697. The Troubles: Murder in Belfast (Part 1)

Introduction and historical overview

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1:03This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions, there's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria. For thousands of years, humanity was defenseless against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity, and American scientists and partners around the world

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2:04This episode is brought to you by Claude Bianthropic. Tom, as you know, recently I've had to work through all kinds of issues. One of them was having to write the notes for a series about the First World War in 1915. It would have been so easy to be overwhelmed by that, like an Italian soldier trudging up a limestone hill towards Austrian guns. But whereas the Italians often felt alone, I knew that I always had you. And that was very special. Yes, you did, Dominic. And if I'd had to do it on my own, I'd have probably been daunted. And the good news is that when you need help, there's Claude. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough.

2:40It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. So whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai slash rest is history. That's claude.ai slash rest is history. Oh God, we pray for a great smashing of the chains of apostasy in this land. Open the eyes of thy

3:28people. Open the eyes of the Protestants of Ulster. Help them to see that through hegemonism, their heritage is being bartered. Their liberties are being sold. And Lord, may they shake the dust from off their feet. And come out and join with us in this battle that we may stand together in the name of the

4:00Lord of hosts. We thank thee that thou didst bless the reformers as they fought this battle in the 16th century. And thou wilt bless us in the 20th century, for God is still the same. And he has not changed, nor ever will. And his truth shall reveal, and his word is quick and powerful.

4:39And sharper than any two-edged sword. And these Irish Presbyterian ministers, and Methodist clergymen, and Church of Ireland rectors, if they need to be rectified, they would all take us back to Rome. Well, we're not going. We're not going. You can go if you want. But we will not go.

5:19So to anyone under the age of 40, that will sound as though I have been having a stroke. But to anyone who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, that I hope will be a very familiar sound because it is the Reverend Ian Paisley. And he was giving a sermon there entitled, Why I am a Protestant on the 1st of March 1965. And Dominic, he was the voice of hardline Protestant Ulster fundamentalism, wasn't he?

5:52He was the sworn foe of that whore of Babylon, the Church of Rome, and the champion of the Ulster loyalist cause. And the thing that's sensational about Ian Paisley is that, I mean, he really does sound like he is ringing all the Reformation greatest hits. He sounds like he stepped out from the pages of a 16th or 17th century anti-papist tract. But the amazing thing about that, I mean, he made it in the year that HELP was released, when London was starting to swing, when the miniskirts were coming out.

6:35And NASA's preparing to send a mission to the moon. The 60s are turning very, very groovy. But I mean, Ian Paisley, he's not groovy, is he? Whatever else you say about him, he's not groovy. No, and I don't think he would wish to be called groovy, Tom. I have to say that was a tremendous, that was a tremendous version of Ian Paisley. So you were riddled with uncharacteristic self-doubt before that recording. I've been practicing quite a lot this morning. I think fair-minded observers would agree that was a tremendous performance. I woke up my friend Loz with the stentorian tones of my rhetoric.

7:11Lying in bed, like a slattern. That's what I told her. Well, we'll come back to Ian Paisley later in this episode. I mean, he is an extraordinary character. I mean, it's amazing to think that he ended up as first minister of Northern Ireland in coalition with Shinvei, by the way. Yeah, with Martin McGinnis, wasn't it? They were the chuckle brothers because they just spent the whole time chortling with each other. That's a twist, a twist that actually nobody could possibly have expected. Anyway, for four decades or so, his was one of the sort of identifiable trademark voices of a conflict that claimed thousands of lives, including the lives of almost 2000 entirely innocent civilians, British and Irish.

7:55And today we call this conflict the Troubles, which is a very euphemistic way to talk about one of the darkest episodes in modern British and indeed Irish history. To give people a massive overview, it began with sectarian rioting in the streets of Northern Ireland, but it escalated into something much more sinister. Effectively, a low level civil war between rival paramilitary groups and the British army and indeed murderous bombing campaigns, both in Ireland and in Britain. And at the peak of the violence in the early 1970s, which is a period we'll be talking a lot about in this series, almost 500 people were being killed every year and a bomb was going off in Belfast every single day.

8:35And the victims of the Troubles included not just British MPs, but as viewers of the Crown will know, the Queen's second cousin, Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, who was killed by a bomb in 1979. And of course, it also killed shop assistants and barmen and singers and hairdressers and housewives and schoolchildren who were shot and blown up because they had the wrong name or they had the wrong, they belonged to the wrong church or because they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

9:08So this series is going to look at the first years of the Troubles, how they came and how they reached their peak at the end of 1972. And of course, it is a very contentious subject. I mean, lots of listeners, whether they're British or Irish or indeed from elsewhere, they may have very strong views and they may remember or have people who were involved in the conflict. And Tom, obviously, we should say right at the beginning, we are obviously British and we live through it. So it's not like we don't have preconceptions. But there are an awful lot of books now about this written by very fair-minded, balanced historians, both British and Irish and indeed people from Northern Ireland.

9:43And I think it is actually perfectly possible to try to give a fairly balanced account and that's what we're going to try and do. I mean, I think that is true. I think a certain degree of distance has enabled studies of the Troubles. Yeah. I mean, so there was that brilliant series on the BBC once upon a time in Northern Ireland that I just thought was impeccably balanced and fair. And I know that you are an impeccably balanced and fair man. Oh, that's kind. So I look forward to you emulating that.

10:13Wow. No pressure. So actually, even where you start the story is a political choice in itself. Right. Because the coming of the Normans. Right. You could go really far back. I mean, a lot of people in Britain, when they tell the story, they sort of assume that the violence just exploded out of nowhere. And it was carried out by psychopathic extremists who were motivated by or exploiting ancient hatreds. And it's senseless, inexplicable, but all this kind of thing. Now, of course, if you're an Irish nationalist, you would start the story much earlier. You would say, well, you shouldn't start in the 1960s.

10:45You should start with maybe with the Normans arriving in Ireland, maybe with Elizabeth I or Oliver Cromwell, the plantation of Ulster, the importation of tens of thousands of English and Scottish colonists. And they would say you should start the story there.

The partition of Ireland

10:59Unfortunately, we no longer live in a world where the rest is history, can do 13-part series. And we have done the story of Ireland before. So I think a sensible compromise is if we just pick up the story at the end of our last Irish series that we did, which is the early 20th century. For people who haven't heard this series, at the beginning of the 20th century, in 1900, there were about four and a half million people on the island of Ireland. And they are subjects of the United Kingdom. And most of them, three-quarters of them are Catholic, and a quarter of them are Protestant. And the Protestants are mostly concentrated in the northeastern part of the island, so that is in the province of Ulster, and around the city, the industrial city of Belfast, the place where the Titanic was built.

11:40And if you want to hear more about that, we did a whole series about the Titanic and its origins in Belfast. And in the first 20 years or so of the century, massive controversy about Ireland's political future. The nationalists, who are mostly Catholic, want home rule or independence. But the Unionists, who are typically Protestant, want to stay part of the United Kingdom. And the Unionists in the northeast are so bitterly opposed to the prospect of home rule from Dublin in a Catholic-dominated Ireland,

12:10that in 1912, almost half a million of them, led by Sir Edward Carson, sign a covenant pledging to use all means necessary to fight against home rule. And the legacy of this will reverberate down the generations long into the 1970s and beyond. I suppose it kind of offers a historical precedent for paramilitary activity, doesn't it? Absolutely, it does. It's a kind of heroic model of, well, if you're not a paramilitary, you'd call it gangsterism. Yes, of course.

12:41And almost all of the paramilitaries we will meet in this series would look back to the events of the 1910s and 1920s and say, I'm doing as my forefathers did before me. So absolutely, the history really matters. So 100,000 of these people who signed the covenant organized into the paramilitary volunteers, and they smuggled tens of thousands of guns into Ulster, and they were preparing for civil war. But then the First World War intervened, and a lot of the volunteers went off to fight. A lot of them fought at Gallipoli, or indeed at the Somme, which became a kind of sacred moment for the Protestants of Ulster, 1916.

13:16But also in 1916, at Easter, there was a nationalist uprising in Dublin, and that was followed by a guerrilla campaign, largely in the south of Ireland, in the Catholic bits of Ireland, that undermined British authority completely. So, Dominic, I'm sure you've been to the Shankill Road and the Falls Road. So the Shankill Road is the Protestant, you know, the street that runs through the Protestant heartland of Belfast, and the Falls Road is Catholic. They're separated now by peace walls, aren't they? Yeah. But there are kind of Checkpoint Charlie-type places where they join, and on one side, there are murals of the Battle of the Somme, poppies, graveyards, British military heroes.

13:59Yes. And on the other side, all up the Falls Road, there are kind of murals of the Easter Rising. And it's like kind of the history is literally written onto the bricks. It is, absolutely. Two rival histories describing the same period, but in completely different terms. Exactly right. So anyway, back to the story. In 1922, the British agreed a treaty that would turn Ireland into a free state, a dominion under the crown, and basically put it on the road to independence as a republic, which it becomes in 1949.

14:29But there was a catch. Two years earlier, the British had allowed six counties in the northeast to form a separate entity called Northern Ireland with its own parliament in Belfast. And the treaty that they do in 1922 allows this entity to opt out of the new free state and to remain as part of the United Kingdom. And the Parliament of Northern Ireland immediately says that's what it wants to do. And so this is what gives you the partition of the island of Ireland.

15:00Dominic, can I just ask, there was never any question that they would just become a kind of independent statelet? No, too small to be a statelet. And dependence on money from Westminster. So this is the sort of theme that comes up again and again in the 70s where British prime ministers will say, we're giving you all this money. Why can't you do what we want you to do? But it is a theme, isn't it, also, that the Protestants of Ulster don't really like Britain or they don't really like British governments. They like the idea of Britain, but not the reality of British governments, I think is fair. So I think they think that British governments are not good at defending British interests and that they're better at it.

15:35And they regard the British as weak and they think the British don't understand their unique situation. Which I guess is kind of true. To a degree, it's probably true. So anyway, the Partition of Ireland in the South, you have 26 counties, overwhelming Catholic majority, capital in Dublin. This in 1949 becomes the Republic of Ireland. And then in the Northeast, there are six counties, Northern Ireland, it's a self-governing bit of the United Kingdom, capital in Belfast, Parliament at Stormont on the Stormont Estate in Belfast, and a two-thirds Protestant majority.

16:08Now, Ian Paisley, in that reading, he called it Ulster, and lots of people do call it Ulster. Actually, it's only six of the nine historic counties of the province of Ulster. So this is a very good way to annoy Irish nationalists, if you call it Ulster, because they will point out it's actually not all of Ulster. Every geographical expression in this story annoys people. It does indeed. So British Isles, Ireland, whatever. I mean, they're always pregnant with annoyance for everyone. Every name is a choice, basically. And I'm sure there were lots of people who say, well, you got this wrong, you should have said this, you should have said the other.

16:42I mean, we're going to try our best. And I speak as the man who uttered the word Londonderry in the Dublin GPO. Yeah, you corrected Paul Rouse when we did a series about Ireland. You corrected a professor of history at University College Dublin. I was just, you know, sticking up for Ulster. Yeah, you were. Reminding him that there are two words for it. Ian Paisley would have been proud of you. So to nationalists, partition is the original sin of modern Irish history, a blight that should be rectified.

17:15I think most historians, including most Irish historians, would agree that partition was probably inevitable. That basically, once the Ulster volunteers had, you know, as it were, signed their covenant, they'd armed themselves, they were never going to be forced into a united Ireland without a civil war. And basically, that was the choice. You partition the Ireland or it all kicks off and you have a civil war. But even if you had a civil war, what do you do? Yeah, where are they going to go? There's, you know, a million people or whatever it is. With guns. Yeah. I mean, that's not good. No. So, at the time when Ireland was partitioned, I think a lot of nationalists just assumed that over time, it would wither away.

17:52Partition would wither away. The six counties one day would agree to join a united Ireland. It was their destiny. And obviously, that didn't work out. Northern Ireland, as an entity, proved much more resilient than they had expected. But that said, from the start, there's a serious fracture line that runs through Northern Ireland. So, the unionist leaders, when they basically took six counties, they had guaranteed themselves a two-thirds Protestant majority. They could have asked for more counties, but of course, those counties had a lot of Catholics. They didn't want them.

18:23So, they've got their two-thirds majority. So, they're gerrymandering. I mean, you could say effectively, yes. Yeah. But what that means, of course, is that one-third of the people in this new state are not Protestants. They are Catholics. So, this is half a million people who are not best pleased at the idea of living in a majority Protestant unionist state. And partly as a result of this, this whole process was accompanied at the time by considerable violence. Now, the early 20s is a very violent time across Europe. There are all kinds of ethnic conflicts and there are border disputes and all of these kinds of things.

18:57And by those standards, not a lot of people die. But by the standards of the islands of Britain and Ireland, a lot of people do die. So, between the summer of 1920 and the summer of 1922, there's this intense street fighting between the IRA and the security forces, especially in Belfast. And by the time it's over, more than 500 people have been killed, most of them Catholic civilians. 10,000 Catholics driven out of their jobs, 25,000 Catholics driven out of their homes by violence and by arson and so on and so forth.

19:30I mean, one difference between Ireland and other parts of Europe in the wake of the First World War, that the violence in Ireland is kind of, it's a continuity. And doesn't, Churchill has that kind of famous phrase about the flood, isn't it? And as the waters subside, we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone, that they're still there. And that, I guess, is part of what gives the story around this the sense of ancient hatreds, the idea that there's no solution to the situation.

20:03Well, to some extent, people are the prisoners of history and the stories they tell and the lessons they learn when they're children. And you have generations of people who have grown up being told stories of separatism, of separate identity, of antagonism and so on. And history is woven into the texture of life in Northern Ireland. It will come to the parades, the marches, the celebrations of battles of the 17th century and things. I mean, it really, really matters and it cannot simply be put aside or wished away. I mean, and that's one of the lessons of this story, that continuity kind of gives you a context that people find it very difficult to escape, I suppose.

20:39But also that politicians in London view this with a kind of frustrated sense of battlement, which is kind of what Churchill is saying there. You know, nothing has changed. No, exactly. And in fact, the longer time goes on and the more that the Irish question, as it were, which had been so big in the late 19th century, the more that it recedes, the less that people in London understand it. So by the time you get to the 60s and 70s, you have a generation of politicians in London, take someone like James Callaghan, we'll talk about him later on.

21:09He was the grandson of somebody who had left Ireland in the famine, but his family had ended up converting from Catholicism to baptism. Does James Callaghan understand Ireland? No, not really. He's not really interested in it. It's something that happened a long time ago to him, but to people in Belfast, this is kind of living history. It's real. And the fact that the British don't understand it is enraging to them because it matters so much to them. Anyway, back to the state of Northern Ireland. All this fighting in the early 20s had two obvious consequences. First of all, if you're part of the one third Catholic minority, you do not regard this state as a safe space by any means.

21:46It's actually a very unsafe space for you. Is there emigration? There is some emigration. Yes, there are thousands of people who cross the border. To the Republic? Again, by the standards of European population transfers to the 20s, it's not enormous, but it's not nothing. There are people who definitely move south because they think this is going to be a very unwelcoming place for us. And Protestants moving from the south to the north? Not so much. More so that Protestants, I think, would move from the south to Britain. Right, okay. Here are people who lived in the big houses, the Anglo-Irish kind of Protestant ascendancy and so on.

22:17So obviously, if you're a Catholic, there are loads of families who sort of bear the scars, sometimes physically of the fighting. There are a lot of people actually later on who were involved in the IRA or whatever in the 60s and 70s who had parents and grandparents who told them stories about what happened in 1920 or 1921. But then for Protestants, for the Protestant majority, they don't regard this as an entirely safe space either. Because although they're a majority in their own state, they are not a majority on the island.

22:48They feel we're surrounded by Catholics, we're besieged by Catholics, there is a state to the south that aspires to a united Ireland so that wishes us ill and wants to destroy our state. That's how they see it. And they say, we've also got this fifth column inside our own borders. We've got a third of our population are Catholics and we can't trust them. And is there anxiety at this stage about the demographic potential of Catholic families tending to have more children than Protestant families?

23:21Which is a kind of, people talk about that a lot now. Yeah. Was it an issue back then? People talked about it a lot. They talked about it a lot throughout the 20th century. So Terence O'Neill, who was the Northern Ireland prime minister in the 60s, made a very contentious speech at the end of the decade when he said, and he disregarded as him being too soft by a lot of Eunists, he said, we should treat the Catholics more nicely because they have loads and loads of children. And if we treat them more nicely, they will behave better and they will have fewer children. They won't overtake us demographically. Basically, nobody likes this speech.

23:53There's quite a lot to unpick there. Yeah, there's a lot going on. But yeah, absolutely. People often would talk about that. I mean, I don't think it's that they feel demographically we're going to be overwhelmed very quickly. What they feel is the people in Dublin want to undermine us, which a lot of them, frankly, do. They think they look south and they say, well, you know, this newly effectively autonomous and going to be independent Ireland is turning itself into a kind of Catholic run state with the church having overweening power. This is the one thing we dread.

24:24We don't want this. And we have all these people within our own borders who we don't think we can trust, who would like to, you know, who would like to undermine us. So that's why, I mean, there's a defensiveness that gives you the slogan, no surrender, which is, of course, one of Ian Paisley's favorite phrases, isn't it? So there's tensions. So they're there in the 20s. And then when most people in Britain tell the story, they sort of stop there and they say, well, let's fast forward to the 1960s because nothing kind of nothing happens in between. But that's actually dead wrong.

24:55Lots of stuff happens in between. It's just we don't ever learn about it in Britain. So, for example, in 1935, I mean, this will surprise loads of people. There is massive rioting in Belfast. There are gun battles. There are snipers on the top of buildings. British troops have to be sent to clear the streets with armored cars. 11 people are killed, 100 people injured, 2,000 people are driven out of their homes. And then actually that inspired reprisals across the Irish border. So there were attacks on Protestant homes and shops in Limerick.

25:25There were burnings of Church of Ireland churches and Methodist chapels in rural Ireland and so on and so forth. And in the background, the whole time, the Irish Republican Army. So, you know, there's been all this stuff in the 1910s and 1920s with the IRA. The IRA had split in Southern Ireland and what became the Republic. It had fought a civil war. The IRA never went away. It's still there all this time. So most IRA men, once the British signed the treaty and the civil war was over, they did go home.

25:59They put their guns away. That was an end to it. But not all of them did. So at any given point, there are still a few hundred active IRA men with guns. And that is still enough to kill people. And they do kill people. So in January 1939, again, most people in Britain don't know this happened. In January 1939, the IRA launched a new campaign against Britain and they called it the S plan, the sabotage plan. And when you go, I mean, it's astounding how little known this is when you go through what happened.

26:29There were bombs in London and Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool and Blackpool all over. There were bomb attacks on railway stations, banks, post office. There were bombs on the London Underground. Most notoriously, there was a bicycle bomb in Coventry City Centre in August 1939 that killed five people, the youngest of whom was 50 and the oldest 82. I mean, I suppose that further developments in Coventry City Centre the following year have slightly obliterated the memory of that bomb. Yeah, of course.

26:59Isn't it funny that Coventry is, you know, obviously a bomb by the Germans. Everyone remembers that. So this 1939 bombing, which otherwise would be very, you know, very well known. Very salient, yeah. Is basically being wiped from our national consciousness. But what happened to the IRA in World War II, both the British and the Irish governments massively cracked down. And they started interning IRA suspects without trial. Ireland actually executed six IRA men during the Second World War, including the chief of staff of the IRA.

27:31They executed him for killing a guard, an Irish policeman. So the Irish are just as tough on the IRA as the British are. Now, against this background, the people who run Northern Ireland, the Unionists, have absolutely no intention of loosening their grip.

A Protestant state

27:46And the first prime minister of Northern Ireland was called Sir James Craig. If you Google him, he really does look like a boiled egg and someone has painted a face on him. Does he have a massive moustache? He does have a moustache, yeah. Of course he does. I mean, with a name like Sir James Craig, you couldn't not. He undoubtedly has a moustache. Yeah, no question. So he was very explicit about this. He gave a speech in the 1930s. He said, I'm not going to do the accent because my Northern Irish accent is not as good as yours. He said, in the South, they boast of being a Catholic state.

28:17All I boast of is that we are a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state. That's good, Dominic. Thank you. It's understated, though, and it's a bit wobbly. He's not wrong. They are a Protestant state. The judges, the magistrates, the civil servants are almost entirely Protestant. The Royal Ulster Constabulary, the RUC, the police, who are going to play a massive part in this story, they're about nine to one Protestant. And the RUC has an armed kind of paramilitary reserve called the B Specials that people sign up for.

28:49And these are exclusively Protestant, really. They are the sort of the bulwark, the enforcers of unionist supremacy. When things kick off in the streets, you call for the B Specials and they come out of their orange order lodges with their guns. And they are the people who will basically restore order. So in the 70s and 80s, the comparison was often made between Northern Ireland and South Africa by nationalists and Republicans. But I mean, there's kind of an element of truth there, isn't there, to a degree?

29:22It's a very inflammatory comparison. I mean, if the entire apparatus of the state is controlled by one faction, then it's not. I mean, there's no way you could describe it as a properly functioning democracy. No, no, you absolutely couldn't. We'll come on to this. You absolutely couldn't. And it's overtly sectarian. If not, I mean, it's not racist, but it's sectarian. It's not racist. It is a sectarian state. Exactly. And Sir James Craig or somebody like that would say, I mean, he might quibble with the word sectarian, but he would say, you know, we're a Protestant state.

29:54End of story. If you don't like it, go somewhere else. This is how we're going to run things. You know, we know what we're doing. Pipe down. He would absolutely say that. And critics would say, well, that's what the Afrikaners or whatever say in South Africa. Some people in Northern Ireland would be offended by that. Some people would lean into that comparison and say, well, we kind of are like the Burrs. We are hardy frontiersmen. We've carved out a state in the face of overwhelming odds. You know, we've built something really precious and special, and we want to defend it.

30:25And don't you tell us what to do. I don't want to plunge into this because it's murky waters, but on the Shank Hill and Falls Road murals, the Shank Hill is full of the Israeli flag and the Falls Road is full of the Palestinian flag. Absolutely right. Absolutely. Yes. There is a self-image. The Unionists, especially some years ago, would have said, we are like the chosen people. We're like the children of God, the children of Zion, all of that kind of thing. Well, I mean, Ian Paisley definitely would have done. Ian Paisley undoubtedly would. And of course, among nationalists, the comparison with the Palestinians, you know, dates, goes back to the 70s.

31:01So absolutely, yes. Two things about the REC, the police, which is important for people to remember. Number one, they are much, much more powerful than a police force in Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe. There was special legislation in 1922 that gave them special powers. They can search without a warrant. They can arrest you without a warrant. They can intern you as a suspect without trial. They can impose a curfew, a ban on a march or a ban on a newspaper at will. So they have a lot of leeway. And the RUC, like their political masters, are very closely tied to a group called the Orange Order.

31:36And the Orange Order is basically a fraternal organization, a fraternity, a brotherhood. It was founded in 1795. It was dedicated to the defense of Protestantism and the union with Britain. It's, of course, named after William of Orange from the Glorious Revolution. And almost every single member of the B Special Reserves and almost every single unionist MP is an Orangeman, belongs to an Orange Lodge. So where does that leave you if you're a Catholic?

32:07In 1967, the Times did a big investigation into the status of Catholics in Northern Ireland. And it described them as Ulster's second-class citizens. And actually, you can see why. So the Ulster unionist leader, David Trimble, who ended up winning the Nobel Prize, didn't he? In 1998, in his Nobel Prize-winning speech, said that Ulster unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. Which was a sort of a big concession for an Ulster unionist leader to have said.

32:41And he was right. A lot of Protestant firms will not employ Catholics. If you have a Catholic name, if your name was, I don't know, Liam O'Hara or something, you probably would not get a job. You wouldn't even be interviewed for a job, given a chance of a job in the big Harlan and Wolfe shipyards. Roman Catholics are twice as likely to be unemployed as Protestants. And they have no political power, really. Because Northern Ireland has a first-past-the-post political system in which the boundaries have been ruthlessly gerrymandered to ensure a permanent unionist majority at Stormont, at the Parliament.

33:19This is even more glaring at the local level. At the local level, you can only vote if you're a ratepayer, if you pay local government rates. And you pay them if you own your own house or if you rent a house. Or you can vote if you're the spouse of somebody who, you know, the wife, usually, of somebody who owns or rents a house. Now, Catholics are poorer. They're more likely to live in extended family groups or with their parents. And as a result, lots of Catholics can't vote in local elections.

33:51As a result of that, in the cities or the places where you have, you know, a Catholic majority, so the city of Derry or County Tyrone or County Fermanagh, power is still controlled by the unionists because they have more people who own their own homes. And that means they control public jobs and, crucially, housing. It may sound very banal, but it's a massive deal in this story. Because the housing stock in Northern Ireland is terrible. It's really, it's Victorian, it's crumbling. You know, one in three houses either doesn't have running water or it doesn't have a flushing toilet.

34:25So young couples in particular, they want to get out of their parents' kind of crumbling Victorian terrace. They want a new home of their own. But because giving people a home means giving them votes, unionist councils don't like giving homes to Catholics because it gives them two more votes, right? Husband and wife, if it's a young couple. So they don't like building homes in Catholic areas, right? Yeah. The chairman of Enniskillen Housing Committee, 1963, we're going to see that the right people are put in these houses.

34:56We're not going to apologise for it. Now, it does work the other way around. So in nationalist councils like Newry, they built lots of new houses in the early 60s, and they gave only a tiny handful of them to Protestants. But the big losers from all this are the Catholics. And one place above all becomes emblematic of this.

The situation in Derry

35:15And this is the second city of Northern Ireland, a city in the far west of the country. It was originally a settlement called Derry. Then in 1613, a consortium of London guilds, basically, was set up to colonise the area. They built a new walled city. And because they were London guilds, they called it Londonderry. And hence, you have the name controversy, which actually, in this period, the 60s... Isn't really, is it? Everyone calls it Derry. Everybody calls it Derry.

35:46It only really became a big controversy once the Troubles kicked off, and then it became a kind of a point of pride to call it either Derry, like Paul Rouse, our former guest, or Londonderry, as you did in the general post office in Dublin. So we'll just call it Derry for short. Derry, in 1965 or so, is a two-to-one Catholic city. So 36,000 Catholics, 18,000 Protestants. But it's always been controlled by Protestants through gerrymandering.

36:18So they're always redrawing the boundaries of the wards to give themselves a majority on the council. So when I was thinking about this, I wondered whether you would say, surely the British government wouldn't stand for this. This is outrageous. But the truth, as we shall see, is the British have absolutely no interest in what happens in Northern Ireland at all. I appreciate that. I'm just wondering if it is, under British law, illegal. A good question. I don't think it is. Some Catholic solicitor would have undoubtedly taken it to court. It's not illegal, I think, because the council set the boundaries. The councils decide the ward boundaries.

36:49So this is the devolution that Andy Burnham wants, Matt. The right of councils to gerrymander. Right. Well, we shall see. Anyway, so to go back to Derry, basically almost every Protestant family who wants a house gets one, but there are 2,000 Catholic families on the waiting list for housing. And we will come back to this in the next episode, because it is no accident that this is where the troubles really kick off in earnest against this background. So just to finish by talking about the Catholics before we go to the break.

37:19Imagine, Tom, you're a young Catholic in the early 60s in Northern Ireland. What is your name? Seamus O. Murphy. Yeah, Seamus whatever. Exactly. So you're identifiable by your name. You have no flat. You have no vote in local elections. You maybe don't have a job. You feel that the system is stacked against you, and it has been for the last 40 years. Where do you look for hope? The Virgin Mary. Yeah, you probably do. Maybe it's the Virgin Mary, exactly.

37:50You might look to the sort of Northern Irish Nationalist Party, but they are very small. They're very ineffective. I mean, in 1962 and 1965, in the Stormont Parliament, they won nine out of 52 seats. I mean, they're barely even an opposition, really. And they are generally seen as a bit old-fashioned, very Catholic, very rural, not terribly effective. Kind of De Valera type. A little bit, yeah. But De Valera is a very wily and ruthless politician, and they are not. Right.

38:20Then you have the IRA. Now, the Unionist hardliners talk all the time about the IRA. You know, they're obsessed with the IRA. They say the IRA, you know, is always out there, which, I mean, to be fair, it kind of is. The IRA had rebuilt after the Second World War, and it had launched a new guerrilla campaign along the border in 1956 called Operation Harvest. And this campaign had been a complete and utter disaster. Both Belfast and Dublin, in fact, Eamon De Valera, reintroduced internment without trial.

38:53They interned loads of IRA people, and they completely broke the back of the organization. And so, in 1962, the IRA had called off this campaign. They dumped all of their weapons. And madly, a few years later, they sold a lot of their weapons to the Welsh. Oh. To the Free Wales Army. Great. So, people thinking it's just about Ireland. It's about Wales as well. There's actually too much Welsh history. So much Welsh history and the rest is history. It just keeps going. I know. Yeah. They're everywhere. It's unbelievable.

39:24Right. So, the IRA gets a new chief of staff who's from Dublin called Cathal Goulding. And Goulding says, listen, we have been wasting our time here. This has been a terrible mistake. And he said later, the notion that the IRA was going to rise up someday and free Ireland and get rid of the British, which was a ridiculous pipe dream. I mean, that's a hell of a thing for the guy running the IRA to say in the early 60s. And this bloke, Goulding, he's actually very close to some Marxist academics and to people from the British Communist Party.

39:55And they persuade him, the IRA's future lies in socialist activism. So, he's listening to the British. He's listening to British academics. I know, which is mad. Never listen to a British academic. Instead of blowing up post offices and stuff, why don't we work to build a non-sectarian workers' alliance that will fight both imperialism and capitalism? And the people who are running the IRA in the 60s say, yeah, actually, brilliant. Let's do that. Because, of course, that goes with the momentum of the 60s, right?

40:26It feels right. Yeah, of course. So, do they start going to conferences in goldsmiths? They do. There's probably men with polo necks. They have a lot of seminars. There's a lot of talking shops about smashing capitalism. They're massively into this. Now, if you're an older IRA veteran, you are not pleased about this at all. So, a lot of older IRA men are culturally conservative Catholics. They are not Marxists. So, Joe Cahill, who was an IRA veteran who had been jailed for killing a policeman in 1942, he said,

40:57the movement was being led off the true path of republicanism. Ultra-left politics were taking over. Sooner or later, there would have to be a showdown. And he's right. There will be a showdown. I mean, people say that Sinn Féin are doing the same at the moment. So, that they're becoming Corbynist, really. Exactly. That they're sort of caught between, you know, the Catholic nationalism on the one hand and a slightly woolly... Marxist internationalism. Yes, on the other. Now, we'll come back to this later in the series. But the point, really, is that they've gone very, very quiet. So, a future member of the provisional IRA, Billy McKee's quote from him,

41:30I believe that it was dead, completely dead, and it was, except in the minds of myself and other old Republicans. So, to return to the original question, if you're a Catholic, where are you looking for help? There is an alternative, of course. You could look to Dublin. Now, in theory, the Republic of Ireland claims the whole island. Article 2 of the Irish Constitution, the national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland. And Irish politicians would always say, if they're asked, well, our goal, of course, is unification of the entire island.

42:02In reality, since the 1920s, governments in Dublin have shown no interest in advancing this at all and done absolutely nothing about it. And again, this is something that will surprise, I think, a lot of listeners. Twice in the Second World War, the British said to the government in Dublin, we will give you a united Ireland if you abandon your neutrality and join the Allies. After Pearl Harbor in 1941, Winston Churchill sent an incredible telegram to Eamon de Valera.

42:34Now is your chance, now or never, a nation once again. So, the nation once again is a kind of Republican slogan. Churchill was using it. And de Valera just completely ignored him. Didn't want to abandon neutrality. And also, of course, if you are a politician in Dublin, you don't really want those one million Protestants who have a tendency to sign covenants and join volunteer groups to fight you. I mean, that's an issue right the way up to the present, really, isn't it? To the present, exactly, of course. So, in 1959, de Valera, the great champion of Irish independence and Irish republicanism,

43:10retired as Taoiseach and he became president of Ireland, kind of kicked upstairs. And he was succeeded by a man called Sean Lamass. I mean, it's unbelievable he's called Lamass. I know, I know. I mean, anything more calculated to Alarmie and Paisley than Lamass. We shall come to this. Lamass had fought in the Easter Rising and he'd also been in the IRA. But in private, Lamass said to people, come on, the island's going to be partitioned for a long time yet. Like, there's no point in whinging about this. It's not going to change anytime soon.

43:41So, Dublin's not really interested in the Catholics in Northern Ireland. And if they're not really interested, people who are even less interested are politicians in London. Now, there are some Labour MPs. There are always Labour MPs who campaign against discrimination against the Catholics. So, this goes back to your point, Tom. How could this happen in Britain? Well, I kind of think. I mean, it's a massive blot on the British state that it's allowing this to happen, I think. But the British state, first of all, it's running an empire for most of this period.

44:13So, I mean, it's not like there aren't other places where there are, you know, interesting local arrangements. But by the mid-60s. Yes, and people in the 60s start to say this. So, you have a Labour backbench, what's it called? The Campaign for Democracy in Ulster, that kicks off in the mid-60s. You have newspapers like The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, drawing attention to this and saying it's kind of not right that these people don't get houses and they don't really get to vote in local elections and stuff like this. But here's why people don't get massively excited about it.

44:45Ever since the 1920s, most British politicians have worked on the assumption that the Irish question which had dogged Britain for so long has been solved. It's done. It's finished. The people in the North, we fixed it because they've got their own parliament. We'll just let them get on with it. It's not perfect. But we absolutely don't want to interfere because they have a tendency to start arming themselves and we don't want to stir them up again. What has happened in Britain is that Northern Ireland has vanished from the national consciousness. It virtually never appears in the newspapers.

45:17It's never mentioned in TV bulletins, news bulletins. Most people never think about it at all. I mentioned Jim Callaghan before. Jim Callaghan, grandson of Irish immigrant. And I quote, most members of parliament knew less about it than we knew about our distant colonies on the far side of the earth. And I think that's true. There's loads in British newspapers about Cyprus in the 1950s. There's loads about Kenya. There's loads about Malaysia. There's virtually nothing about Northern Ireland. And actually people think, well, what's the point?

45:49Nothing's ever going to change. The unionists hold every single Westminster seat. The nationalists are totally irrelevant. The IRA have been beaten. And frankly, most people in Northern Ireland, they might be Protestant, they might be Catholic, but this is the 60s. It's the affluent society. They're more interested in buying a new TV or a new washing machine than they are about refighting the kind of the battles of the past. So this is the Sandbrook perspective. Well, that would be the Sandbrook perspective. And I would be wrong all about washing machines. In this instance, my washing machine eccentric view of history

46:21would be absolutely discredited because everybody thinks life is going to go on. Everything is going to be the same forever and ever. And they are wrong because things are about to change very dramatically indeed. And Dominic, we will find out how and why after a break. There have been disappointments and frustrations, but progress has been so marked that there is no excuse for pessimism about the future.

46:52The six counties, unlike their neighbours across the border, belong to the British welfare state. They share too, as they richly deserve, many of the fruits of the affluent society. The processes of modernisation have been carried far and they are not halted. On the contrary, they are on the march. So welcome back to The Rest is History. And that ringingly optimistic, groovy, 60s perspective was in The Times on the 12th of April, 1965,

47:24looking ahead to a bright new future for Northern Ireland. Great to see The Times with its finger on the pulse. Always. The paper for top people. And I suppose that top people sitting in their gentlemen's clubs, reading those words, it would have seemed beyond the bounds of possibility to them that within a few years, there would be bombs going off everywhere in the streets of Belfast and Derry, British soldiers patrolling those streets, hundreds of people being killed every year,

47:55and the carnage of it all spreading to the British mainland. Yeah. So what goes wrong? I mean, what happens? What happens? Big question. That's what the series is all about, Tom. So let's start on the 25th of March, 1963.

Terence O'Neill takes power

48:09So this is the day that Captain Terence O'Neill becomes the fourth Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. So 1963, Harold Macmillan is Prime Minister in Britain. The Beatles are about to launch their great assault on the charts. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Goalhangers, the rest is science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. When we talk about beating cancer, we often focus a lot on survival. And that can mean overlooking impacts that last long after treatment ends. Yeah.

48:40For example, take cancers in children and young people. The treatments themselves can be incredibly harsh. They can cause lifelong side effects like infertility or hearing loss. And Cancer Research UK is working to change that because young people, they should be able to grow up hearing the voices of the people that they love and living their lives to the fullest. That's right. And one clinical trial led by Cancer Research UK showed that giving another drug alongside chemotherapy nearly halved the number of children losing their hearing. And today, the treatment combination

49:11is being used by doctors across the world. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org slash rest is science. Hi, this is Gary Lineker from Goalhangers. The rest is football. This episode is brought to you by WISE. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas,

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50:57Includes up to 20 gigabytes of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. You know, they're only months away from going to America. The swinging 60s are kind of poised to happen, all of this. And Northern Ireland is going to get an exciting, dynamic, modernizing new prime minister. And this is Captain O'Neill. So Captain O'Neill is almost 50 years old. His father was an Ulster Unionist. His father was the first MP to be killed in the First World War.

51:31He was born in London, brought up in London. He went to Eton. He spent his summers in Northern Ireland. He served in a tank brigade in the Second World War. Two of his brothers were killed in the war, but he wasn't. And afterwards, he became an Ulster Unionist MP, as his father had before him. And then he rose to become Northern Ireland's Minister of Finance. And then in 63, the party grandees, they chose him to succeed the elderly Lord Brookborough as Prime Minister. Now,

52:01O'Neill knows that when he takes the reins, he's facing a big challenge. But in his mind, that challenge is primarily economic. So in our previous series, when we talked about Ireland, or indeed when we did the Titanic, we talked about how Belfast was different from other cities in Ireland. It's made of brick, you know, not stone. It feels like a Northern English city transplanted across the Irish Sea. It's an industrial powerhouse. It makes all its linen in the mills, and it's got its shipyards, and it's got chimneys, and smoke,

52:31and the sound of hammers, and all of that kind of thing. And of course, that's brilliant if you're in 1900. But if you're in 1963, this is the kind of place that's going to be left behind by the harsh winds of global competition. Even in the 50s, jobs in textiles and shipbuilding had been shrinking dramatically, and unemployment was going up, and unemployment was already higher than in the rest of Britain, and earnings lower than in the rest of Britain. So if you're an Ulster Unionist, this has political consequences. Because you look at the electoral map,

53:03and there's a slow, steady advance of a Northern Irish Labour Party that's appealing to kind of working class people and saying, you know, times are tough. We're going to better represent you than the old stuck-up unionist grandees. And so for Terence O'Neill, he thinks, well, my priority is to revive the Northern Irish economy by getting new investment. And I'm going to look abroad for that investment. I'm going to get multinational companies, Michelin, Ford, ICI, these big names.

53:34They'll come to Northern Ireland because their labour costs are cheaper. But there are two issues with this. Issue number one. Most of this happens in Belfast or the east of the country, the places that are more urbanised and have better transport links with the island of Great Britain. But in the west, which is more heavily Catholic, where unemployment is already higher, these companies don't want to invest there. So these places feel like they're being left behind. And people there say, well, Terence O'Neill talks a good game,

54:05but he only cares about the Protestants in the east. He doesn't care about us at all. But then the other thing, the sort of more counterintuitive thing about all this new investment, it's very disruptive to Northern Ireland's existing arrangements. Because if you're, you know, Ford or Michelin or something, and you arrive, you're the sort of, you're like people from Mad Men or something. Yeah. You know, you've got a kind of sharp suit. You like a graph and a table and all that stuff. You've got all these time and motion studies. And then people say to you, well, you know, we'll be wearing our bowler hats

54:36when we go on a big march. And obviously we can't have any Catholics. You stare at them in stupefaction and disbelief and you say, well, that's not, you know, the Ford Motor Company does not operate that way or whatever. Get with it. Exactly. And so there's a degree of tension between the newcomers, you know, the new investment, the new companies, and then the people who basically are like, come on, we spend our evenings always at the Orange Lodge and we sing our sex songs about the glorious revolution. Now, this would not have been insuperable for a sort of populist politician,

55:07for a more skillful communicator to handle. But Terence O'Neill is not that man. As we said, he's an old Etonian, he's married to an English woman, and he has an English accent because he's been brought up in London. And so, although he goes down quite well with the kind of country landowners because he's very posh, the poorer, more conservative, working-class Protestants, they see him as soft and as stuck up and as somebody who's totally oblivious to their concerns. So I already mentioned David Trimble,

55:37leader of the Ulster Unionist in the 1990s. He said of Terence O'Neill, he never spoke or behaved as if he was one of us, which is, I think, true. He has a slight look of the former editor of the Daily Telegraph. Yeah. Charles Moore. And like Charles Moore, Charles Moore is the head of the Rectory Society or something. He loves an old rectory. Yes. And I believe Terence O'Neill lived in a Regency rectory. And that's a very bad sign in a person.

56:02Is it not? Never trust a man who owns a Regency rectory. No, they're terrible people. So Terence O'Neill also lacks natural political skills. He's very aloof. He's very shy. He's cold. One of his own ministers said he was distant and uninspiring. I would not have felt like dying in a ditch for him. And I don't think that's ideal. You know, it's not an unfamiliar. I mean, we've had prime ministers like that. In fact, quite recently, we've had a couple of prime ministers like that. But it's not the ideal type for this moment.

56:34So actually, after a couple of years, more conservative Protestants are beginning to wonder whether O'Neill is really the man for the job after all. And he keeps doing things that worry them. So, for example, in 1965, he became the first prime minister of Northern Ireland to welcome the Taoiseach, the prime minister of the Republic of Ireland. This is Sean Lamass. Now, Terence O'Neill said, well, it's good to have this boat, Lamass, here, because we want to build bridges with our neighbours. We want to build bridges

57:04with the Republic. And one of his critics, who was a Presbyterian minister, said, a bridge and a traitor are very much alike, for they both go over to the other side. And the name of the man who said this was the man we heard in that introduction. Oh, Ian Paisley. The Reverend Ian Paisley.

The rise of Ian Paisley

57:23So, he's back in the show. Great. Great to have him back. So, Paisley is really an incredible character. I did worry that he would slightly take over this episode. And maybe that would be no bad thing. He is this colossal figure in the life of Northern Ireland. He goes from the most sort of strident demagoguery to power sharing in the 1990s and 2000s, which just seems absolutely bonkers as a trajectory. And like everyone else in this story, he is profoundly shaped by history.

57:54So, he's born in Armagh in 1926. His father was a Baptist minister and his father had served in Sir Edward Carson's Volunteers. And Ian Paisley himself becomes a Baptist minister and he preached his first sermon when he was 16. Wow. He's a massive bloke. He's like six foot four or something. Do you know what? He looks brilliant in a dog collar. Really, it really suits him. I think dog collars when they're around a scrawny neck look a bit weedy. But with him, he looks like a Celtic warrior

58:25with a talk. I mean, he probably wouldn't like that comparison actually. Yeah. He could look like a Saxon warrior with the talk. He might take that. I don't know. Or a Scottish warrior, I suppose. So, he's this firebrand fundamentalist style. In 1951, he set up his own kind of Calvinist church, the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster. He believes in the literal truth of the Bible. He thinks the established churches of Ulster, which strike most observers as quite hardline conservative churches,

58:57but he thinks they are weak, soft, Romish sellouts. There's an obvious parallel, of course, with southern evangelical preachers in the United States. Later in his life, he does forge very strong links with Bob Jones University in South Carolina. Bob Jones University. Are you aware of Bob Jones University? No. You're not? No. Bob Jones University is a big deal because Bob Jones University was an anti-Catholic, ultra-Protestant university, evangelical.

59:27I can't remember when it was set up, but George W. Bush went and gave a speech there in 2000 when he was campaigning for the Republican nomination. Was it set up by a guy called Bob Jones? Or did they just... Let's think of a funny name. Bob Jones, you laugh at Bob Jones University and you're foolish to do so. It has 3,000 students. It has an endowment of $20 million. And the current chancellor, Bob Jones III. Well, I take it all back. I apologize to Bob Jones. So anyway,

59:57Ian Paisley forged links to Bob Jones University. And so there's a sort of... There are lots of southern evangelicals who love Ian Paisley. His calling card, rather like that of Bob Jones, actually, is absolutely red-hot, evangelical, old-fashioned anti-Catholicism. And if people enjoy anti-Catholic rhetoric, this podcast is the place for it. Should I do it? Do you do it? Yeah, I think you should do it because you do the voice. Through potpourri, the devil has shut up the way to our inheritance.

1:00:30Priestcraft, superstition, and papalism with all their attendant voices of murder, theft, immorality, lust, and incest have blocked the way to the land of gospel liberty.

1:00:49That's... That's... Yeah. That's good. That's his take. That is... I mean, it's a view. Now, people may raise their eyebrows there about priestcraft and its attendant voices of murder and whatnot, but also lust and incest. He takes it very literally, doesn't he? Yeah. Now, there's a lot of talk of lust and incest in Ian Paisley's sermons. He loves all this. So in his first prayer meetings, he used to... Like sort of jack-in-the-box. A nun would pop up and he would say,

1:01:19this nun has escaped from a Catholic convent and she was being... She was the victim of sexual overtures from monks and other nuns. And I have rescued her and she has seen the light and she's going to tell us all about the evils of Catholicism. He had his own newspaper, the Protestant Telegraph, some of its headlines. Priestly murders exposed, children tortured, monks turned out as sadists. Or, probably my favourite thing that he said, when the moderator of the Church of Scotland made a cordial visit

1:01:51to the Pope the headline in the Protestant Telegraph was, the Church of Scotland drunk with the wine of the fornication with the Roman whore. And, of course, it's easy for us to mock and it's very easy and that's what we have been doing. But in Northern Ireland where religious identity is so important, this finds a ready audience. He's a brilliant, brilliant speaker. I mean, that is the thing, isn't he? Yeah. There is a power to those tones. Toast there is. He's speaking with the timbre of John Fox and

1:02:21there's a kind of magnificent rhetorical role to it. But you know who would agree with you? Somebody very unexpected. The actor Liam Neeson. I will find you and I will kill you. You know, that guy, that guy. Yeah, he was an early impression. Very early impression. He was born in a Catholic family who's from County Antrim but he was inspired by Ian Paisley to become an actor. He would go to see Ian Paisley at his gospel hall and he said afterwards you could see

1:02:51this extraordinary performance, the charisma that he had. It was electrifying. And loads of people talk about this. So a man we'll be talking about a little bit later. One of Pais' protégés is a guy called Noel Doherty. He was a teenage fundamentalist, he became a printer and then he became a loyalist paramilitary. He said, I was spellbound by his oratory. I felt this is a man that is doing the Lord's work and I'm going to do it with him. I saw him as a great Ulster man and a second Carson. Again, harking back to the history of the early 1910s. Now, in 60s Britain,

1:03:22people laughed at Ian Paisley and they said he's bonkers, he's a clown, he's a freak, he's a relic or whatever. But actually, we have done so many people like this on this show, different time periods, Savonarola, the Ayatollah Khomeini, imposing, charismatic, striking, rhetorically brilliant speakers who have a gift for giving these electrifying addresses that channel the anxieties

1:03:53of their listeners. Well, I mean, it might sound shocking but Martin Luther King on the progressive side. Yeah, a brilliant speaker. I mean, again, using the potency of biblical rhetoric. And like a lot of these people, Khomeini is a good example, always dresses the same way. Ian Paisley has a costume. He's got a flair for publicity. So in this period, he always wears a black suit. He wears his white clerical collar, which you liken to a talk. And he had something that he doesn't really persist with in later life, which is he has

1:04:23this trademark raincoat. Because the 60s is a great age for a coat. This is a Ganex raincoat. I don't think it's Ganex like Harold Wilson's. It's more old-fashioned than that. It's this huge, because he's so massive, it's this massive like white belted coat that he always wears. He does sometimes wear orangeman sash, doesn't he? Oh, yeah. He'll wear an orange sash when the time calls for it. And he's very good at publicity stunts that are very attractive to the newspapers and they look good on TV. So to give you

1:04:54some of his stunts, he first really came to public attention in 1956. he rescued a 15-year-old Catholic girl called Maura Lyons. Maura Lyons had decided she wanted to join Ian Paisley's church and her parents forbade it. So he and his supporters smuggled her to Scotland. You know, this was a massive story. I mean, they basically kidnapped this teenager and he was absolutely unrepentant. He called a big rally. Whenever he's in trouble, he calls a rally in the Ulster Hall in Belfast

1:05:24and he said, they're saying I'm going to have to go to prison. I would be proud to do time for Protestant liberty. Like, he always says this kind of thing. That was actually Richard Nixon's voice.

1:05:36Two years later, the Queen, he condemns, I mean, he loves putting the boot into the British when they let the side down. The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret made a courtesy call to Pope John XXIII. He said of them, they've been committing spiritual fornication and adultery with the Antichrist. I mean, accusing the Queen Mother of fornication and adultery is strong stuff, I think. Especially with the Antichrist. I mean, it would get you in the papers, wouldn't it? It would. Saying stuff like that. Or,

1:06:06when the Pope died in 1963, Terence O'Neill, a conciliatory gesture, said we will lower the Union Jack as a mark of respect because after all, one in three of our citizens is actually a Catholic. Paisley went absolutely berserk at this. He said, I can't stand the lying eulogies now being paid to the Roman Antichrist by the Iscariots of Ulster. He said, the good news though, he said, the Romish man of sin is now in hell. Well, that's something.

1:06:36Do you remember in the 80s, he disrupted the European Parliament? Yeah, he did. There was lots about the Antichrist and the Whore of Babylon and stuff. He was an MEP at this point, wasn't he? Was he not? And the Pope, Pope John Paul II, came to address the European Parliament and Ian Paisley started, was bundled out of the hall, shouting, I denounce you as Antichrist. He had massive jowls by that point and they would kind of wobble all over his chest. Yeah. Well, anyway, we come to the Westminster General Election of 1964

1:07:07and this story, this really is the politics of Northern Ireland in microcosm.

The 1964 West Belfast riots

1:07:13So,

The 1964 West Belfast riots

1:07:14we're in West Belfast, which is historically over the city's four seats, the most competitive because it contains the heavily Catholic Falls Road, which you mentioned earlier. And one of the candidates was a guy called Liam McMillan who was an IRA man. He'd been active in the border campaign and he is standing as an independent Republican. And in the window of his election office in the Lower Falls, he hangs this big Irish tricolour flag. Now, under the Stormont Flags and Emblems Act of 1954,

1:07:43the RUC are empowered to take down any flags that they think are likely to provoke a breach of the peace. And this legislation was aimed specifically at people flying the Irish flag. But, the police aren't completely stupid. When people fly it in Catholic areas, they generally leave it alone. You know, just let them get on with it if that's what they want to do. Paisley is horrified by this. He calls a big rally and he says, I do not accept that any part of Ulster is Republican. I do not want to see the tricolour flying here. And under this pressure, the RUC

1:08:14decide, fine, we'll take it down. So, on the 28th of September, a group of heavily armed police constables smashed down the door. of this bloke's office and they carry off the flag through a crowd of 2,000 people who were sort of jeering at them and throwing stones at them and stuff. And this kicked off the worst rioting in Ulster since the 1930s. In some ways, you could say this is a possible departure point for the Troubles. There are thousands of people throwing stones and petrol bombs.

1:08:44People set a trolley bus on fire and it ends with hundreds of RUC men armed with batons supported by armoured cars and water cannons physically clearing the Falls Road. And 50 people end up in hospital as well as 18 RUC constables. And there's also copycat rioting or sort of tip-for-tap rioting by the way in Dublin. There's a crowd when they hear this that assemble outside the British Embassy and they have to be held back by the Irish police and they're kind of throwing stones at them. And this is the first

1:09:16point really since the war that the British papers almost noticed Northern Ireland. So the Times, there is a sickening familiarity about all of this, it says. Let's hope we're not returning to the bitterness and savagery of the orange and green vendetta. But from Paisley's point of view, this has been very effective. It's got his name in the newspapers once again. He's made a stand. The Irish flag has come down. He is the champion of Protestant liberty as he would call it. And two weeks later, when the unionist candidate Jim Kilfeder

1:09:46wins West Belfast, he makes a point in his speech of thanking Ian Paisley for his support. So that sets the scene for two years in which Ian Paisley is becoming ever more strident in his attacks on what he sees as the soft, weak, English, untrustworthy Terence O'Neill. So the visit of Sean Lamass from Dublin. This is when Ian Paisley is going around shouting, no mass, no Lamass. And then he gets an even better gift a year later.

1:10:17It's going to be the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. And you said yourself, you know, on the Falls Road, there are all the murals to this day of the Easter Rising. They make a big deal of it. Of course, 1916, if you're a unionist, it's the year of the Somme. So it's like a history war, I guess, being played out in the streets of Belfast. O'Neill says, fine, let the Catholics have a, if they want to have a march to celebrate the Easter Rising 50 years on, of course, we'll let them do it.

1:10:48You know, it would be mad not to. It'll just create great tension if we ban it. Paisley's horrified by this. He tells a rally that by allowing this nationalist march, O'Neill is supporting murder, treason, sedition. Our forefathers suffered from bullets and bombs and won. We will do the same. Ian Paisley loves very violent rhetoric. Then there's another confrontation, June 1966. This time he's attacking the mainstream churches. So the mainstream Presbyterian church are holding their annual assembly.

1:11:19Paisley decides to lead 1,500 supporters to attack them for their Romanizing tendencies, as he puts it. Basically, you could never be hard enough on Catholicism, I think, for the Reverend Ian Paisley. And he leads his supporters through this very Catholic area deliberately. They're attacked by local youths and the melee ends with lots of stone throwing, fighting, people throwing bricks at the RUC, all of this kind of thing. The magistrates then order Paisley to sign

1:11:50a court order to keep the peace, a pledge to keep the peace. And he says, no, I'm not going to do that. And they sentenced him to three months in Crumlin Road prison, and that provoked yet more rioting, thousands of his supporters, going on the rampage, chanting his name, people attacking Catholic-owned businesses, Catholic shops, and so on and so forth. And at this point, Terence O'Neill, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, says, okay, enough. I've lost patience. I'm banning all marches,

1:12:20Protestant or Catholic, for the next three months. The RUC have the power to shut down all meetings with more than three people in. You know, no more of this. And he gives a very, very outspoken speech at Stormont. And he says, Paisley and his supporters call themselves loyalists. But to whom are they loyal? To the Queen, whose personal representatives they revile? To the United Kingdom, in which their fellow citizens view their conduct with a mixture of ridicule and contempt? To Protestantism,

1:12:50many of whose leaders they have personally abused? I mean, it's good stuff. But O'Neill all the time is losing momentum. And it's Paisley who is attracting momentum. And part of this is the sort of ratchet effect of sectarian rhetoric. But it's also the economic context, the fact that people feel anxious about the future, the fact that Northern Ireland feels like it's a changing society and a lot of people don't like that, all of these kinds of things. And all the time, Paisley is attracting more recruits for

1:13:21his church and for its political wing, which was called Ulster Protestant Action. He had set this up, twofold reasons really. One, he'd said this will deter the IRA. But he also said, we want to keep loyal workers in employment in times of deep depression. So there's an economic context to this too. But this is not the only group that he's associated with. There's a whole series of sort of a bewildering variety of factions and subgroups and whatnot. So I mentioned that he had a protégé called Noel Doherty.

1:13:52In April 1966, with the anniversary of the Easter rising coming, Doherty set up another group, a vigilante group, called the Ulster Protestant Volunteers. The stated aim of this group is, we think the IRA are going to launch an uprising on the anniversary of the Easter rising, and we're going to be ready for them. We'll have cells all over Ulster, and they will rise up on command. The name, the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, obviously is to evoke Carsten's Volunteers from 1912. The motto is the same, for God and Ulster.

1:14:23And like Carsten's Volunteers, they really want to get a hold of guns. So Doherty recruits very heavily among the B-specials, the kind of police reservists, because they have been issued with revolvers and submachine guns, and they're allowed to keep their weapons at home. So this is a very useful thing for a paramilitary group. And Doherty said later, my aim was to have a private army, just like Carsten did with the signing of the covenant. So Paisley would have had his own private army, and he would have been a second Lord

1:14:54Carsten. Can I ask, Dominic, would the Protestants in Ulster at this point be ahead of the Catholics in terms of arming? Well, given how many guns the B-specials have, I would say probably yes. And actually, when the IRA re-enter the story, let's say 1970, they don't have that many guns. And getting guns, it's armolites as they end up getting, becomes a real priority for them, because of course, they've made the cardinal error, which you should never do, of giving those guns to the Welsh. Yes, of course. And the Welsh don't want to give them back.

1:15:25Have you ever tried to reclaim a gun from a Welshman? I can't say I have. It's impossible. It can't be done. Okay. Well, that is a mistake then. Yeah. So anyway, Noel Doherty, this guy, is going round in the spring of 1966 trying to get guns and jet ignites. And he comes into contact at this point with another loyalist vigilante group that also looks back to Carson's volunteers. And this is a group called the Ulster Volunteer Force, the UVF. And it's been founded a few months earlier by a group of men

1:15:56who used to meet in the pubs in the working-class Protestant Shankill area. And the chief among them, and a big figure in the story of the Troubles, although he's not so well known in Britain as some of the other figures, is a man called Gusty Spence, who was in his early 30s. Spence's father had been Carson's volunteers, Spence's father had also served in the First World War. Spence himself had been in the British Army, he'd been in Cyprus, he came home to Belfast, he worked as a scaffolder at

1:16:26the Harland and Wolf shipyards. So he sort of ticks all of these different boxes. Spence is a very hard man, he's no stranger to a brawl in a pub or something, he's a very keen member of the Orange Order. People look up to him because he's been in the army. There's a bit of an element I think about him and his friends of the old soldiers who are hanging around in the pub talking about their old days, trying to find something to do. They want a cause basically. So in a way, that's kind of true of Mountbatten. Yeah.

1:16:57You know, all those kind of posh guys in the 70s wanting to a military takeover. General Sir Walter Walker, David Sterling, all of these people. Yeah. Yeah, they look back to the war or something and they say, God, that was brilliant. I wish we could have that back again. Instead of all these grubby political compromises and Harold Wilson's nasty raincoats, all of this. So I think with Gusty Spence and a lot of people like this, and this goes, by the way, for people on the Republican side, for people in the IRA, there was a sense of a romantic history of sort of

1:17:27outlaw violence and adventure and whatnot. It's all about the songs and the fiddles. And the stories and all of that kind of thing. And they are almost willing it back into being because at a time when, you know, jobs are scarce, life seems shabby and disappointing, this would give you a sense of excitement. And of course, if you ally that to the fear of the others, then that becomes a very potent combination.

1:17:58The sense is that there is nothing inevitable about the troubles. People choose it. People choose it. As you say, they will it into existence. Yes, they absolutely do. And I think this search for a cause, and it's a cause that they're very familiar with, is a really important part of the story. Spence said later, there was still a sense, like with the old Ulster volunteers, that you were for the cause. You would fight and die for it. Yes, fight and die for the cause. And that's so widespread

1:18:28among the people who join the different paramilitary groups, whether loyalist or Republican. Fight and die and kill? Well, this is the thing. So, do you remember when we did the series about the Irish War of Independence with Paul Rouse, he said all the ballads are about fighting and dying, but people don't write ballads about fighting and killing, but someone's got to do the killing. Yeah. And actually, this brings us very neatly to May 1966 and arguably the first

The first modern victims

1:18:53casualties of the Troubles. At this point, Spence and his pals have already started petrol bombing, Catholic schools, Catholic shops and so on. In their minds, they are deterring IRA vandalism. This is their excuse. Of course, an external observer would say, this looks very much like drunken sectarian vandalism and bullying to me. On the 7th of May, they decide to target a Catholic-owned pub just off the Shankill Road. They say, loads of Republicans hang out in this pub, we should blow this pub up. And they throw a petrol bomb through

1:19:24what they think is the landlord's window. But actually, it's the house next door. And it belongs to a Protestant grandmother called Matilda Gould, who was 77 years old. She was bedridden with severe arthritis. She can't get out of bed. She's horribly burned by this petrol bomb. And she dies seven weeks later of her injuries. And a lot of accounts point to her as the first victim, first modern victim of the Troubles. And obviously, this was a terrible, a terrible mistake by the UVF to

1:19:55kill a Protestant grandmother. But in a sign of what's to come on both sides, they don't back down. They issue a statement two weeks later. From this day, we declare war against the IRA and its splinter groups. Known IRA men will be executed mercilessly and without hesitation. We solemnly warn the authorities to make no more speeches of appeasement. So there's two issues there. One is the sort of omnipresent, gnawing fear of the IRA that is there in loyalists' minds the whole time.

1:20:26But the IRA are a shadow at this point. They're very quiet at this point. I mean, a loyalist would say, come on, the IRA is still there, aren't they? And yes, they are still there, but even though they're not actively campaigning. But the other thing is the attack on the authorities for appeasement. You know, this rhetoric runs right through the 60s and 70s. And on the 27th of May, the UVF meet to discuss their next attack. They meet in a pub again. They say, there's a bloke nearby called Leo Martin. He's a Republican activist. He's involved with the IRA.

1:20:57Let's go off and shoot him. And they go off to the Falls Road to go and find him, and they can't find him. And on the way back, having not found him, they see walking down the street towards them a bloke who's been in the pub all evening, who's singing Republican songs. He's called John Patrick Scullion. He's 28 years old. And they say, well, this bloke will do. And they stab him and they shoot him. And two weeks later, he dies in hospital of his wounds. And he's the second victim. And then a month later, a third victim.

1:21:28The evening of Saturday, the 25th of June, there are four young Catholics, four young blokes. They've been working in Belfast City Centre, working late. They decide to go for a last pint at the Mulvern Arms just off the Shankill Road because they know it stays open after hours. This pub, the Mulvern Arms, is a Protestant pub. But one of these blokes says, it's fine. I know the landlord. This guy's called Andrew Kelly. He says, okay, I know the landlord. He'll have no problem with us going there. They get to the pub at about midnight. The pub is very busy.

1:21:58The landlord does know him. It's fine. They have no problem getting served. Great. They sit down with their pints. Unknown to them, but sheer bad luck, the drinkers at the next table are Gusty Spence and his gang. And one of the gang said to the police later, the conversation came up about the religion of these fellows. Spence asked the company if they would be Catholics. Spence then went up to the bar beside the four lads to buy a drink. When he returned to our table, he said, I've been listening to their conversation. They're four IRA men.

1:22:29They're IRA men. They will have to go, which they're not. They're not IRA men. They're absolutely not. The four Catholic, young Catholic guys have their pints. A couple of hours later, they leave the pub and leading the way is one of them, Peter Ward, who is 18 years old. And as soon as they get outside, the shooting starts. Andrew Kelly again. He was dead, Peter Ward, when he hit the ground. I was shot too and I dropped down, but they kept on shooting at me. There were four gunmen. They didn't say anything. All I remember is the flashes and the shooting.

1:23:01So one of them, this guy, Peter Ward, is killed. Spence and his gang were arrested and Spence and two others were sent to prison. Now, Paisley always condemns shootings of this kind. He's very happy to ratchet up the tension rhetorically, but he almost always distances himself from actual violence. And that, again, is something, you know, he's not unusual in that regard. There are loads of people in this story who are very happy to kind of stoke the flames. But when the bullets fly,

1:23:32they always say, oh, no, I don't agree with this. Of course. Do you think that's a cynical? Take, or is he acting on genuine principle when he condemns it? That is, I think, something that only he would know. That only he would know. If you're asking me my personal verdict, which not all listeners would agree with, I would say, I think there's an awful amount of cynicism from people in this story. So I'm not just talking about Ian Paisley, I'm talking about Jerry Adams or whoever. There are an awful lot of people who say, I don't really support violence, I

1:24:04don't really encourage it, but everything that they do, seems designed to encourage it because they believe it's in their political interests, frankly. Okay, okay. So, yeah, I would take a very caustic view of such people personally. And actually, to go back, just to finish on Spence and Co., these killings were just so terrible to us. To some people, they give them a kind of outlaw appeal. They seem exciting. One writer later called Spence a loyalist folk hero. And there are lots of loyalist gunmen who joined

1:24:35power ministry, it was later, who say, yes, he was my inspiration, I really looked up to this guy. He was the one person who had the guts to take up the gun and to actually do something positive to defend our people. So I think that's an important thing to bear in mind. In Britain, what do people think of all this? Do you know what? Most people don't even notice. This is the summer of swinging London. It's the summer of England's World Cup win. Most people are completely uninterested in Northern Ireland. It doesn't really fit the mood, these stories. Who cares that some people

1:25:06in a faraway place have been shooting each other if all your thoughts are of Carnaby Street and miniskirts and stuff. But of course, in Belfast, people don't think that way at all. Terence O'Neill had been on a visit to France for the anniversary of the Somme and he cuts it short to come back to Stormont and to denounce the Ulster Volunteer Force. He says, it's abominable to compare yourselves, to Carson and his volunteers. There's no connection between men who were ready to die for the country and the fields of France and this sordid conspiracy of criminals.

1:25:36And he ends with this really dramatic warning, O'Neill. He says, Northern Ireland must choose either the road to progress or return to the pointless violence of the past. When he gives the speech, the London press say, oh, this is great. O'Neill is laying down the gauntlet and people will undoubtedly rally to him because people don't want to go back to the sectarian ages of the past. But the biggest newspaper in Belfast, the Belfast Telegraph, which has a much better sense of the local mood, is much

1:26:07less optimistic. It says, Ulster is in danger of being thrown back into a dark past thanks to those who have been sowing dragon's teeth and do not care how terrible the harvest may be. But Tom, that harvest will be much more terrible than anybody realises. So next time, we'll be looking at the civil rights marches of 1968, the fighting in the streets of Derry, your hero, Jim Callaghan, deciding to send in the troops after a lot of

1:26:39prevarication and the IRA preparing to reemerge from the shadows. So club members can hear that episode and the entire series. And if you're not a member, you can, of course, get membership at therestishistory.com. And as we may have mentioned before, membership does come with an incredible rate of supplementary benefits, including our fantastic newsletter, which includes guest historian essays, book

1:27:10extracts, quizzes, prizes, just nonstop fun. So all of that and more in your inbox every Friday. So, Dominic, another excellent reason to become a member. So many reasons. So many reasons. Anyway, thank you, everyone, for listening. Thank you, Dominic. And bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Welcome to Populous

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