LITMIR.BIZ

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‘Freedom’, he explained, had to relate to the needs of ordinary people. ‘To do this we had to involve ourselves in their everyday struggles for existence. In housing, land, trade unions, unemployment …’ It might take ten years of agitation along these lines before there was even the basis of a revolutionary movement and the IRA ‘wasn’t geared to this type of action at that time. Most of the people in the Movement were geared to a physical force campaign … [P]olitical agitation wasn’t as exciting I suppose.’3 (Goulding’s last comment is a useful reminder that people participated in the IRA for social as well as political reasons.)4

      This did not mean that the IRA was opposed to the use of physical force. Goulding himself declared on 15 August 1965: ‘There will be a fight, there must be a fight. It will have to be a fight on many fronts. We have only to look around us to see that we will have to fight on the military front, the economic front and the cultural front.’ The IRA’s Adjutant-General, Séamus Costello, was even more explicit in a speech on 19 June 1966: ‘to imagine that we can establish a Republic solely by constitutional means’, he said:

      is utter folly. The lesson of history shows that in the final analysis the Robber Baron must be disestablished by the same methods that he used to enrich himself and retain his ill gotten gains, namely force of arms. To this end we must organise, train. And maintain a disciplined armed force which will always be available to strike at the opportune moment.5

      The Irish police report from which these quotations are taken identified twelve different training camps in 1965 and eleven in 1966 at which IRA members received instruction in the use of various weapons. Six of those in 1965 and seven in 1966 were attended by members from Northern Ireland and in six of them the training officer was identified as coming from Belfast. These camps were in addition to other meetings and exercises conducted by the organization.6

      As Goulding implied in his interview, there was opposition to the new, more political approach of the IRA after the end of the border campaign. One of the leading opponents was Seán Mac Stíofáin, a London-born member of the Army Council who had been in jail with Goulding following an arms raid on a British public school in 1953, and who later became the first Chief-of-Staff of the Provisional IRA. In his memoirs, Mac Stíofáin complained about the excessive attention paid by the Republican movement to ‘agitation on social and economic issues’ when ‘the main objective [was] to free Ireland from British rule’. ‘Some of the older Republicans’, Mac Stíofáin wrote, ‘who had been with the movement for years and still had years of service to contribute to it, began to drop away in disgust and protest’. If the Irish police report cited above is to be believed, however, this did not prevent a year-on-year increase in the strength of the IRA from 657 at the end of December 1962 to 1,039 at the end of October 1966.7

      Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill caused a sensation in January 1965 by welcoming his opposite number in the Republic of Ireland, Seán Lemass, on an official visit to Stormont. No such visit had occurred since partition, more than forty years before. Lemass, who had been a member of the IRA during the War of Independence and the Civil War, reportedly told O’Neill, ‘I shall get into terrible trouble for this’, whereupon O’Neill replied, ‘No, Mr Lemass … it is I who will get into trouble for this’.8 The Ulsterman was right.

      Although public opinion in Northern Ireland generally welcomed his effort to improve relations with the Republic of Ireland, there were rumblings of discontent within his own party and also the powerful Orange Order, the body to which virtually all Unionist politicians belonged, which enjoyed a statutory role in the counsels of the Unionist Party and which organized regular marches commemorating Ulster’s Protestant heritage. This discontent was due not only to the Prime Minister’s failure to consult his Cabinet colleagues before issuing the invitation to Lemass, but also to the very fact that the meeting took place at all. Ian Paisley, unsurprisingly, was full of righteous indignation and it was in this context that he uttered his famous remarks equating O’Neill’s bridge building with treachery.9

      Ten months later, on 21 October 1965, the IRA made a dramatic reappearance in Belfast. A group of men wearing masks and carrying hurley sticks broke up a British Army Kinema Corporation film show at Saint Gabriel’s Intermediate Boys’ School on the Crumlin Road in the north-west of the city, injuring two members of the unit involved and damaging their screen and projector. The IRA admitted responsibility in a statement issued four days later, explaining that ‘the Belfast unit of the IRA now give notice that this immoral proselytism of Irish youths will be stamped out by whatever means deemed necessary’.10

      Two days after this statement, O’Neill called a Stormont election for 25 November 1965, although there is no reason to suppose there was any connection between the two events. His principal objective seems to have been to undermine support for the NILP, particularly in Belfast. If this was so, the tactic worked. Even though the Unionist vote in Belfast fell from 67,350 in 1962 to 62,646 in 1965, the NILP vote fell even further, from 60,170 to 43,363. More importantly, the Unionists gained two seats at the expense of the NILP, reducing the latter’s representation at Stormont to two.11

      This was a heavy blow to the one party which enjoyed a degree of cross-community support. The parish chronicle of St Matthew’s church in the Catholic enclave of the Short Strand in east Belfast describes how one of the two remaining NILP MPs only held on to his seat as a result of Catholic votes. The Unionists, the author wrote, ‘tried their utmost’ to win the Pottinger constituency in which the Short Strand was located. The party selected a popular milkman and supposedly liberal candidate in the shape of Jack Bannister, who had contributed to Catholic charities and who, together with his Unionist councillor wife, had been photographed alongside the two parish priests for the nationalist Irish News. But the priests did not wish it to seem as though they had been ‘bought over by Bannister’s largesse’ and therefore ‘felt compelled to vote Labour’, as did ‘all the Catholics who cared to vote at all’. There was therefore ‘no truth in the Unionist assertion that they got Catholic votes in this election – certainly not in Pottinger. History was made in that the Unionists sought Catholic votes’.12

      In the meantime, the O’Neill Government had been informed on 9 November 1965 that the IRA was plotting a new campaign in Northern Ireland, ‘the most sinister aspect of which was a threat to the lives of members of the Cabinet and … Special Branch’. Ministers were ‘painfully conscious’ that if the news leaked out it would be represented as an election stunt. Some fifty members of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) – the notorious B-Specials, the all-Protestant police reserve – had been mobilized in order to support the RUC in providing adequate protection for ministers as well as for the former Prime Minister, Viscount Brookeborough, and for the Speaker. The placing of guards at ministers’ homes came to the attention of the media and the government was forced to issue a statement.13

      On 17 November 1965, five young men in a parked car close to the official residence of the General Officer Commanding (GOC) British troops in Northern Ireland on the outskirts of Belfast were arrested. They were wearing ‘semi-military dress’ and a bayonet and a pair of handcuffs were discovered in the car. Although they initially gave their names and addresses to the police, ‘on a command being given in Irish by the person who appeared to be the leader they ceased to answer any further questions’. They were later charged under the Special Powers Acts of being in possession of an offensive weapon and records of police movements and of being members of an illegal organization. On 3 December all five were sentenced to a year in jail. They refused to utter a word during the run-up to and throughout the course of their trial.14

      A public statement by the Minister of Home Affairs, Brian McConnell, on 7 December 1965 referred to ‘information which has been received’, indicating that the IRA was about to resume its subversive activities and that attacks would be made against selected persons as well as against property and public services. It concluded that the arrest and conviction of the five young men, together with the incident at St Gabriel’s School, ‘were the first overt activities by the I.R.A. for some years’.15

      An even more alarming message was delivered by the Inspector-General of the RUC, Sir Arthur Kennedy, to the GOC Northern Ireland, Lieutenant-General Sir Desmond Fitzpatrick, on 4 February 1966. He told Fitzpatrick ‘that he had received information from two sources within

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