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taking the threat ‘very seriously’ and MI5 was being kept informed.16

      Kennedy continued to sound the tocsin. On 22 February 1966, he gave a top secret update of his earlier warning to the GOC. The IRA’s intention, he argued, was ‘to set extremists on both sides at each other’s throats and thus bring about a situation in which sectarian riots will precede other acts of violence and sabotage in Northern Ireland’. There was good reason to believe that the campaign would begin in Belfast. Indeed, a number of recent petrol bombings and slogan paintings in the city (which he listed) suggested that the first shots had been figuratively fired already. Such provocative incidents, he believed, would continue until Easter when it was hoped that a Protestant extremist backlash against the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916 would in turn necessitate intervention by the RUC and the British army.

      At this point, the Inspector-General continued, ‘members of the IRA will close with the police and military in hand to hand combat and will shoot and also seize any weapons they can’. As the situation developed, further IRA units would infiltrate across the border in order to exploit the situation to the full. Power supplies might be interfered with and while only small arms and petrol bombs would be used in Belfast, heavier weapons would be employed to attack military and police installations elsewhere. The RUC would be ‘stretched to full capacity’ and it was therefore essential that ‘strong military forces be available to come to the aid of the civil power’, if this proved necessary.17

      Another anxiety was the Republican movement’s plan for a so-called ‘Freedom Train’ which would transport ‘a large number of Republicans and sympathisers’ from south of the border to attend the Easter Rising commemorations in Belfast on 17 April 1966. ‘The influx of these supporters of the Irish Republican Army into Northern Ireland at this time’, the RUC felt, ‘will no doubt create a great deal of tension’. Indeed, it had been intimated by ‘various sources’ that these people were coming to Belfast ‘with the express purpose of causing disturbances by roaming through various parts of the City flaunting tricolours’ and that efforts would be made ‘to create incidents in which retaliatory action can be taken against the police’. Unless ‘wiser counsels’ prevailed, it was claimed, all the signs were that the IRA were ‘poised to open a campaign of violence within the next month or two and that every effort will be made to create major trouble in Belfast, which fortunately remained quiet during the last [IRA] campaign’.18

      The Northern Irish Government’s anxieties were communicated to Whitehall. The Vice-Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Geoffrey Baker, decided to visit Northern Ireland himself on 30–31 March 1966 to assess the situation at first hand. He reported on his return that there was ‘a very real likelihood of trouble, of two main kinds’. The first consisted of IRA violence on the EOKA model, with attacks on key individuals, the police and the military, together with action against police stations and military establishments, especially armouries. The second was sectarian violence, ‘most probably in Belfast’, which could lead to ‘communal rioting of a particularly virulent sort’. The most likely date for the outbreak of trouble was the weekend of 16–17 April and the Inspector-General intended to take precautionary measures on 14 April, which would include searches and the arrest and interrogation of known IRA leaders. The Inspector-General had made it clear that any trouble over the weekend in question would not be ‘a one-shot affair’, but would mark the beginning of an indefinite campaign. Baker noted that, throughout his discussions, he was impressed ‘by the Inspector-General’s sober, balanced and “down-to-earth” approach’ and that ‘his conclusions had obviously been formed on a basis of reliable information, cross-checked and carefully weighed against a background of wide experience of the IRA problem over a number of years’.19 Prompt action was taken as a result of the VCGS’s visit. An extra battalion of troops (the 3rd Royal Green Jackets) was sent to Northern Ireland to reinforce the existing garrison ‘ostensibly for training purposes’, but in reality to come to the aid of the civil power if necessary. A special communications link was established between Northern Ireland and Britain and a senior MI5 officer was sent to Belfast for the period 15–20 April.20

      Depending on which way one looks at it the outcome was either a damp squib or a triumph of foresight and preparation, for there was no serious trouble over the weekend of 16–17 April. Indeed, the RUC’s ‘Security Intelligence Review’ for the month recorded only seventeen ‘minor incidents’ during the entire month. The MI5 officer who had been in Belfast over the weekend in question wrote in his report that, as late as 15 April, the RUC had believed it was the IRA’s intention to exploit the celebrations ‘in order to shoot members of the Crown forces’ and that it was only thwarted by three factors. The first was the restraint of the authorities themselves, who assisted rather than obstructed the nationalist parade and who decided – contrary to the Inspector-General’s previously stated intention21 – not to make precautionary arrests. The second was the closing of the border on the night of 16–17 April. The third was ‘the high order of police work’ embodied in their ‘courteous firmness’ and skill in handling rival demonstrations, their deployment of reserves, their excellent communications and ‘the individual efficiency and high morale of officers and men’, all of which ‘combined … to frustrate the IRA plan’.22

      But was there an ‘IRA plan’ in the first place? It seems unlikely. The Republican Publicity Bureau in Dublin had issued a denial on 22 February 1966.23 At the end of the previous year, Roy Johnston, the IRA’s Education Officer, told C. Desmond Greaves, the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Irish expert, that ‘there is no truth in the six-county rumour that a further disturbance is to be expected’, adding that ‘if the IRA didn’t exist, the six-county government would have to invent it’.24 If these denials may be discounted as self-serving, it is also worth noting that two leading southern members of the IRA’s Army Council, Mac Stíofáin and Ruarí Ó Brádaigh, were publicly advertised as speaking at rallies in Northern Ireland on 17 April 1966.25 Unless this was part of some elaborate deception, it would surely have been unwise to have these two men away from headquarters and within the grasp of the RUC on the very day on which a military campaign was to be launched. Finally, none of the scholarly studies of the Republican movement during this period provide any evidence to support a claim that the IRA was planning major military action at this time.26

      The most that the IRA probably hoped for was what actually happened. Billy McMillen later claimed that the Belfast IRA saw the 1966 Easter Rising commemorations ‘as a golden opportunity to drive a coach and four horses through the notorious flags and emblems Act. From January until April the whole resources and energy of the Belfast movement were devoted to preparations for the celebrations.’ Although he argued that ‘no great material benefit accrued to the IRA’ as a result of the parade, it must have been gratifying to be able to claim that 12,000 took part in it and 400,000 had watched,27 while even O’Neill conceded in his memoirs that ‘the Catholic streets in Belfast became and remained a forest of Irish Republican flags for the duration of the celebrations’.28

      II

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