699. The Troubles: Return of the IRA (Part 3)

Introduction and Sponsor Messages

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Live Show Announcement

1:44Hello. Now, before we go to today's episode, I have some insanely exciting news for you. On Friday, the 4th of September, Dominic and I will be forming live at the South Bank Centre in London. And better yet, we will be doing something completely new. Something that no one has ever heard before on The Rest is History. The ultimate Victorian adventure. So to give you just a little taste, we will be in Africa in 1868.

2:18The Emperor of Abyssinia, Theodore II, has kidnapped 59 Europeans and he is holding them hostage after descending into this demented rage because one of his fellow monarchs, Queen Victoria, has declined to answer his letters. I'm not making this up. And the British, after months and months of fruitless waiting, have lost patience and they have sent a military expedition under General Napier halfway around the world to save them.

2:50An expedition that includes thousands of mules, loads of elephants, and they've even had to build their own railway across the highlands of Abyssinia or Ethiopia to try to get to his mountain citadel. It is a bonkers story. It's an absolutely extraordinary, full-blown British imperial epic full of ludicrous behaviour, mad characters, colossal moustaches, everything that we love on The Rest is History. It is, though I say so myself, a guaranteed classic in the making.

3:23So you're probably thinking, how can I get a ticket for this extraordinary Victorian adventure? Here is the answer. If you want to get a ticket for this event on Friday, the 4th of September, all you have to do is to go to TheRestIsHistory.com. It is as simple as that. You maybe have to part with some money, but it will be money very, very, very, very well spent. See you there.

Ted Kennedy Washington Speech

3:45Down through the centuries, the people of Ireland have been forced to wage a continuing and arduous struggle for freedom and equality. For generations, division and despair have scarred the countryside. Often alone, often without notice from others throughout the world,

4:17brave men and women of Ireland have given their lives for the principles they hold dear. Today, the Irish struggle again. The crisis now, however, is especially serious, because the hate and bitterness are taking a new and far more drastic turn. Ulster teeters on the brink of a civil war that threatens to engulf all of Ireland. The government of Ulster rules by bayonet and bloodshed.

4:51The soaring toll of death and violence is uncontrolled. Thousands flee their homes in terror. Businesses are bombed and factories close down. Barbed wire roadblocks imprison every street corner. Young children stand on curb stones and shout shrill insults filled with hate. Ulster is becoming Britain's Vietnam.

5:24So that was Senator Edward Kennedy taking time off from driving young women into tidal ponds and then pretending it never happened to make a helpful intervention on the plight of Northern Ireland. In the United States Congress on the 20th of October 1971. And Dominic, this was a speech that went down in Britain like a cup of cold sick. And I suppose the members of the British population who particularly enjoyed it

5:55were the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland itself. But having said that, it did go down very well with Catholics in Northern Ireland, didn't it? And indeed in Ireland more generally. Yeah, absolutely. So, hello everybody. That was a remarkable attempt on Ted Kennedy's voice there. I thought, ironically, given their antagonism… It actually sounded more like Jimmy Carter. Yeah, I know. I finally got there after months of practice. I was trying to make it nasal and for some reason it went Southern.

6:26It's great to have Jimmy Carter back on the show, isn't it? Anyway, so this speech, yeah, kicked off an absolute firestorm of controversy. So, the British Embassy in Washington issued a kind of rare statement of rebuke. It said, our troops in Northern Ireland are there to stop murder and bloodshed. And actually, if a majority of people in Northern Ireland want to join the Republic of Ireland, we will not stand in their way. We're not holding them by bayonets and bullets and so on and so forth. And Kennedy's intervention is a sign, I think, of just how toxic Northern Ireland had become for Britain, for the image of Great Britain in the early 1970s.

7:01And his comparison with Vietnam, which was incredibly controversial in late 1971, given what was happening in Vietnam, was it accurate? Well, it's not that far-fetched. So, at this point, at the end of 1971, about 200 people have been killed. Of course, nothing by the numbers being killed in Vietnam. But the spectacle of an army trapped in a quagmire, you know, where it's hard to tell friend from foe, where there's no political solution in sight. I mean, there's a lack of napalm, isn't there?

7:31There is a lack of napalm, but there is the sense of a conflict spiralling out of control and politicians haplessly struggling to keep up. I mean, there are definite, you know, dissimilarities, no question. Sure. But rather, as the Americans, when they first went into Vietnam, thought, well, this will be done and dusted quite quickly and we'll be able to go home. Similarly, when the British sent in the army, as we heard last time, in the late summer of 1969, and of course, they sent troops to protect, largely to protect the Catholic populations of Belfast and London Derry.

8:02They thought, well, hopefully we'll be home, not by Christmas, but within a few months. And the story of today's episode is how all of that went wrong. How did things become so bitter and so murderous so quickly in a way that would lead outside observers to make a comparison with what was going on in Vietnam?

Ted Heath Becomes Prime Minister

8:21So let's kick off by reminding ourselves where we got to last time. So we had Northern Ireland established in the 1920s with this deep sort of fracture line, Protestant majority, Catholic minority. The Catholic minority feeling they're treated like second class citizens and everything from jobs to housing. In the first episode last week, we talked about how things started to spiral downhill in the mid 1960s. Terence O'Neill's attempts to modernize, Ian Paisley's inflammatory kind of rhetoric, the anniversary of the Easter Rising, the first killings by the Ulster volunteer force in 1966.

8:59And then last episode, the emergence of the Catholic civil rights movement, this sort of increasing sense of confrontation, the Battle of the Bogside, as it was called in Derry, and Wilson and Callaghan agreeing to send in the troops. So let's pick up the story in the mid-summer of 1970. And specifically, we're on the 21st of June. Now, Harold Wilson, with his shiny Ganex raincoat, is out. He's gone. He's gone from the story. He has lost the election.

9:30He lost it three days earlier on the 18th of June. And so, Tom, we welcome back to the show a great yachtsman, a great organ scholar, but a man who hates a traditional county. And that man is Ted Heath. The worst man in history, apart from Jimmy Carter. You think Ted Heath is the worst man than Jimmy Carter? What he did to Rutland is unforgivable. Yeah. And the ridings. Mad counties. Mad counties. And Heath is personally to blame. I think that's the takeaway from this series.

10:00So Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party, has just won the general election. He hasn't talked at all about Northern Ireland. He's talked about overhauling the British economy to get rid of all the lame ducks in industry. But, I mean, he's a conscious moderniser, isn't he? So he would have no interest in Northern Ireland, which he would see as a kind of antediluvian 17th century bog. Completely. Completely. And, of course, he wants to be friendly to Britain's neighbours because he wants to get us into the common market. So Britain will join along with Ireland in 1973.

10:31Ted Heath, it would astound you to hear, given what we were saying about Britain's politicians in the last episodes, has absolutely no knowledge of Northern Ireland and no interest in it whatsoever. So on the 21st of June, which is where we're kicking off, the Cabinet Secretary has the excellent name of Sir Burke Trend. Sir Burke Trend. Yeah. That's his name. That's an insane name. Well, that's his name. American style name. I'm never going to be rude about an American name again. So Sir Burke Trend sends him this briefing document and says, OK, this is the situation.

11:02You know, I'm going to tell you everything you need to know about Northern Ireland. And Sir Burke says to him, it's now 10 months since we sent in the army and we hope to bring them home quickly. But obviously that ship has sailed. And he says there are basically two scenarios. The best case scenario is that things stay exactly as they are. And I quote stabilized by the presence of British troops and trembling on the edge of disaster, but never quite tipping over. And Burke Trend says the downside is that was going to be very expensive in terms of men and money. However, that's the rosy scenario.

11:34The worst possibility as follows. It could get worse and finally tip over the edge. The Northern Ireland government proving incapable of holding the position. Civil war breaking out within the province and Dublin being compelled to intervene. This would present us with a political and constitutional crisis of the first order. I mean, Dominic, you compared it. Well, Edward Kennedy did to Vietnam. Yeah. But actually what it sounds like is Iraq or Afghanistan. The briefings that American presidents were probably getting in the wake of the attempt to stabilize those governments.

12:10Yeah, you're not wrong. And actually, which we will see, there are attempts to basically do a sort of general David Petraeus type surge, you know, in this similar kind of debates. Do we get out? Do we put in more troops? What do we do? You know, do we spend good money after bad, as it were? Yeah. It's not a bad comparison at all. So that's the picture.

Rise of the Provisional IRA

12:30But what Sir Burke Trend and Ted Heath do not know is that at this point, a new factor is about to enter the equation. Now, one group that we actually haven't talked about that much, which may surprise some listeners, is the Irish Republican Army, the IRA. And the reason that, as we've talked about before, they had this border campaign that failed by 1962. The leadership of the IRA abandoned guerrilla violence. They put on their polo necks and they turned to kind of Marxism and hanging around with academics.

13:02And they thought about, you know, they thought that the future of this movement is a workers' alliance to beat capitalism as well as imperialism. And that meant that during all the disturbances in 1969 that we talked about last time, the IRA are actually quite quiet. And graffiti went up in Belfast that summer. IRA equals I ran away. Now, if you're an older IRA man, if you've been active in that guerrilla movement since, let's say, the 1940s, even longer, you are very embarrassed by this.

13:35In fact, you're positively furious. So these older IRA veterans, often they're kind of cultural conservatives, very strongly Catholic. They don't have any truck with the Marxism and whatnot. They're really fed up with this. They're like, why are we not getting stuck in? And then the other group who I think are really important are the younger militants, often in their, you know, late teens, early twenties. People have seen action in the street fighting in Belfast and Derry in 1969. And they similarly think the IRA has basically vacated its historic role as the defender of the Catholic people of Northern Ireland.

14:13You know, someone should take up arms to defend our people against the loyalists and the RUC and all of this. And this comes to a head in December 1969. There's a secret meeting of disaffected IRA men in Belfast. And they agree that they will split from the Marxist leadership and they will set up their own rival IRA executive and army council, as they're called. And they call themselves the provisional IRA, partly to echo the text of the proclamation in the Easter Rising of 1916, which had set up a provisional government of Ireland.

14:48And what happens to the original IRA? Well, they still hang around. They have the official IRA. And are they still a going concern today? They effectively wound up their operations in the early 1970s, but they are still active in the period of this series. Right. So they have gunmen. They have, you know, they have weapons. They have seminars. Yeah. Well, they become radicalized to try and compete with the provisionals, actually. So they sort of take up the gun as well. But they end up merging, do they, basically? No, they don't merge. I mean, there's also the INLA, which we don't need to get into them.

15:21You know, this is the nature of paramilitary groups. And to splinter. Yeah. Of course. So 10 days after this, so the provisional IRA issued their first public statements and they said, we're going to defend our people in the north. We're going to fight for the full political freedom of Ireland. And then early January 1970, the political wing of the IRA. So it always had this allied political party called Sinn Féin that split into official and provisional factions on the same lines.

15:51And of course, as anyone who remembers the 1970s and 80s will know, it is the provisional IRA, the provos, that they are the people who dominate the headlines in Britain and in Ireland in the next 30 years or so. So just to talk about them, because they are the group that everyone knows as the IRA. A couple of really important points. Sometimes when you're reading about them, you will see people say, well, they were basically set up as a defensive organization. They were set up to defend Catholic communities from attacks by Protestant mobs in 1969.

16:27And that's where the provisionals came from. This is really just not true at all. So almost all of the original leaders of the provisionals, we'll talk about them a bit later, but a guy called Sean McSteven, Ruria Brady, Davey O'Connell, Billy McKee. These are longstanding IRA men. These are people who have been in the IRA for 10, 20, 30 years. A lot of them have served time in prison in Britain or in Ireland. These are paramilitaries who are, you know, they believe in using force to get a united Ireland.

17:01Now, even younger people associated with the IRA come from longstanding Republican families. Let's look at one person who very, very vigorously denies that he was ever part of the IRA. Can you guess who this person is? Is this Gerry Adams by any chance? It is Gerry Adams. Yes. So we're just putting on the record that he does deny he was in the IRA. He absolutely denies he was in the IRA. The strange thing about Gerry Adams is Gerry Adams denies that he was in the IRA, but every single academic historian who writes about this believes that he was.

17:33So it's hard to know who to believe there, Tom. So Gerry Adams was 21 years old when the provisionals were established. Gerry Adams himself has always said, I was drawn into Republican activism through the civil rights movement. I was radicalized to join Sinn Féin because I was so shocked by the loyalist violence. That's important, isn't it, for the framing of the message for American audiences? Because if you cast yourself as being on the side of the civil rights movement, I mean, who would object to that? Yeah, who would disagree with that?

18:03Now, it's important to say what Gerry Adams is saying here about being radicalized this way is just not true. Gerry Adams comes from a Republican family in West Belfast. His grandfather was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the 1920s. His father was in the IRA. His uncles were in the IRA. His father was jailed for an ambush on a police patrol. So let's assume that Gerry Adams is telling the truth that he was never part of the IRA. The puzzle for me is why he wasn't.

18:33Because given his background, it would be very strange for him not to have joined it, I would say. However, you know, it's a funny old world, isn't it? So maybe he wasn't. Now, the other point is about violence. The provisional IRA, unlike the, say, the civil rights movement, are not interested in reforming the Stormont state. No, they want to destroy it, don't they? They don't want to destroy it. They want to bring down Stormont, they want to drive out the British, and they want a united Ireland. And the way that they're going to do that is what they call euphemistically physical force.

19:04And that is violence. And they're completely upfront about that. So this is the Republican news in September 1970. It says, the Irish people should realize that British imperialists do not respect, fear, or pay much attention to people who beg, grovel, or crawl for favors or concessions. In other words, they only respect you if you fight back. Now, of course, the IRA say, and they say this throughout, there are going to be civilian casualties. But this is a war. That is inevitable.

19:34It is worth it. You know, we are going to be doing terrible things, but it is worth it to get what we want, and the end will justify the means. And that is why, when you get to the late 1990s, that is why the older Republicans often feel so betrayed by the Good Friday Agreement and the deal that the IRA ended up taking. And by the older Republicans, you mean people who are from a generation before? Yeah, but also people who've been in there since the 70s. If you joined in 1970, right, and you're 20 years old, you are, what, getting into your 50s, maybe, by the time it all comes to an end?

20:08And the best part of your life, you know, your prime years are behind you, and you've spent those prime years doing things that you know are terrible things. You have killed innocent people, but you did it because you believed the end justified the means, and the end was a united Ireland. And now your leaders tell you, actually, you did it so that you could get into coalition with Ian Paisley and run the waterboard. And you say, what? I mean, we waded through blood. We descended into hell. We basically, you know, sold our immortal souls for this.

20:40And that's why people feel so aggrieved when Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness do the deal. I mean, you mentioned hell and immortal souls in that. I mean, do you mean that metaphorically, or are we talking about people who genuinely think that they have risked their immortal souls? I think there are quite a lot of people who are very pious Catholics. We know for a fact that a lot of IRA men were pious Catholics. I mean, they believe in this stuff. You know, they live in a world where they're surrounded by religious iconography. The iconography of the Irish Republican movement is very, very heavily Catholic.

21:12I think when you read interviews with people, when they're looking back at their lives, they're looking about what they did. They're obviously, you know, they're steeped in a kind of religious culture. And I think a lot of people did feel, you know, we did terrible things, but we did it in the name of greater good. Yeah. And we've been sold out. I mean, this obviously always puzzles people. Why did the continuity IRA or the real IRA or whatever, why didn't they just get around the table and accept the Good Friday agreement? Well, I think this is why, because they just felt betrayed.

21:42Anyway, we're jumping ahead too much. Back to early 1970. So they've been set up, the provisionals, their priority is to get guns, and they have powerful friends to help them do it. So first of all, they have friends in the Republic of Ireland. This is an extraordinary story, actually. I don't think it's terribly well known in Britain. In 1969, the Irish government had put aside £100,000 as a sort of relief fund for Catholic families driven from their homes in the north. And basically, at least two Irish government ministers, so Charles Hockey, later the prime minister of Ireland, the boss, the Taoiseach, yeah, and a guy called Neil Blaney.

22:20They collaborated with a Belgian businessman who had been in the SS to use this money. They diverted the money to buy guns in West Germany, and they smuggled them to the IRA. This was a huge deal in the Republic of Ireland. There's a huge court case about it. And then the other place is America. Of course, lots of Irish Americans, lots of Irish Americans with very sort of misty-eyed memories of the old country, an instinctive suspicion and dislike of Britain. Including Ted Kennedy. Including Ted Kennedy.

22:52And you have groups like NORAID, most famously. They raise money from Irish Americans. A lot of that money goes to buy Armalite rifles, which were made in California. And then they are smuggled across the Atlantic, including, amazingly, they would smuggle Armalites across on the QE2. Oh, so like the Lusitania. Yeah, exactly. So by the summer of 1970, the provisionals have a pretty serious arsenal. They've got assault rifles. They've got semi-automatics. They've got about 1,000 active members, and that's people who are going to go and fight on the streets, but it's also people running safe houses and things.

23:25They make their grand entrance at the end of June 1970.

Short Strand and Falls Curfew

23:29Now, Heath, Ted Heath has an unparalleled record, I think, in modern British history of making well-intentioned but disastrous political miscalculations. So his first one, this is the summer of 1970, are you going to ban the traditional Unionist marches, the Orange Order marches and things? And he says, no, I'm not going to do that because I've just come in as prime minister. I don't want to alienate Protestant opinion in Northern Ireland. But also, you said he doesn't know anything about Northern Ireland.

24:00No, he doesn't. It's true. I mean, to be fair, he's following advice. He did end up living in Salisbury, so I'm going to occasionally rally to his cause. Okay, we're going to stick up for Ted Heath. Yeah. Well, the instinctive thing, I suppose, you think, if I don't know much about this, I'm not going to intervene. I'll just be hands-off for the time being. One British official in Belfast said, this was the greatest single miscalculation I've ever seen made in the course of my whole life, which is quite a big statement. And actually, he's probably right, because on Saturday, the 27th of June, there are huge Orange Order parades across Belfast.

24:33The inevitable fighting and rioting escalates into sort of massive street fighting and gun battles. And the fiercest fighting ends up being at a place called the Short Strand, which is a Catholic enclave in East Belfast. And it's around a church, St. Matthew's Church, Catholic Church. And this is where the Provisionals first entered the story. There's a small group of them. They're armed with M1 carbines. They're positioned around the church. And there's the scene of them kind of blasting away at Loyalist petrol bombers and the RUC.

25:04And about 30 people are injured. Three people are killed. Two of them Protestants, one of them Catholic. It's not one of the biggest street battles of the Troubles, but I would argue it's one of the most important, because it's the moment that first really establishes the Provo's street cred. Everybody says, they're back, you know. These are the people who are going to stand up to the authorities and defend, you know, Catholic areas and stuff. So Ted Heath's made one bad mistake. And just days later, the authorities make an even bigger one, which gives the IRA an even bigger gift.

25:37So on the late afternoon of Friday, the 3rd of July, so this is what, not even a week later, British armoured personnel carriers move into the Lower Falls area of Belfast, kind of Catholic working class area. And they're going in to seal off one particular street called Balkan Street, which is this kind of brick terraced narrow street. And they've been tipped off that there is an official IRA, arms cash at number 24. So the official IRA, Tom, the Marxists, the Polonek people.

26:07And the British go in and they find the guns. But as they come out of the house, there's this crowd outside, very angry, and people start rocking the armoured personnel carriers. And then people start throwing stones and petrol bombs and stuff. And the soldiers who are Scots guards, they fire tear gas at the crowds, and then they start calling for reinforcements. And then both wings of the IRA turn up en masse and start shooting. So it's a very chaotic scene. And they're not kind of shooting each other. They're fighting side by side. No, they're not shooting each other. No, I wouldn't put it past them.

26:38So there's this huge kind of street battle. There's tear gas. There are nail bombs. There are petrol bombs. There are snipers. There are people building barricades. Both sides are firing hundreds and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. And at 10 o'clock that evening, the British commander in Northern Ireland, Sir Ian Freeland, he says, I want the whole Falls area sealed off, and I want it put under indefinite curfew, basically put it under lockdown. And so you have this scene now. It's 10 o'clock at night, and you have helicopters flying over the area from which there are kind of clouds of smoke emerging.

27:14And the helicopters have loud speakers. And from the loud speakers, a kind of clipped British voice is telling people, get off the streets or you will be shot. This area is now under curfew. So it's very like, you know, sort of apocalypse now scene, smoke, tear gas, burning fires, and helicopters with this voice coming out with this apocalyptic message. And then for the next two days, thousands of British soldiers, supported by helicopters, supported by armored cars, move through the Falls area.

27:47They are forcibly searching the houses for weapons. They go through house after house. They arrest more than 300 people, and they actually find hundreds of guns and bombs, loads of ammunition and stuff like that. But this is a terrible reputational blow to the British Army, because there are afterwards tons of stories about the soldiers behaving badly and wrecking people's houses. So this is one local activist. Holy statues were smashed on the floor. Family portraits and pictures were smashed.

28:19Fit furniture was ripped and overturned. Windows were broken and doors off the hinges. Some of the people who'd been beaten were still lying there, bloody and bruised. Now, the Army said afterwards, this is all untrue. This is just Republican propaganda. This is rubbish. Our British boys behaved impeccably. But I'm not sure about that. No journalists were allowed in the curfew zone at all. And the Army's own log sheets show that the troops were instructed beforehand to, quote, be aggressive.

28:50I think these stories, you know, some of them might be exaggerated, but there's clearly an element of truth in it. I mean, soldiers under pressure, searching people's houses. Are they really going to wipe their feet on the doormat? I don't think so. So presumably, the people whose houses are being searched, they're not giving them cups of tea anymore or anything like that. No, no, no. So you're dead right. When they arrived in 1969, it was fish and chips and cups of tea. But right now, from this point, you know, Catholic housewives will spit in the soldiers' faces. Kids throw stones at them.

29:20And the provisional IRA have been watching all this with delight because basically they know that it's turned the local community against the Army. And they're going to get a flood of recruits, which they do. So we're only a couple of weeks into Ted Heath's premiership. I mean, this has all happened very quickly. And it's taken a very, very dark turn. And a few days after this, our old friend Sir Burke Trend is back. And he discusses this with Heath and Heath's Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling. We shall be talking about Reginald Maudling later on.

29:51Great character. Exactly. And they agree, listen, if things continue to deteriorate at this rate, we are going to have to suspend the Parliament of Northern Ireland. And we're going to have to send in a British team to run Northern Ireland ourselves. But they do not want to do that. They absolutely do not want to do that. No, they don't. So that would be the nuclear option to abolish Stormont and introduce direct rule. But he doesn't want to do that. He's only been Prime Minister three weeks. He wants to give the Northern Ireland Prime Minister, James Chichester-Clark, a chance to sort this out.

30:22And remember from last time, James Chichester-Clark. I mean, this is going to sound very harsh. I hope his descendants don't listen. I think he was useless. He's from the landed gentry. He's a farmer. He's kind of very slow and plodding and unimaginative. Of course, he's trapped between the nationalists on the one hand and the kind of Paisley hardliners on the other. But he doesn't have any of the political skills to deal with it. I said that also at this meeting is Heath's Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling. And we should talk about him a little bit.

30:53There is possibly a case that the British might have handled Northern Ireland more sensitivity in the early 70s with a different Home Secretary. Because Reginald Maudling, who I actually really like, is a truly terrible person to be in charge of the Home Office. So, to explain to people who he was, he'd been the runner-up to Ted Heath in the Tory leadership. You should approve of him, Tom, because he had a first in classics from Oxford. And he'd been in RAF intelligence during the war. And he's suave.

31:24He's witty. He's very liberal-minded for a Tory. He's very clever. He's incredibly affable. On the other hand, he is louche. He is incredibly lazy. He is greedy. And he is fantastically corrupt. And he's also a massive, massive boozer. So, if I tell you his daily intake, he would have brandy for breakfast, gin at mid-morning. And then at lunch, he'd have wine and digestif. And then for the rest of the day, he'd just be as the mood took him.

31:56I mean, he'd be asleep, actually, for the rest of the day. And Reginald Maudling, he's basically one of those people. He's the ultimate sort of 70s British politician. Massive glasses. He's quite overweight. He's flecked with dandruff. And he's stinking of gin. And he absolutely despises Northern Ireland. And he's not afraid to show it. So, when he made his first trip to Northern Ireland, which was just before the Falls curfew, he made it absolutely obvious to everybody that he didn't want to be there. And he was incredibly bored. And even the British military commander said afterwards, he seems, and I quote, completely

32:31ignorant. And when his plane took off, he infamously, as soon as it took off, and he knew he was off Northern Irish soil, he said very loudly, for God's sake, bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country. So, anyway, the story of the next nine months is these men, Heath, Maudling, Chichester Clark, basically totally out of their depth, dithering and dallying while the situation gets steadily worse. So, a good example of how it's getting worse in a small way, you mentioned the cups of

33:04tea. There had been a lot of fraternization between the army and the locals at the end of 1969. The army had even organized kind of clubs for local kids, trips and stuff for them. They'd organized a New Year's Eve disco with local girls in Derry. But a year on, things are completely different. Girls who now fraternize with British soldiers are punished for it. There's a soldier in Peter Taylor's book about the army in Northern Ireland, Brits, it's called. Brilliant book. A soldier tells him about finding a girl tied to a lamppost and she had literally been,

33:36her head had been shaved and she'd literally been tarred and feathered. And he said the tar ran down her neck and the front of her breast and her hands were badly affected where she'd been clawing at her face to get it off and the feathers were stuck to the tar. We had to cut her away from the lamppost and take her to hospital. So, this is the sort of context.

First British Soldier Casualty

33:55And then in February 1971, trouble breaks out in an area of North Belfast called the New Lodge area. And this is a Catholic area. It's very densely populated. And the army believed that the provisionals had been stockpiling guns on the estate and had been launching search missions. There were days of clashes and these escalate on the evening of the 5th of February into street fighting. The army sent in a unit of Royal Artillery. They get there, it's a chaotic scene, bricks, petrol bombs, bottles, all of this. And then as one soldier described it, it's like the crowd parts, like the sort of parting

34:29of the Red Sea. As he describes it, this chap just popped out with a machine gun and opened up. And this chap is Billy Reid of the Provisional IRA. He's got a Stirling submachine gun. He shoots four soldiers wounded. And he shoots gunner Robert Curtis through the heart. And Curtis becomes the first British soldier to die in Northern Ireland. He was from Newcastle. He was 20 years old. He left a pregnant wife who was also 20.

34:59An interview by the press afterwards, his father said, I have no idea what my son died for. And his widow, his wife, said, our boys should be brought home immediately. We should leave the mobs to fight it out among themselves. Now, already at this point, a lot of people in Britain agree with this. So if you look at the polls, in 1969, most people had favoured the decision to introduce troops. But even in early, you know, the early 1970s, so 70s, 71, more than half of the electorate

35:30think that their troops should be brought home. And Northern Ireland should just be abandoned. And this is what the government is kind of contending with all through this story. But Heath's cabinet have absolutely no intention of pulling out. So if you look at the cabinet minutes after this, they've lost their first, you know, British army casualty. And the cabinet minutes say they know, and I quote, many people would favour abandoning the province to its fate, a course which the government could not contemplate. And the reason they couldn't contemplate it is they say international opinion would damn us for it.

36:01Ted Kennedy wouldn't, but a lot of other people would. And the result would be the sectarian bloodbath. And they agree a common line. And they say, this is not just about communal strife. It's not about rebellion against political injustice. This is the outcome of deliberate terrorism by the IRA. Now, through this story, we have been quite down on British government policy, and we will probably continue to be because Heath goes on to make some absolutely cataclysmic mistakes.

36:32But I think it is actually worth stopping just to say for a moment that he's not entirely wrong about this. So, the conflict obviously has deep roots. And among the causes, undoubtedly, are British government neglect and incompetence, and of course, the discriminatory nature of the Stormont state. But just on the British side, Heath's intentions, I think, are pretty admirable. Heath wants to see a reformed, non-sectarian, Northern Irish state that does not discriminate.

37:08Everybody's treated equally, and nobody gets shot. And actually, he's open to all kinds of different things. He's open to links with Dublin. He's open to rethinking Northern Ireland's constitutional status. He will consider anything. And historians who've written about this almost uniformly say the Heath government is much more open-minded when it comes to Northern Ireland than any previous British government had ever been. Now, as for the army, the army made terrible mistakes, and we'll be talking about one in particular next time. And the army, of course, have all kinds of prejudices and blind spots and preconceptions

37:42and whatnot. Worth saying about the army in Northern Ireland, I mean, the army do not go in to kill people. I mean, they are trained killers, but they've been sent as peacekeepers. And the army, deep down, would love to go home. I mean, no one likes being sent to Northern Ireland. There are, however, people in this series of whom that's not actually true. They do want to kill people. So, we saw some in the first episode, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the people who go out from pubs and carry out sectarian murders, the provisional IRA. They actively want to increase the tension.

38:14They haven't imported guns just to exhibit them on their walls. They've imported guns to use them. They actually do want to kill people. And the reason they want to kill people is not necessarily because they're in averted commerce monsters. It's because they think it is politically right to do so. We will get what we want. And I think that is a big difference between them and Ted Heath. I mean, Ted Heath doesn't want to kill anybody. People do get killed. But, I mean, it's not necessarily what he wanted. I mean, he had been at the Nuremberg rally, hadn't he? He'd fought in the Second World War.

38:45So, he is aware of how deep hatreds can run. But even so, in this, there does seem a failure of imagination on his part to contemplate, I guess, that within the United Kingdom, there could be hatreds so violent that there are substantial parts of different populations that want to pull the whole house down. That's the problem, isn't it? Because once you reach that stage with people, there's no negotiations really that can solve it. Well, we're actually, I mean, you're right to make that point about negotiations because

39:18you're anticipating what we'll talk about in the next episode. When they do have negotiations, they have negotiations with the IRA. And it turns out that the IRA basically say, well, actually, we'd prefer to carry on fighting and killing than, you know, we'd rather not do a deal, actually. Yeah. So, back to the story, the early months of 1971. If anybody thinks that Gunnar Curtis's death will bring an end, they've got a shock coming. Because four days after that, five BBC engineers are killed by a landmine in County Tyrone, planted by the IRA, meant for an army patrol.

39:48A week later, a second soldier, John Laurie, who was 22, is killed by the IRA. And then two RUC men, two policemen in the Ardoin are killed by IRA snipers. And then you have the event that I think shocks people in Britain more than any other.

The Murder of Three Soldiers

40:06A massive story in March, 1971. So, it's Wednesday, the 10th of March. There were three young men from the Royal Highland Fusiliers, and they'd gone out to have a drink. As soldiers were allowed to do in those days, they were allowed to go out in civilian clothes to have a pint. And they went to Mooney's Bar in the city centre. And they were Dougal McCaughey, who was 23, and two brothers, John and Joseph McCaig, who were 17 and 18. I mean, the ages of the people in this story, they're so young, a lot of them.

40:39I mean, they're basically the age of schoolchildren, some of them. So, they're off duty. They're in civilian clothes, and they're in this pub, and a bloke comes up to them, and he says, oh, you British Army soldiers. I'm actually a former soldier. Let me buy you some drinks. And he buys them some drinks, and they get chatting. They chat for a bit. And then this bloke says, oh, do you want to come to a party? There's a party, all the rest of it. And they go off. They're due back at their barracks at about 6.30. They don't show up. That's not uncommon, because it wasn't unknown for soldiers to go out, have a few pints, lose

41:13track of time, start talking to some girls or whatever, and then they come back late. They get into trouble, of course, but it's not unusual. But a few hours later, some children were playing in fields at a place called White Bray, which was north of Belfast, and they saw something in a field. They saw a pile of something in a field. They went over the children, and it was the bodies of these three Highlanders, and they'd been shot, all of them in the back of the head. And more than any other incident, this really cuts through, because they have, of course, been shot by the IRA.

41:45One Belfast paper said, after all the horrors of recent weeks and months, Ulster people have almost lost the capacity for feeling shock. But the ruthless murder of three defenseless young soldiers has cut to the quick. And in Britain, there's a memoir by a paratrooper called Harry McCallion, who was a working-class Catholic from Scotland. And he was stationed in Britain. He writes in his memoir of the silence that fell over his kind of barracks when he and his comrades heard about these killings.

42:16And he writes, I looked at the faces of the older soldiers around me. I read on them the same thing. Just wait until we get across. For me and for everybody at the table, that was the major turning point. And so the risk is that the British Army is also starting to be radicalised, I suppose. And that must, I guess, then be a factor in British governmental calculations. So who knows what will happen? Will the British government consider pulling out or will they double down?

42:49A critical moment, Dominic, and we will find out what the British government decides after the break.

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44:37It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. WISE uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees. So, when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee, and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the WISE app today. Be smart. Get wise. T's and C's apply. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Goalhangers. The rest is science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

45:10When 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, for 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

45:45chemotherapy nearly halved the number of children losing their hearing. And today, the treatment combination is 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. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Rest is History.

Escalating Violence and Internment

46:12It is March 1971. Three young Highland Fusiliers have been murdered. And with that, the mood on the streets of Belfast and in the army barracks as well, I guess, is darker than it's ever been. So you, before the break, described the horror of the army and the condemnation of the newspapers. But that's not a kind of universal perspective, is it? Because there are obviously elements within Northern Ireland, and I would guess Ireland

46:45more generally, who think, well, all's fair in love and war. They had it coming. Yeah. So there's a wonderful book actually about Northern Ireland in the 70s called Watching the Door by an Irish columnist, quite controversial Irish columnist actually, Kevin Myers, who was born in Leicester, but he was from Irish Catholic parents. At the time, he was working as a journalist for RTE, the Irish TV service. And he remembers in this book that when these three guys were killed, among his Republican contacts, there was a mood of, quote, quiet satisfaction.

47:18People would say to him, well, you know, they belong to the British Army. I mean, they were very young, but they were British Army soldiers. So they had what was coming to them. And at one point, his driver, who's a Catholic, says to him, the war is coming and it's going to be serious. The provis have fresh gear coming from America. There will be people dying in this town who have never effing died before. And that sounds very melodramatic. But actually, I think at this point, a lot of people genuinely thinking there's going to be a civil war. I mean, remember, there are a lot of people alive, Tom, who remember the violence of the

47:541920s. You know, it's only 50 years before. So there'll be people who might have been 20 in the 1920s and are now 70 and are able to tell their children and grandchildren about it and probably have done for years. There are nationalists who've never felt safe in Northern Ireland. There are unionists who have always believed that the Catholics are a kind of fifth column and the IRA were poised to attack them. And I think for both of these groups, they say, well, this is it. The decisive showdown is at hand.

48:24And it's for this reason that you have this huge growth in 1971 of vigilante groups. So in Belfast working class Protestant areas, people have been setting up these loyalist defense associations, as they're called. And the biggest is the Ulster Defense Association, the UDA. UDA, again, a sort of acronym to conjure with in the 70s, 80s, 90s. This was this alliance of loyalist vigilantes. It was set up in the autumn of 1971. At its peak, it had somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 associated members.

48:59Extraordinary. It had women's units. In the course of the troubles, the UDA was responsible for more than 400 murders. So almost all of them Catholic civilians. How does that compare with the IRA's killing rate? Oh, far more. The IRA is by far the biggest killer in the course of the troubles. I mean, it's interesting, actually. The killers that get most attention, I would say, most newsprint, certainly now are the British Army. But by far, numerically, the biggest killers are the provisional IRA.

49:30Back, though, to the loyalists. Interesting question. How do people justify this to themselves? What would make you join a loyalist vigilante group? Well, in his book, Loyalists, Peter Taylor gives the example of one man called Martin Snodden. And there's lots of interviews with this guy online because he's quite a prominent peace campaigner now. Martin Snodden grew up in a Protestant enclave in Catholic West Belfast. So he and his family in the late 60s felt very fearful. They felt embattled, surrounded.

50:01And then, of course, things got worse, the more that the sort of temperature dropped. And when he was 16 years old in 1970, he joined the UVF. And as he saw it, it was the natural thing to do to defend his family. You know, it's the brave thing to do. It's manly and so on. And it's also, I think, crucially rooted in history because his grandfather had been a B special. His father had been in the Ulster Defence Regiment. And when he was asked, he defined his motives as a combination of fear and love, fear for

50:36what could happen and what was happening in the area at the time, but also a wider sense of love for my whole tradition and the country that I'd grown up in. And where that fear and love took him, he joined when he was 16. By the time he was 20, he is serving a life sentence for a bomb attack on a pub that he believed was a front for the IRA. His comrade, his mate, was killed when the bomb went off prematurely, but also killed was an innocent woman who was in the pub at the time.

51:07And he said afterwards, although in some sense I felt I could justify it, I sank to depths I never thought I would go to, depths I never knew existed. And of course, he's speaking for thousands of other people. Anyway, back to the narrative in the spring of 1971. Sir James Chichester Clarke, this slightly useless prime minister, is under great pressure to crack down. There are demonstrations outside Stormont, thousands of shipyard workers, people from the Harland and Wolf yard that had built the Titanic.

51:38They down their tools. They march through Belfast. They want a harder line. Ian Paisley is on the scene. Tom, do you want to give us your Ian Paisley? We can no longer tolerate your weakness. You must go before the whole land is deluged with the blood of innocent men and women. So what can Chichester Clarke do? Well, the big question is, would he introduce internment? So internment means locking up suspects without trial.

52:10And that may sound like a very nuclear option, but it has a long history in Ireland. The British government used it after the Easter Rising. The Irish Free State, Michael Collins and co, used it during the Irish Civil War. Both Belfast and Dublin used it in the Second World War and in the border campaign, the IRA border campaign of the late 50s and 60s, and it worked. Basically, they knew who the IRA men were. They had intelligence that told them.

52:41They went and grabbed them and they locked them up without trial and they broke the back of the IRA. And in fact, the Irish government, which is always a bit schizophrenic, I think, at this point about the IRA and republicanism generally, because, of course, the Irish government is nominally committed to a united Ireland, but it's also committed to smashing the IRA, which it regards as an illegal terror group. So it's sort of torn and it's pulled in two directions. In 1970, the Dublin government publicly threatened to bring back internment.

53:13And a year later, they scrapped jury trials for IRA suspects. So often they do actually take a pretty hard line. And some, even in the north, some moderate nationalists say to the British, do you know what? We could kind of live with it if you brought back internment. So Jerry Fitt, who we met, I think, last time, the guy who occupied the secretary's house, the house man was Austin Curry. Jerry Fitt is the bloke who used to work as a sort of, he used to work on the ships, I think. Didn't he become an MP?

53:44He became an MP. Exactly. He became an MP. Mates with Jim Callaghan. I thought he was one of them. He was one of the people who occupied the secretary's house. No, it's Austin Curry and a couple of his friends. Oh, okay. Anyway, Jerry Fitt suggests to the British, he says to them, and I quote, the immediate internment of all provisional IRA men known to the police. But Chichester Clark, the prime minister, actually thinks that's quite a bad idea. And the reason for that is that the army and the police have told him, we don't have very good intelligence, so we won't pick up the right people.

54:18And it will probably provoke massive protests to make Northern Ireland ungovernable. So Chichester Clark flies off to London on the 16th of March, 1971, and he says to Heath and to Maudling, I don't want you to introduce internment. I want a military surge, like a General Petraeus military surge from 2007 in Iraq. Basically, I want you to flood Northern Ireland with troops, throw thousands of reinforcements into the Catholic estates, go through curfews, cordons, lockdowns, all of this.

54:54And Heath says to him, I'm not going to send in loads of extra troops. You can have a thousand more troops, but I mean, I'm not going to hurl in tens of thousands of British soldiers. Chichester Clark is completely deflated by this. He thinks, well, this is pointless. You know, I've shot my bolt. There's nothing I can do. He flies back to Belfast. And then two days later, he decides I'm going to resign as prime minister. Oh, spend more time with his cowers. Exactly so. And he decides, I don't want to ring Ted Heath because Ted Heath is terrible on the phone.

55:28He's so glacial. Hello. Yeah, exactly. I'm not going to ring Ted Heath. He thinks I'll ring Reginald Mordling. So he rings Mordling. This is absolutely beyond parody. Mordling, he can't get through because Mordling is giving a lecture at Merchant Taylor's School, a very well-established public school. Mordling's special branch men go to find him to say the prime minister of Northern Ireland is on the line. He wants to talk to you urgently.

55:58But they find him not giving the talk, but closeted with the headmaster. And I quote, having a lunch made up entirely of whiskey. So I don't know what that says either about Mordling or indeed about Merchant Taylor's School. Nothing good. Oh, the headmaster. Right, exactly. Are you not running a school? For God's sake, man. That's the real scandal of this story. Anyway, Mordling eventually is persuaded to summon a car to take him back to London to take this call. But when they're on their way, the car mysteriously breaks down in Watford.

56:30So he is unable to take the call from James Chichester Clark. And Mordling's biographer, Lewis Baston, I think says basically what happened was that Mordling was so drunk after this liquid lunch that his officials decided they couldn't possibly risk him. Yeah. Just pull into a light, lay by. Exactly. So James Chichester Clark has to ring Ted Heath instead, which he's been trying to get out of. And Heath is incredibly rude to him, of course, refuses to listen to anything he says. Keeps saying to him, you can't give me a single example.

57:01How can you say we're just sitting there and doing nothing? And at the end, Chichester Clark, almost in sort of desperation, says, well, I'm going to resign and I'm going to blame the British Army. I'm going to say it's all the British Army's fault. They let us down. And Heath goes absolutely berserk. You do quite a good Ted Heath. So do you want to do Ted Heath now? I consider that absolutely unjustifiable. It has very little relation to the truth. I think it is doing immense harm to Northern Ireland. And I think it makes the position of any successor of yours absolutely impossible. And then Chichester Clark sort of blusters. He says, well, I don't do anything unhelpful.

57:32And Heath says, I don't think there's anything more to discuss. And he just hangs up on him. And that's the end of that. That's the end of James Chichester Clark in this story. Is he all right? Does he enjoy going back to his farming? I think he goes back to his farm. It's all okay? Well, I think it's all okay insofar as it possibly can be. As his country collapses around him. Yeah. So he's out. Now, finally, the Ulster Unionists decide, well, we've had two Etonians. Let's look beyond the old Etonian class for somebody who's actually quite good at politics.

58:03And they get in another bloke. And this bloke is called Brian Faulkner. Oh, yes. He went to school in Dublin with WB Yates' son. Correct. He absolutely did. That's the amazing fact I know about him. And here's an amazing fact. You know, he also went to that school. So he went to St. Columbus in Dublin, which builds itself. I googled it. It builds itself as the most prestigious school in Ireland, the best boarding school in Ireland. Brian Faulkner went there.

58:33WB Yates sent his son there. Adam Clayton from U2 went there. Did he? U2 don't often talk about their boarding school backgrounds, do they? And they're playing Bloody Sunday. That changes their image a little bit, I think. It's great to out people as the products of prestigious boarding schools, I think, on the show. I think it's one of the things we specialize in. So Brian Faulkner, his father had run and founded, in fact, the world's largest shirt makers. So the Belfast Collar Company make more shirts than anybody else on the planet.

59:06And he'd gone off to St. Columbus, and then he'd gone into politics. Faulkner is very good at politics. He's cunning. He's kind of no-nonsense. He's incredibly ambitious. He is the champion of the kind of Protestant middle classes of small businessmen. If you're a small businessman, you love Brian Faulkner. He'd been the Home Affairs Minister during the IRA border campaign. He'd been very hard. He'd taken the credit for beating them. Under Terence O'Neill, he'd been the Minister of Commerce. He'd been getting all this international investment. He thinks a lot of him.

59:37He thinks he's the only man who can keep Northern Ireland together. Faulkner agrees and thinks, I am the only man who can do it. I'm the champion of law and order. I'm the saviour of Northern Ireland and all this. But he has a terrible inheritance. Basically, the security situation is awful. There are bombs going off every day. The thump of explosions. The smell of cordite. The sound of sirens. These are becoming everyday features of life in Belfast. And by the 12th of July, so that's when the Provo's launch a new bombing campaign,

1:00:07there will already be more than 300 explosions, 320 shootings, 600 people hospitalized. And the death toll for 1971 will come to 171, which is up sixfold in a year. So, what Faulkner does, Faulkner thinks, right, I'm going to offer some concessions to the Catholics. We mentioned Gerry Fitt and you mentioned, you asked if he was the same person as Austin Curry, the guy who had occupied the Pebbledash Council House. And actually, both of these blokes had set up this new party, the SDLP,

1:00:41which is a kind of moderate nationalist party. And Faulkner decides, I'm going to offer them an olive branch. It's a brilliant olive branch. I'm going to offer them the chairmanship of two Stormont committees.

1:00:53Yeah, so enticing. So, he's going to offer them this, right? But then to balance this tremendous offer, he has to do something for the Protestant base. So, he decides to take a big gamble. He flies to Britain and he asks Heath, he says, I'd like to introduce interment. I'd like to be able to lock people up without trial. Now, Heath is very well aware of the arguments against this. British Army Intelligence have said to him, we'll catch one in five provisional IRA men.

1:01:24We'll probably catch only the lesser people, the small fry, as they put it. The RUC, the Royal Alistair Constabulary, have also told him, the IRA have loads of young people now who we don't know and we won't know who they are and we can't pick them up. Even the British commander in Belfast, the new British commander, Sir Harry Tuzo, he says to Heath, I think the arguments against it are very strong. If you do this, be clear about this. This is a political decision, not a military one. And on top of all that, the Taoiseach, the Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland, Jack Lynch, has said to the British ambassador,

1:02:01I really don't think you should do this, it will drive the Catholics into the arms of the IRA. I am basically begging you not to do it. The problem for Heath, though, Heath is totally committed to Brian Faulkner. If Heath says no, and if Brian Faulkner says, well, that's it, I'm out, I'm done, then Britain has no alternative but to introduce direct rule. And nobody in London wants to do that. And Reggie Maudling, you know, who's basically woken up now from his gin-soaked sleep.

1:02:34What's going on? Yeah. Says to Ted Heath, look, the way to justify this, we say to people, this is the only way to sort of forestall a Protestant backlash against the Catholics. You know, actually, maybe the army are being too pessimistic. Maybe we'll get loads of people and it'll be fine. And so Heath says, okay, let's do it. So basically, people who know nothing about the situation are overruling people who know loads about it. That's pretty much exactly what's happened. Yes. But you can understand why they've done it, because if they're all in with Brian Faulkner, what else are they going to do?

1:03:10Find someone else? You know, I suppose they'd call his bluff. Or they could introduce direct rule right away, which may be, arguably, they should have done about two years earlier. That is one argument that you could make, that basically the opportunity was missed in like 1969. They should have taken it over right away. But anyway, they didn't. So Heath says to Brian Faulkner, fine, you can introduce internment. It's a purely political decision, not military. So because of that, it must look even-handed. So what I want you to do, it must go along with a ban for six months and all loyalists, you know, Orange Order parades and marches and stuff.

1:03:49Faulkner's not happy about this, because it would upset his base, but Heath says, no, you've got to do it. And then the other thing that he says, which is absolutely crucial, he says, when you lock up people without trial, you must, and I quote, include a certain number of Protestants. And Faulkner clearly doesn't like this, but he says, yeah, I hear you. Now, we shall see how that plays out.

Operation Demetrius and Torture Reports

1:04:11So on Monday, the 9th of August, 1971, it's actually A-level results day, interestingly, at four o'clock in the morning, Operation Demetrius, as it is called, begins. And I always think Operation Demetrius sounds like a brilliant name for something. It sounds like an incredibly daring, swashbuckling raid in the Second World War. I can imagine your brother and Al Murray doing an amazing four-part series on it. Surely a multi-part series about Operation Demetrius. Wasn't there an Eric Ambler novel, The Mask of Demetrius?

1:04:43Yes, exactly. Set in Constantinople. So it conjures up a kind of Balkan spy adventure. We shall see whether this lives up to the expectations. So before dawn, thousands of British troops are sealing off streets across Northern Ireland. They're smashing down people's doors. They're breaking into their houses. And they're dragging out hundreds of people who are on these lists. And it's a very dramatic, it's a very cinematic scene. Although I can't help thinking that if you were to see this on the big screen, you would assume the people doing the dragging out are the villains.

1:05:17It's very unusual for the people doing the dragging to be the heroes in the story. Well, especially if it's a provisional IRA film club. That's what you would assume. That's, I guess so. If it's a Ken Loach film, then undoubtedly they're the villains. They're dragging Daniel Day-Lewis out and Pete Possilthwaite or something. Anyway, we'll come to the optics of this in a second. But it's important to say that as a military operation, this is an absolute unmitigated shambles. The army are using RUC intelligence files.

1:05:48But as everybody has told Heath, these files are massively out of date. They don't reflect the split between the official and provisional IRA. They don't reflect the fact that loads of young volunteers have joined the provisionals. Loads of the names are wrong. They don't get most of the key people. There's a wonderful story, and I can't remember what book this is in, about a British officer who went at four o'clock in the morning. He bursts into this bloke's house. And he finds this bloke who's clearly in his 80s. And this bloke says to him, when he drags him out of bed, this bloke says to him,

1:06:20I'm delighted to think that I'm still a trouble to the British government, but I have to tell you I've not been active since the Easter Rising. Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? I suppose he would. So some of the people they take are teenagers who are just very nationalistic. At least one teenager is on the list purely because he plays Gaelic games. Paul Rouse wouldn't approve of that, would he? Paul Rouse. Paul Rouse would have been dragged out, you see, because of his enthusiasm for Gaelic games. Yeah. They arrested in total 342 people and took them to internment camps.

1:06:52Now, given what Heath had said to him about make sure you have a good balance. So what is the balance, Dominic? So the balance is as follows. Out of 342, the balance is Catholics, 342. Oh, no.

1:07:09Protestants, zero. Why? They just couldn't be bothered in the end to get any Protestants. Well, actually, I'll let Reginald Maudling answer this question. So I'll leap ahead and tell you what Reginald Maudling said in interviews afterwards. The newspaper said to him, why didn't you arrest loyalists? And he said, well, if any Protestant organisations were behaving like the IRA, we should have treated them in precisely the same way. But the thing is, they had actually, the first killings were done by the UVF. Well, those guys shooting people in pubs. Right, exactly. So, of course, this sets off this absolute, you know, furore-y, extraordinary scenes,

1:07:44actually, while it's going on in Northern Ireland. So women will be banging dustbin lids when there are British troops approaching. There are people building barricades to stop them getting into the streets. People commandeering milk carts to use the bottles for petrol bombs. There's gigantic rioting and the days afterwards, hundreds of houses set on fire by sectarian mobs of one kind or another. 7,000 people were driven from their homes by mob violence. Great clouds of black smoke over Belfast estates.

1:08:1617 people shot dead in gun battles with the army. It's a scene of complete apocalyptic breakdown. Everything has gone horrendously wrong. So, as you say, apocalyptic, what does the judge dread of the British Conservative government make of this Reginald Mordling? Has he sobered up to deal with it? Not entirely. So it's actually been a lovely day in suburban Hertfordshire where he lives, and Reggie has been chilling by his swimming pool with a bottle of gin.

1:08:46So he's been relaxing. And every now and again, he rouses himself from his lounger to go and ring Whitehorn to say, you know, how's it going? And they tell him, he said, oh, sounds splendid, absolutely splendid. And he goes back to the sun lounger. And I mean, it's a reminder, isn't it? That, of course, ministers cannot keep track minute by minute of what is going on, because the technological opportunities to do that are not in existence. And I guess that is something to bear in mind. Tom, this sounds like you're defending Reginald Mordling.

1:09:17I am defending him. You know, it's a beautiful summer's day. A chap wants to hang out and drink gin. He doesn't want to be bothered with all this nonsense. Yeah. I mean, he disgraces himself, actually, because afterwards, when he's interviewed, he tells the Guardian, we did this on army advice with the army who told us to do it. Oh, that's so bad. That's poor, yeah. And his biographer, Lewis Baston. So Lewis Baston came on a bonus last year to talk about borderlands, which is his big enthusiasm now. So he was talking about the Silesian border, slightly implausibly. But anyway, he says in his biography, which is called Reggie,

1:09:50he says this was an outright lie from Mordling, which it was. Yeah, a total lie. Yeah. Baston also describes this as, quote, one of the great blunders of recent British political history. It absolutely is. So basically, everyone says introducing internment was a total own goal. Had it worked, would it? I mean, had they got the right people, maybe it would have worked, do you think? Well, it might have been a price worth paying if you'd absolutely got the right people. If you'd literally- You've broken the IRA. Yeah. The IRA has, well, 1,000 people at this point. Imagine you locked up 500 of them.

1:10:21Well, you were not going to get all 1,000, but you might get hundreds and hundreds of the senior people, break the back of the organization. You know, maybe that would work. Unfortunately, they absolutely didn't. They didn't get any of the right people, so a shambles. And it completely drives the wedge between moderate nationalist politicians and the authorities. And it completes what the falls curfew had begun. It destroys the relationship forever between the army and the Catholic population. So, you know, there's no going back now.

1:10:51And of course, the winners from this are the provisional IRA, because they've got their arms intact. They get loads of new recruits. And on Catholic estates, their reputation is higher than ever. Now, what makes this worse? What makes this far worse is what happens to the people interned. They are interned at a disused airfield at a place called Longkesh, in these sort of low, corrugated iron Nissan huts. Imagine, again, your brother and Al Murray love a Nissan hut, sort of World War II relic. The people in these huts are being tortured by the army and by the RUC.

1:11:28They are being – you get the first reports in Irish newspapers of people being dragged out of bed, two o'clock in the morning, and sort of beaten up and battered against the wall. And the army and Stormont, the government, say this is a lie. This is IRA propaganda. But it's actually not a lie. It's true. And what does Reginald Mordelin think about this? He thinks it's brilliant. He thinks this is exactly what you should be doing. Does he? Yes. Because the army and the RUC had had meetings before internment to talk about what they would do,

1:11:58and they'd agreed to adopt something called the five techniques. And the five techniques are making you stand spread-eagled for ages, putting a hood over your head, playing white noise at you, giving you a minimum of bread and water, so just enough to keep you alive, basically, but you're thirsty and famished or whatever, and you're deprived of sleep. So this is what they'd done in Malaya, wasn't it, to break the insurgency there? In Malaya, in Palestine, in Kenya, in Cyprus. This was an established British colonial practice.

1:12:32And it's extraordinary, I think, to me, that the army thought they could – I mean, people will have their own views, of course, about whether such techniques are permissible. It was a big debate in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yeah. The people that they thought they could do this in a part of the United Kingdom against United Kingdom citizens is pretty remarkable. Or is it? Because in the government, do they see Northern Ireland, really? So there are definitely historians who say this shows the colonial mindset.

1:13:02They wouldn't do this in Berkshire, but they think it's okay to do it in Ulster. Absolutely, you're right. And the amazing thing is they have explicit government approval for it because – you asked about marginal modelling – the Defence Secretary, Lord Carrington, later told a Cabinet committee, he said, Reggie and I explicitly approved the proposed methods of interrogation. So to read the minutes of the Cabinet Committee, the lives of British soldiers and innocent civilians depended on intelligence.

1:13:33We were dealing with an enemy who had no scruples. And we should not be unduly squeamish about the methods of interrogation in these circumstances. So they're completely open about it with their colleagues. Now, of course, they can't keep this quiet. It was amazing they thought they could. The Sunday Times did a big investigation. The Sunday Times Insight team listed 11 separate cases of torture. The government commissioned a report by three judges. Two of the judges said it's fine. But the third judge, Lord Gardner, said, These techniques are secret, illegal, not morally justifiable,

1:14:06and alien to the traditions of what I believe still to be the greatest democracy in the world. I see that he no longer believed that Britain was the greatest democracy in the world than if he framed it like that. Yeah. I mean, when a judge says that, there's no going back. You know, you're sunk. Ted Heath immediately, when that came out, said, Okay, fine, we won't use them again. But there's a brilliant letter, actually, by Graham Greene. Graham Greene said to the Times, wrote to the Times, If I, as a Catholic, were living in Ulster today, I confess I would have one savage and irrational ambition

1:14:37to see Mr. Maudling pressed against a wall for hours on end with a hood over his head. It's so funny, because Maudling would, of course, be absolutely wasted. Hearing nothing but the noise of a wind machine, deprived of sleep when the noise temporarily ceases by the bland voice of a politician telling him his brain will suffer no irreparable damage. So all this, of course, is a gift to Britain's critics. It's a gift to people like Ted Kennedy in America, you know, great champion of the Irish-American lobby.

1:15:07But it also is a gift to people in Britain, on the radical left, who do agree with this thing, this stuff about Vietnam, who do see it as a morality story of brutal imperialists and heroic martyrs. So this is a point, 1971 or so, where you have marches in the streets in London that are kind of conflating loads of causes at once. The omni-cause. The omni-cause. So my favourite placard, Gay Liberation Front supports battle for freedom in Ireland.

1:15:38Now, this would appeal to you, I know, with your Beatles enthusiasm, because you will know that the two best-known Beatles were great enthusiasts for the Troops Out movement at this point. So John Lennon would go on marches. He released an album in 72. Yeah. Sometime in New York City, which had two songs about Ireland. That's his worst album by Miles, it has to be said. And of course, Wings, the band the Beatles could have been. Their debut single. Their debut single. Yeah. Give Ireland Back to the Irish. Yes. Give Ireland Back to the Irish.

1:16:09Well, so you know that the guitarist in Wings, Henry McCulloch, was a Protestant from Londonderry, I guess we should call it. Wow. And his brother, I think, got beaten up in an Irish pub in Kilburn about it. About the song? Yeah. And Henry McCulloch kind of didn't go back to Northern Ireland for years and years, because he was so worried about their reaction. Yeah. Because Paul and Linda had talked him into this song against his will. I think Paul hadn't even discussed it with him. I think, you know, he thought, oh.

1:16:42That's insane. Not sure about this. But anyway, actually, the thing about British opinion, I mean, this will, I think, surprise Irish listeners and maybe some American listeners. It's the one thing I think that people often get wrong about this story abroad. People, I think, abroad, and I remember this when I lived in America, people would ask me about Northern Ireland. And I would say, well, no one in Britain cares about it at all. And they would say, oh, no, that's not right. People in Britain have an irrational attachment to the ownership of part of the island of Ireland.

1:17:14Most people in Britain, I mean, you will know this, Tom, you lived during this period, genuinely could not care less about this subject. And in fact, even doing this podcast, there's part of me that thinks, will we have any downloads? It's because all our British listeners will say, no, too dull. I'm not going to listen to this. It's depressing, I think. Yeah. But the main thing, it was background noise of bombs and assassinations. And you just thought, oh, just make it stop. Yeah. It was the case even from the beginning. So September 1969, when the troops had just gone in, and you would think it would have at least the sort of novelty value,

1:17:46people were asked to rank the problems facing the British government, and they unerringly ranked Northern Ireland as bottom, least important. But the thing is, the British government, do you think would have agreed with that or not? By this point, is it higher up? Ted Heath spends a lot of time on this. I mean, people are dying, you know, it's a serious thing. It's a low level civil war. Is it as important to him as getting into the common market? No, nothing is as important. I mean, to be fair to Ted Heath, Ted Heath has the most bonkers cascade of events and challenges,

1:18:19but it is remarkable. It's never an election issue. It never features in election campaigns. It's almost never mentioned at party political conferences. It rarely comes up on TV. It comes to seem like bad weather in February. Yeah. It's just what you expect. You don't like it, but you just put up with it. Yeah, I think that's true. But anyway, Ted Heath, I mean, you asked about Ted Heath. Ted Heath cannot now ignore it, because after the disaster of internment, things go from very, very bad to absolutely horrendous.

1:18:50So it's now mid-August 1971.

Pub Bombings and Tit for Tat Murders

1:18:52There's a dramatic increase in the bloodshed. Four people shot on the 11th, a Protestant shot on the 12th, a Catholic shot on the 13th, a soldier killed by the IRN the 14th. You know, it's now becoming a daily occurrence that people are dying. And we'll end with this, I mean, talk about concatenation of events, with this absolute sort of drumbeat of horror in the autumn of 1971. So it starts on Wednesday, the 29th of September. It's 1030 at night. And we're in the four step in, which is a Protestant pub off the Shankill road. And it is packed with people watching TV in the pub lounge.

1:19:25And then a bomb goes off and the bar roof collapses. Almost 30 people are injured and two of them are killed, Alexander Andrews and Ernie Bates. Alexander Andrews was 60. He was so badly disfigured by the bomb that his son had to identify him by his shoes. And nobody claimed responsibility for this, but there's no doubt whatsoever that it was done by the provisional IRA. And yeah, this pub is not a military target. This is the first time really that you get a bombing that is purely a sectarian attack.

1:19:56So that really is damning their souls. Completely, completely. Then the 2nd of November, they strike again, this time the red lion on the Ormo road. 430 in the afternoon, people are in the pub having a drink. Two men walk into the pub with a third man with a gun. And the 2 men say, put down this bomb. I mean, they literally carry in the bomb. And then they say to the people in the pub, you've got 10 seconds to get out. And then they get out themselves. The bomb actually went off after 6 seconds. Again, the roof fell in.

1:20:27Dozens of people injured. Three people killed. John Cochran, Mary Gemmell, and William Jordan, who were all Protestants. At this point, the Ulster volunteer force get their revenge. A month afterwards. Saturday, the 4th of December, 1971. McGurk's Bar in the city center. Kind of pub where old men are sitting around over a pint, looking at the newspaper and talking about the horse racing. 8.45 that evening, a UVF man, so a loyalist, walks into the pub entrance and he drops a brown parcel.

1:20:57And then he runs back to a waiting car. The parcel is a bomb which explodes almost immediately. It destroys the entire building. 15 people are killed. And this includes McGurk, the landlord's wife, and his 14-year-old daughter, and a 13-year-old boy. So it's escalating. And then a week after that, the IRA take their revenge. So it's tit for tat. And this is a terrible story. Saturday lunchtime, the Shankill Road, packed with shoppers. A car pulls up outside the Balmoral Furniture Showroom.

1:21:30And a man jumps out and he puts a box down on the doorstep and then the car speeds off. A few seconds later, this box explodes and it again destroys the entire building. 20 people are buried under the rubble. Four people are killed straight away. Two of them were staff in the showroom. The other two people who were killed were Tracy Munn and Colin Nickell. Tracy Munn was two and Colin Nickell was 17 months old and they were sharing a pram when they were killed. It's an absolutely horrendous scene.

1:22:01Loads of people come running up and one of them is a boy. He's 15. He's called Billy McQuiston. He heard the bomb and he came running up and he later told the BBC reporter Peter Taylor, he said, women were crying, men were trying to dig out the rubble, other men were hitting the walls. I just stood there and cried, just totally and utterly numb. It wasn't until I got back home that I realised this isn't a game. There's a war going on here. These people are trying to do us all in because we're Protestants, they're going to kill us. So we're going to have to do something.

1:22:32And so the next day, this 15-year-old boy goes to find the loyalist UDA and that evening they signed him up. And that was how it worked. That was how it went on. So this was the United Kingdom in December 1971. So we've seen how the atrocities have been escalating and in 1972, things are going to get even worse because the conflict is going to be reaching its deadly peak. So in our final episode of the series,

1:23:04Bloody Sunday in Derry, Bloody Friday in Belfast and Stormont, the Parliament of Northern Ireland will be getting mothballed. Club members can hear that episode now. You can sign up at therestishistory.com. There will be lots about this series in our incredible newsletter. You can sign up for that as well if you haven't already. Thank you, Dominic. We will be back with our final episode. Until then, goodbye.

1:23:35Bye-bye.

1:23:55We're the hosts of The Rest is Classified and in our latest series, we are telling the inside story of how the 9-11 terrorists slipped through the CIA's grasp. In the summer of 2000, a man walks up to US immigration at Newark Airport. His passport gets stamped, he's waved through, and welcome to America. That single stamp was one of the gravest intelligence blunders in modern history. Because one year later, nearly 3,000 people will be dead. That man was Mohammed Atta,

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