that some “mad dog” purporting to be fighting for Irish freedom should take my life, then I would like my wife to give this to an Irish newspaper to be published in the hope (1) the leaders of the IRA might realize the terror and torture that Irish people are being subjected to in the name of Irish freedom and call a halt to this insane policy. (2) That young men, no matter how much they are motivated by patriotism—I use the word reservedly, thinking of the famous Samuel Johnston [sic] quotation “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels”—no matter how much they are motivated by patriotism or hatred or detestation of the British Army and RUC, or whatever reason, will think twice and think again before they commit themselves to any group or organization which can, through desperation, become controlled by “mad dogs” for fear they in turn might become “mad dogs” dedicated only to the success of their immediate objective, however evil it might be, rather than contributing to the greater good of their country and its people. If there be such a thing as patriotism it must surely be love of one’s country, not hatred of her enemies. From love can come greatness, from hatred nothing but evil. It is my intention to place this in a sealed envelope and lodge it for safekeeping in the National Bank in Ballyshannon. I didn’t know of the existence of this account until early 2001, some months after my father died at the age of seventy-eight. In the intervening time, he and my mother had experienced varying fortunes, like so many others. Looking back now, I can see that he most likely suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Whatever medication had been prescribed left him unfit for work in the succeeding months. Ciarán Murphy, the seventeen-year-old younger brother of my close friend Pat, was murdered by a loyalist gang some six weeks after this ordeal.9 My father couldn’t face the funeral and went back to Donegal for a further period. In the immediate aftermath, he was also taken in for questioning by the RUC and British Army on a number of occasions. I believe,

194

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in addition, that he carried the conviction that the Provisional IRA would shoot him for his failure to do as ordered. Within a year, he finished working with the bakery and worked at a succession of jobs for another five years before he and my mother settled full-time in Cloghbolie. He flourished in that transition and visited Belfast only infrequently in the following twenty years. When I read the account of that day, I am struck by his command of structure in the narrative,10 by the dry wit in his observations, by his concern for his wife and family, by his sense of duty to his employers, and by a pervasive sense of fear and betrayal. There are other strands of less worthy attitude to be discerned. The tribal bigotry at the heart of this thirty years of uncivil commotion is evident, although I am sure that he—just like me—would disavow any notion of such intolerance. I am reminded of an advertising campaign many years ago, sponsored by the Irish government, to promote the Irish language. The slogan for the campaign was, “It’s part of what we are.” I wonder, is bigotry part of what we all are in Northern Ireland and to what extent has this changed or is this changing? I remember the Saturday afternoon in 1974 when we arrived back in the bakery yard at Hughes’ after our deliveries outside Belfast. I must have known that a bomb had gone off in the environs of the BBC. Perhaps I had heard the blasts or become aware through a radio news bulletin. In any event, a colleague and friend of my father’s, Jack Magee,11 took me aside to tell me that there had been an explosion. I remember feeling impatient as to why he was telling me this but how my attitude changed to one of complete chagrin as I learned of my father’s involvement. At this distance, I like to imagine that I felt fury that the Provos could do this to my father for all the reasons I have mentioned previously. But I don’t trust this memory of imagined fury. I don’t have any confidence in what I remember of what I, as a twenty-year-old, thought of as legitimate targets or justifiable violence in 1974. From atrocity to atrocity and from year to year, my attitudes—insofar as I can re-create them—seemed to shift, but I do know that I was ambivalent about so much of what was going on at that particular time and that endless and heated exchanges in rationalizing or rejecting violence were a part of daily discourse. Now, almost forty years later, I ask myself, what was it

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all for, what was it all actually about? It was such a vicious and vengeful time. Whatever about root causes, systemic evils, and historic gains, too many people suffered for us to let go of the current fragile “parity of esteem” or to contemplate returning to the absence of hope of those dark days. Perhaps, attempting to remember the Troubles openly will help us lessen the chances of their return. NOTES 1. William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow (New York, 1980), 27. 2. For an introduction to this district of Belfast and the effects of the Troubles on it, see P. Lundy and M. McGovern, Ardoyne: The Untold Story (Belfast, 2002). 3. My memory is contradicted by historical research on the period in question; see Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party (Dublin, 2009), 136. 4. Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (London, 2002), 38–73. 5. Hanley and Millar, Lost Revolution, 153. 6. A small townland three miles north of Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal. This was his own father’s homeplace, and it had been willed to him in 1972. 7. I believe this observation serves to underline the conviction held by my father and many others in isolated nationalist areas that they were under siege from loyalist paramilitaries, unlike comparatively safer areas in West Belfast. My father knew Máire Drumm and her husband, Jimmy, well. Máire Drumm was then prominent in Provisonal Sinn Féin. His observation in this particular case, though, jars with history. In October 1976 she was shot dead by loyalist gunmen while a patient in the Mater Hospital, Belfast. 8. Dáithí Ó Conaill, a Provisional IRA leader, based in Dublin. I imagine my father’s use of the Anglicized version of his name was calculated. 9. Lundy and McGovern, Ardoyne, 218–22. 10. My father had left school without formal qualification, as was the general pattern of the time. He was always an avid reader. I seem to remember around this period that his favorite genre of novels was westerns and his favorite author, Zane Grey. 11. Jack Magee wrote a fine history of the founder of Hughes’ Bakery: Barney: Bernard Hughes of Belfast 1808–1878 (Belfast, 2001). The bakery finally closed in 1979, by which time Jack had moved on to lecturing in marketing at a Belfast college. He subsequently emigrated to Australia.

Contributors

Aaron Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Defence and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is the author or editor of several books, including Transforming the Peace Process in Northern Ireland: From Terrorism to Democratic Politics  (with Stephen Bloomer, Irish Academic Press, 2008), A History of the Northern Ireland Labour Party: Democratic Socialism and Sectarianism (Manchester University Press, 2009), Defending the Realm? The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars since 1945 (Manchester University Press, 2012), Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the End of Empire (Transworld Books, 2014), and War: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld Publications, 2016). His book UVF: Behind the Mask will be published by Merrion Press in 2017.

Cathal Goan was founding Ceannasaí (chief executive) of the Irishlanguage television service Teilifís na Gaeilge and subsequently director general of RTÉ, the national public service broadcaster of Ireland. He has been a visiting fellow in the Keough Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame and is an adjunct professor in the School of Irish, Celtic Studies, Irish Folklore and Linguistics at University College, Dublin. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ulster in 2006. 196

Contributors

197

James W. McAuley is Professor of Irish Studies and Associate Dean

at the University of Huddersfield. His research on Northern Ireland focuses on Unionism and Loyalism. His recent publications include Very British Rebels? The Culture and Politics of Ulster Loyalism; Ulster’s Last Stand; The Democratic Unionist Party: From Protest to Power (with Jonathan Tonge, Maire Braniff, Thomas Hennesey, and Sophie Whiting); and  Abandoning Historical Conflict: Former Political Prisoners and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (with Peter Shirlow, Jonathan Tonge, and Catherine McGlynn), which received the Political Studies Association of Ireland Book of the Year award in 2011. He is co-convenor of the Political Studies Association Specialist Group on Britishness.

Ian McBride is Foster Professor of Irish History in the University of Oxford and former Visiting Fellow in the Keough Naughton Institute, University of Notre Dame. He is the author of The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology (1997) and Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (2009) and the editor of History and Memory in Modern Ireland (2001). McBride is currently writing a book on “dealing with the past” in Northern Ireland. John Mulqueen holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin, where

he has taught contemporary history. He is a tutor in history at Dublin City University and has written for the Dublin Review of Books, History Ireland, and Intelligence and National Security. He is currently preparing a study of Irish Republicanism and the Cold War.

Margaret O’Callaghan is Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s University, Belfast, and has previously taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Notre Dame. She is the author of numerous works on aspects of British high politics and the state apparatus in relation to nationalist and unionist political formations in Ireland from the late nineteenth century to the revolution. She coedited (with Mary E. Daly) 1916 in 1966: Commemorating the Easter Rising (Royal Irish Academy, 2007). Her current research focuses on Irish political thought, propaganda wars in the Irish public sphere, and the politics of Irish literature.

198

Contributors

Ruan O’Donnell is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Limerick. A former visiting fellow in the Keough Naughton Institute, University of Notre Dame, he is the author of numerous publications on the history of Irish Republicanism, including the two-volume Special Category: The IRA in English Prisons. He is a member of the all-Ireland Universities Ireland Decade of Centenaries Committee.

Jim Smyth is Professor of Irish and British History at the University of Notre Dame and has been a visiting fellow at the Folger Institute, Washington, DC. His books include The Men of No Property, Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in Ireland in the Late Eighteenth Century, The Making of the United Kingdom, 1660–1800, and Cold War Culture: Intellectuals, the Media and the Practice of History.

Index

abstentionism, policy of refusing legislative seats, 48–50, 62, 124, 126, 130, 145–46 Adams, Dominic, republican prisoner, memoirist, 63 Adams, Gerry, president, Sinn Féin, 49, 59, 61–63, 67–68, 86–87, 165 Before the Dawn, autobiography, 68 The Politics of Irish Freedom, 63 poor memory of, 143–44 Ahern, Bertie, Taoiseach, 136 Aldershot bombing, 147 amnesia official, 88 politically constructed, 96–97 Ancient Order of Hibernians, 9, 169 Anglo-Irish Agreement, 170 An Phoblacht, 10, 54–55, 60, 62, 134 Ardoyne, north Belfast, 23–24, 87, 180, 182 Ardoyne: The Untold Truth, 36 Commemoration Project, 20, 31, 36

Arlington Cemetery, 170 Armagh city, 32, 34, 58, 85 county, 20, 60, 65, 126 women’s prison, 12 Barry, Tom, IRA, chief of staff, 150, 159 Bateson, Larry, republican activist, 48 BBC Northern Ireland, 28, 189–90, 194 Beal na Blath, site of the killing of Michael Collins, 66 Belfast, 10, 18, 20, 23, 29, 33, 50, 52, 57, 59–60, 63, 67, 100, 146, 150, 152–53, 156, 175–76, 181, 194 East Belfast Cultural and Historical Society, 102 history of sectarian conflict, 16, 47, 49, 167, 169–71 West Belfast, 14, 16, 49, 68, 87, 124, 126, 136, 143, 157, 167, 169, 172, 183 199

200

Index

Bentley, Michael, historian, 2 Berry, Peter, senior civil servant, 144 Biener, Guy, historian, 5 Birmingham bombing, 151 Bishop, Patrick, journalist, 46 Bloody Sunday, 5, 11–12, 30, 54, 86–88, 119, 147–48 Bloomfield, Sir Kenneth, mandarin, victims commissioner, 1, 22, 27–28, 36, 119 Bodenstown, grave site of Wolfe Tone, 65–66, 103, 145, 170 Bombay Street, burned out by loyalist mob, August 1969, 49 border, 10, 27, 36, 65, 78, 127, 134 Border Campaign (“Operation Harvest,” 1956–62), 46, 50, 52, 143, 146–47 Boston College tapes, 61, 68–69 Boyce, George, historian, 2 Bowyer Bell, J., historian, 64 Boyle, Kevin, legal scholar, human rights advocate, 78 Boyne, Battle of the, 101 Bradley, Denis. See Eames-Bradley Consultative Group Bradley, Gerard, IRA memoirist, 60–61 British Army, 10–11, 17, 23, 29, 31, 49–50, 55, 57, 67, 77–91, 108, 129, 143, 146–47, 167, 186–89, 191–93 Operation Banner, 6–7, 15, 77–78, 81–82, 84–85 Brooklyn Five, gunrunners, 63 Brown, Kris, sociologist, 79 B Specials, 54, 102 Burns, Lavinia, Cumman na Bhan, 176

Burns, Peter, IRB, 175 Burntollet, People’s Democracy marchers attacked by loyalists, 47 Burton, Frank, sociologist, 23 Butt, Isaac, home ruler, lawyer, 168 Byrne, Gerard, printer, 56 Cahill, Joe, IRA veteran, 17, 63, 66, 176, 182 Cameron, David, British prime minister, 30 Campbell, Sheena, Sinn Féin organizer, killed by loyalists, 63 The Captive Voice, 62 Carson, Sir Edward, unionist icon, 107, 109 Casey, Donal, printer, 56 ceasefires of 1994 and 1997, 13, 17, 62, 58, 83, 160 Official IRA, 1972, 51, 59, 143, 148, 152, 171 Provisional IRA, 1974–76, 59, 127, 129, 133, 153–54 Celtic, Glasgow, football team, 183 Cenotaph, 159–70 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 65 Civil Rights movement, 11, 47–49, 130, 145, 147, 150, 152, 182 Clann na hÉireann, 53, 151–52, 171 Clarke, Kathleen, widow of Thomas, opponent of Anglo-Irish Treaty, 66 Clarke, Thomas, Fenian, 66 Cold War, 59, 144, 158

Index Collins, Eamon, IRA volunteer turned state witness, author of Killing Rage (1997), shot dead, 60 Collins, Michael, General, IRB, 175 collusion, usually between British security forces and Loyalist paramilitaries, 6, 12, 20–21, 28–29, 78, 119, 153 communism, 54, 58, 143–45, 150–53, 156, 159 Connerton, Paul, social anthropologist, 98–99 Connolly, James, revolutionary socialist, 50, 55, 130, 132, 143–45 Connolly Association, 58 Conway, Maurice, Sinn Féin, 132 Coogan, Tim Pat, historian and journalist, 64 Cooney, Patrick, minister for justice, 134 Costello, Seamus, founder of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), 50, 126, 131, 135, 152, 157 counterinsurgency, 85–86, 89 Crawford, Paul, Official republican, 131 Cromwell, Oliver, 101 Cronin, Anthony, poet, critic, columnist, 166 Cronin, Sean, historian, journalist, IRA chief of staff, 46–47 cultural capital, 128 cultural politics, 175 culture wars, Northern Ireland-style, 105, 107 Cumman naBhan, 175

201

Daly, Fr. Edward, 11 Darby, John, political scientist, 97 Dawson, Graham, historian, 79–80, 88 Deane, Barbara, bomb blast casualty, 33 Decade of Centenaries, 6, 120–21 decommissioning, of guns and explosives, 26, 67 Defenders, 44 Democratic Left, 67 Derry, 13, 18, 30, 47, 50, 54–55, 57, 59, 87, 100, 147 county, 10, 48 history of sectarian conflict, 16 siege, 5, 9, 102 De Valera, Eamon, Taoiseach, president, 122–23, 169 Devine, Michael, INLA, hunger striker, 13 Devlin, Joseph “Wee Joe,” Redmondite MP, 169 Devlin, Paddy, SDLP politician, 1940s internee, 176 Devlin/McAliskey, Bernadette, MP, left-wing activist, 57 Dillon, Martin, author, 64 dirty war, 12, 33 Donaghy, Tommy, IRA Volunteer, 10 Donaldson, Geoffrey, DUP MP, 14 Dorian, Patrick, bishop of Down and Conor, 167–69 Drumcree, 10 Drumm, Máire, vice-president, Sinn Féin, 11, 187 Dublin-Monaghan bombings, 6 Duddy, Jackie, killed on Bloody Sunday, 11

202

Index

Dunne, Tom, historian, 2 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), 12, 25–27, 107 Eames-Bradley Consultative Group, on dealing with the past in Northern Ireland, 29, 118 Easter lilies, 52–53, 66–67, 174. See also Stickies Easter Rising, 1916, 10, 115–16, 127–36, 144, 146, 167, 173–74, 176 Edentubber, fatal explosion, 1957, 65 Edkins, Jenny, professor of international politics, 81, 117, 120 Eire Nua, 55–56, 58 Elliman, Robert, Official republican, 153, 158 Enniskillen bombing, 166 European Court of Human Rights, 86, 177 European Economic Community (EEC), 56, 122, 152 European Union, (EU), 119 Ewart-Biggs, Christopher, British Ambassador to Ireland, killed, 136 Falls Road, West Belfast, 16, 126, 167, 170, 172, 176, 183, 188 curfew, 57, 86, 143, 146, 169 Families Acting for Innocent Relatives (FAIR), 17, 30 Fanon, Franz, anti-colonialist theoretician, 129 Farrell, Mairéad, prison “blanket protestor,” IRA volunteer, killed by SAS, 30, 166

Faul, Fr. Denis, peace and justice campaigner, 58 Faulkner, Brian, prime minister, Northern Ireland, 10 Feeney, Brian, SDLP politician, historian, opinion columnist, 60 Fenian Brotherhood, and “Fenian Dead,” 11, 61, 65–66, 169–70, 173 Fennell, Desmond, writer, 55 Ferris, Martin, Sinn Féin TD, 63 Festival of Anti-Imperialist Struggle, 151, 155 Fianna Éireann, 156, 173 Fianna Fail, 69, 122–23, 127 Fifty Dead Men Walking, 60 Finucane, Pat, solicitor, victim of collusion, 6, 119 Pat Finucane Centre, 31, 84 Fitt, Gerry, Baron Fitt of Bells Hill, 124 Five Techniques, euphemism for torture, 86 Flynn, Jim, Group B, 171 folklore, 5, 84, 108 forgetting, 4, 96–97, 102–3, 126, 142–43, 159 Foster, Trevor, bombing victim, 20 Fox, Sean, Official republican, 131 Freedom of Information Act, 84 Garda Síochána, 56, 119, 132, 134, 145 Garden of Remembrance, 170 Garland, Sean, architect of Official republican project, 130–31, 145, 158–59 Gaughan, Michael, hunger striker, 63, 66

Index Gibney, Jim, Sinn Féin, 62 Gilchrist, Andrew, British Ambassador to Ireland, 145 Gilmore, Eamon, Taniste, 67 Glasnevin Cemetery, 66, 132, 168, 170 Goan, Seamus, 1940s internee, 181 Good Friday Agreement, 5, 13, 24–27, 29, 34, 61, 63, 67, 69, 110, 143 Goulding, Cathal, chief of staff, IRA/Official IRA, 47, 50–52, 65, 123, 144–50, 155 Graff-MacRae, Rebecca, political scientist, 120 Graham, Brian, geographer, 80, 82 Group B, 52, 156, 171 Guelke, Adrian, political scientist, 143 Hadden, Tom, legal scholar, human rights advocate, 78 Hain, Peter, secretary of state for Northern Ireland, 118 Halbachs, Maurice, pioneering historian of collective memory, 97 Hall, Stuart, cultural theorist, 103 Hanley, Brian, historian, 171 Harbison, William, Fenian, 170–71, 173 Harrison, George, gunrunner, 64 Hartley, Tom, Sinn Féin, 62 Harvey, Nick, armed forces minister, 91 H-Blocks, 14, 21, 62, 66, 142, 155, 159 Healing Through Remembering project, 29–32, 118

203

Heath, Edward “Ted,” prime minister, 148 Hepburn, Tony, historian, 167 Heron, Hugh, Official IRA, 50 Hewitt, John, poet, 110–111 Historical Enquires Team (HET), 6, 46, 119 Howell, Ted, Sinn Féin strategist, 62 Hughes, Bernard, “Barney,” baker, 169 Hughes, Brendan “Darkie,” Provisional IRA officer, hunger striker, 61, 118 Hume, John, leader of the SDLP, 22 hunger strikes, 13, 62, 66, 118, 142, 150, 158–59, 171–72, 174–75 Ignatieff, Michael, public intellectual, liberal supporter of Iraq war, 90–91 imagined community, 101, 104, 110 internment, 5, 54, 63, 86–87, 148, 175–76, 181–83 Irish Citizen Army, 52, 134 Irish Democratic Youth Movement, 156 Irish Democrat, 58 Irish Industrial Revolution, 157 Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), 13, 27, 135, 171, 174 Irish Republican Army (IRA) Official, 11, 47, 50, 52–53, 67, 116, 128, 130–31, 135, 142–60, 171 pre-split (1969), 11, 16, 46–49, 51, 53, 57, 63, 123, 143–47, 150, 159, 173, 175–76, 181–82 Provisional, 6, 11, 13, 15–17, 20–23, 25–27, 30, 32–34, 36,

204

Index

Irish Republican Army (IRA) (cont.) 44–69, 80–81, 85, 87, 116, 118, 122, 127–29, 131, 133–34, 136, 144, 146–47, 151, 153–56, 158, 160, 165–66, 171–72, 175–76, 182, 185, 188, 191–94 Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), 51–52, 55, 115, 175 Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), 59, 103, 131–32, 135, 152, 157, 174 Jones, Martha, Black Studies, 96 Keegan, Sir John, military historian, 87 Keenan, Brian, army council, IRA, 50, 63 Kelly, Eileen, six-year old victim of IRA feud, 153, 158 Kelly, Gerry, IRA, prison escapee, Sinn Féin MLA, 61 Kelly, Liam, Saor Ulah, 50 Kenny, Enda, Taoiseach, 67 KGB, 143 Kinsella, Sean, IRA “lifer” in English prisons, 61 The Last Post, 67 Lemass, Sean, Taoiseach, 122 Libya, 57, 62, 64 Lieux de mémoire, 4, 12, 176 Long Kesh, aka the Maze prison, 12–14, 59, 62, 144, 151, 153–55, 186. See also H-Blocks Long War, 6, 21, 44, 47, 54, 59, 61, 66, 68, 166 Lost Lives, 32

The Lost Revolution, 143 Loyalists, 6–7, 10, 12–14, 16, 20–21, 28, 31, 33, 35, 48–49, 78, 80, 82, 89, 91, 96–111, 117–19, 125, 129, 131, 154, 165–6, 171, 173, 182, 193 MacBride, Oistin, photographer, 63 MacDonagh, Bernie, Republican Clubs councillor, 156–57 MacDonagh, Oliver, historian, 1, 137 MacDonagh, Steve, publisher, 63 MacEntee, Sean, safe finance minister, 127 MacEoin, Uinseann, mountaineer, defender of built Georgian heritage, historian, 1940s internee, 46 Mac Giolla, Tomás, president Sinn Féin/Official Sinn Féin/Sinn Féin the Workers Party/The Workers Party, TD, 47, 65, 123, 135, 145, 148, 151, 153, 155–56, 158 MacManus, Terence Bellew, Young Irelander, 170 MacStiofain, Sean, first Provisional IRA chief of staff, 47, 49, 51, 54–55 MacSwiney, Terence, lord mayor of Cork, hunger striker, 66 Magee, Gerard, author of Tyrone’s Struggle, 67 Maguire, Commandant-General Tom, anti-Treaty TD, 130–31 Mallie, Eamonn, journalist, 46 Marks, Colin, IRA volunteer, 13

Index Maskey, Alex, Sinn Féin, Belfast Lord Mayor, MLA, 63 Maskey, Sean, IRA, prison memoirist, 63 Maxwell, William, novelist, 181 Maze prison. See Long Kesh McAliskey. See Devlin/McAliskey, Bernadette McAllister, Brendan, victims commissioner, 27 McAteer, Aidan, Sinn Féin strategist, 62 McAteer, Eddie, Nationalist Party leader, 123–24 McAuley, Gerard, Fianna Eireann, first republican fatality of the Troubles, 173 McAuley, Richard, Sinn Féin strategist, 62 McBride, Ian, historian, 4–5, 7, 142 McBride, Patricia, victims commissioner, 27 McCann, Danny, IRA volunteer, 166 McCann, Joe, iconic figure, Official IRA, 11, 67–68, 147–48, 171, 175 McDougal, Bertha, victims commissioner, 27 McDowell, Sara, human geographer, 79–81 McEvoy, Kieran, legal scholar, 90 McGarry, John, political scientist, 14 McGartland, Martin, IRA autobiographer, 60 McGeough, Gerry, IRA volunteer, 46 McGlennan, Charles, abstentionist MP South Armagh, 126

205

McGuigan, Jim, cultural theorist, 103 McGuinness, Martin, Sinn Féin, deputy first minister, Northern Ireland, 10, 50, 165 McGuire/Gatland, Maria, Provisional IRA, Tory councillor, Croydon, 60 McGurran, Malachy, Republican Clubs, 131 McKeague, John, Loyalist, 16 McKee, Billy, IRA veteran, 1940s internee, 17 McKelvey, Joe, briefly IRA chief of staff, executed extra-legally by the Free State, 173 McLaughlan, Ray, prison memoirist, 61 McMillan, Liam “Billy,” OC Belfast Brigade, Official IRA, 126, 131, 135 McMillan, Margaret, historian, 89 McVeigh, Jim, IRA, prisoner, biographer, 63 Meehan, Martin og, IRA prisoner, biographer, 63 Mellows, Liam, executed extralegally by the Free State, 144 memory collective, 11, 90, 97–110 corporate, 84 cultural, 105, 108 institutional, 95 official, 81, 88 memory work, 10, 118 MI5, 33, 60 Miller, Scott, journalist, historian, 171 Milltown cemetery, 53, 128, 130–32, 165–76, 182

206

Index

Ministry of Defence, 81 Molloy, Francie, Sinn Féin politician, 10 Molloy, Tobias, Fianna Eireann, 10 Moloney, Ed, journalist, 61, 64 Monaghan, Jim, Colombia Jail Journal, 54, 61 Moody, T. W., historian, 2–4 Moore, F. Frankford, journalist, author of The Truth about Ulster, 16 Morrison, Danny, Sinn Féin, 22, 61–62 Mountbatten, Louis, First Earl Mountbatten of Burma, 166 Mullen, John Pat, Official IRA, 5 murals, 4–5, 13, 99–102 Murphy, Conor, minister for regional development, 26 Murphy, Patrick, RUC, 171 Murray, Fr. Raymond, justice campaigner and local historian, 58 myths and mythology, 1–6, 83, 89, 91, 97, 102, 106, 110, 179–80 Nagle, John, anthropologist, 79, 86 Nally, Lillian, Fenian heritage of, 66 Nally, P. W., Fenian martyr, 66 Namier, Sir Lewis, historian, 3 Narrow Water ambush, 81–82, 91 National Graves Association (NGA), 10, 53, 56, 174, 176 National Memorial Arboretum, 81 Nesbitt, Mike, Ulster Unionist politician, 27, 107 Nic Giolla Easpaig, Aine and Eibhlin, prison memoirists, 61 Noonan, John, prison memoirist, 63 Nora, Pierre, historian, 4, 99

Northern Aid (NORAID), 53, 56 Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), 48, 150 Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP), 125 Novick, Peter, historian, 100 O’Bradaigh, Ruairi, president Provisional Sinn Féin, 49, 51, 63, 129, 132–35 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, fount of revisionist polemic, 121–23, 127, 134, 169 O’Brien, Richard, writer, 64 O’Callaghan, Sean, informer, 60–61 O’Coinnigh, Sean, Official Sinn Féin, 131 O’Conaill, Dáithí, Army Council, Provisional IRA, 49, 65, 132–35, 187 O’Connell, Emmett, businessman, 55 O’Danachair, Gerry, author of Provos, Patriots or Terrorists?, 57 O’Day, Alan, historian, 2 O’Doherty, Eamonn, IRA, author, 64 O’Doherty, Malachi, journalist, 11 O’Doherty, Shane Paul, IRA, memoirist, 60 O’Donovan Rossa, Jerimiah, Fenian, 61–62, 170 O’Duill, Fr. Piaras, Provisonal republican publicist, 58 Offences Against the State Act, 45, 133 Óglaigh na hÉireann, 44–45, 52, 57, 69n1 O’Hara, Patsy, INLA hunger striker, 13

Index O’Leary, Brendan, political scientist, 14, 24 O’Leary, Martin, Official IRA, 147 Omagh, bomb and inquiry, 6, 12, 21, 29 O’Mahony, John, Young Irelander, 66 O’Malley-Daly, Anthony, Provisional Sinn Féin, 131 O’Neill, Captain Terence, prime minister of Northern Ireland, 10, 124–26, 136 O’Neill, P., fictitious official spokesperson for Provisional IRA, 45 Operation Banner. See under British Army Operation Harvest. See Border Campaign Orange Order, 9–10, 16, 29, 52, 99–109 O’Rawe, Richard, IRA, prison memoirist, 61 O’Sullivan, P. Michael, photojournalist, 56–57, 63 Outdoor Relief riots, Belfast, 10–30 Paisley, Rev. Ian, founder of DUP, first minister, 12, 124–26 Paisleyites, 16 Pantheon, Paris, 170 Parades Commission, 5, 14 partition, 21, 25, 45, 47–49, 64, 121, 123–44, 126, 147, 152, 175 Paterson, Owen, secretary of state, Northern Ireland, 6 peace process, 24–26, 30, 69, 117–18, 136, 172, 176 People’s Democracy, 48, 128

207

Pinkerton, Patrick, international studies scholar, 117, 119 Plant, George, IRA, executed 1942, 66 Pocock, J. G. A., historian, 3–4, 83 Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), 6, 29, 46, 80 political status for prisoners, 59, 61, 77, 127, 150, 153–56, 158–59, 175 Prevention of Terrorism Act, 171 Protestant Telegraph, 125 Purvis, Dawn, leader of Popular Unionist Party, 103 Queens University, Belfast, 36 Rees, Merlyn, secretary of state for Northern Ireland, 153–54, 175 Republican Clubs, 47, 53, 68, 132, 143, 148, 153–56, 158–59 Republican Congress, 49, 51, 103 Republican legitimist theology, 51–52, 163 Republican News, 54–55, 60 revisionism historical, 1–4, 65 and 1916 rebellion, 121–23, 136 Ribbonism, 169 Robinson, Gavin, DUP lord mayor of Belfast, 107 Robinson, Ken, Ulster Unionist MLA, 108 Robinson, Peter, DUP first minister, 107 Rolston, Bill, expert on wall murals, 100 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), 167, 169

208

Index

Royal Irish Rifles, 78 Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), 11, 13, 20, 26, 29, 47–49, 78, 80, 119, 131–32, 166, 169, 176, 186–87, 190–93 RUC George Cross Garden, East Belfast, 29 Russell, Sean, IRA chief of staff, 46, 175 Sandhurst Military Academy, 85, 87 Sands, Bobby, hunger striker, MP, 61, 158, 170–73 Saor Eire, 62 Saor Uladh, 50–51 Savage, Sean, IRA volunteer, 166 Saville Inquiry, 5, 88, 119 Shankill Road, 16, 87, 103, 126, 182 silence, 32–33, 44–45, 89, 169 Sinn Féin, the Workers Party, 156–57 Official, 54, 130, 132, 148, 150, 155, 159 pre-split, 47, 49, 51–52, 123–24, 145, 169, 172–73 Provisional, 10–12, 21–22, 25–27, 35, 50, 53–56, 58–68, 105, 118, 127–29, 132–34, 136, 142, 150, 165 sites of memory, 99–100 sites of mourning, 81, 166, 170, 176 Smithwick Tribunal, 119 Smyth, Kevin, Republican Clubs, 132 Smyth, Marie, author, 17 Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), 25–26

Somme, Battle of the, 101, 108–9, 126, 166 South, Seán, IRA, funeral and commemoration, 146, 170 South Armagh, 20, 126 Special Air Service (SAS), 27, 166, 175 special category prisoners, 127, 150, 153–55, 175. See also political status for prisoners Special Criminal Court, 45 S-Plan, 46, 175 Stagg, Frank, hunger striker, 66 Steele, Jimmy, stalwart republican veteran, 65, 126, 182 Stephens, James, Fenian leader, 170 Stevenson, Edward, grand master, Orange Order, 108 Stewart, A. T. Q., historian, 6 Stickies, slang term for Official republicans, 52–53, 146, 171 Stone, Michael, Loyalist paramilitary, 165–66, 169 Stormont regime, 30, 48, 52 post-regime Stormont, 24, 91, 133 Sunningdale Agreement, 58, 152 Switzer, Catherine, geographer, 80, 82 Taylor, A. J. P., historian, 129 Taylor, Peter, journalist, author, trusted chronicler of the Troubles, 64 Thatcher, Margaret, prime minister, 31, 159, 175 Thornley, David, Labour TD, 134–35 Todd, Jennifer, political scientist, 28 Toland, Thomas “Totler,” IRA, 53

Index Tone, Theobald Wolfe, United Irishman, 11, 50, 103, 130, 132, 144–45, 159, 170 Wolfe Tone Society, 46 Trimble, David, Ulster Unionist leader, first minister, 10, 25–26 Troops Out Movement, 58 truth and reconciliation, 30, 32–33, 69 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africa, 117–18 Tumilson, William “Liam,” killed in action, Spanish Civil War, 102–3 Twomey, Seamus, chief of staff Provisional IRA, 1940s internee, 182 Tyrone, county, 10, 13, 20, 46, 50, 57, 132, 148, 158, 171 Tyrone’s Struggle, 67 Ulster Covenant, 6, 100–102, 107–8, 121 Ulster Defence Association (UDA), 185, 187 Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), 20, 29, 78, 80, 131 Ulster Unionist Council, 10 Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), 27, 107–8

209

Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), 108–9, 125, 131, 182, 185 Ulster Workers Council strike, 102 United Irishman, 54, 145 United Irishmen, society of, 44, 51, 62, 65–66 Voices from the Grave, 61 Ways of Dealing with Northern Ireland’s Past, 33, 35–36 Walker, Brian, historian, 110 Wall, Maureen, historian, 2 Walsh, Seanna “Sid,” 45 Ward, Peter, first fatality of the Troubles, 126, 182 Whiggery, 2 Widgery Report, 11, 148. See also Bloody Sunday Williams, Tom, IRA, hanged 1942, 11, 173, 176 Winter, Jay, historian, 121 Workers Party, 64, 67, 143, 155–59, 171 Workers’ Life, 159 Young Ireland movement, 61, 66, 170