Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (14 page)

Many years later, in the mid-1990s, the BBC journalist Peter Taylor interviewed Frank Steele about his memory of the ceasefire meeting in Cheyne Walk and he confirmed this optimistic view of Gerry Adams. On their way back to Belfast, Steele recalled, he had attempted to talk sense to the IRA delegation, to tell them that persuasion more than violence could win Protestants over to Irish unity. ‘Steele knew he was wasting his time’, wrote Taylor, ‘and felt that all Seamus Twomey and Ivor Bell in particular wanted to do was to get back to the IRA’s simplistic doctrine of physical force in the belief that “one more heave and the Brits would be out”. However, he sensed that Adams, who had said little, either at the meeting or during the journey (although he was taking everything in) felt that this was not enough. Steele believes that the experiences and discussions of that day and the meeting at Cheyne Walk increased Adams’s recognition of the limitations of “armed struggle” and the need for the IRA to have a parallel political policy if it was ever to get anywhere’.
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Twenty years later that is exactly what Adams did.

Brendan Hughes played only a marginal role in the preparations for the ceasefire talks but he was at the very centre of the breakdown in Lenadoon, an event that Seamus Twomey had helped to contrive. Twomey had ordered him and two other seasoned IRA men to occupy a position overlooking the scene and to begin firing at the British when he gave the signal. What struck Hughes about this was that normally it would be Adams who would have given such orders, not Twomey. Many years later he concluded that his long-held assumption that Adams shared Twomey’s and Bell’s hostility to the ceasefire was mistaken.

If 1972 was the year that saw the IRA bring down Stormont and force the British to the negotiating table, albeit briefly and to little effect, it was also the year in which the IRA proved that it was every bit as capable as the British Army of self-inflicted military disasters. Civilian casualties, particularly killings, were not supposed to be part of the IRA’s stock-in-trade. Not only did the organisation claim to be a non-sectarian army which fought by the rules of civilised warfare, but in practical terms the IRA operated within well-understood boundaries set largely by its own community. One of the limits of acceptability was killing civilians, especially when it looked deliberate or casually careless. It was not that the Catholic community was especially tender-hearted about the issue but rather that they knew the inevitable Loyalist
retribution would be directed randomly, like scatter shot, against them. It is one of the reasons why causing civilian casualties has consistently cost Republicans politically down through the years of the Troubles, right up to the carnage at Omagh in August 1998. The IRA had come close to causing large-scale civilian slaughter a few times in 1971, but got away relatively lightly. But in the spring of 1972 that changed utterly.

In early March, a small bomb, thought to have consisted of around five pounds of gelignite, exploded without warning in the Abercorn restaurant in downtown Belfast. It was late on a Saturday afternoon and the restaurant was packed with shoppers, mostly women and children, taking some refreshment before heading home. Two women were killed in the blast and 130 were terribly injured, some losing one or more limbs. The televised scenes of the aftermath were so shocking that the IRA chose to deny responsibility then and ever since, although IRA sources have confirmed unofficially that the Abercorn blast was its work. The bomb, which eyewitness accounts suggest was placed by two young girls, caused a public backlash against the IRA even in Republican areas of West Belfast, not least because the Abercorn was a popular venue for Catholics and the two female fatalities, a twenty-one-year-old and a twenty-two-year-old, were both Catholics. The IRA supposedly had guidelines for commercial bombings which said there had to be phone warnings both to the target or nearby, as well as either to the Samaritans or to the RUC. These were also supposed to be given in sufficient time to clear the area but in the case of the Abercorn there was no evidence that any of this had been followed. A phone warning was made but it actually came seven minutes after the blast and to many, not least the maimed survivors, it looked as if it was a deliberate atrocity. The second bombing disaster came just two weeks later and this time there were warnings but conflicting, contradictory ones that ensured the death and mayhem that followed. On 20 March, a North Belfast unit of the IRA, from the Third Battalion, drove a 200-pound car bomb into Donegall Street, just a few streets away from the Abercorn restaurant, and left it there.
The first warning gave an inaccurate location for the car, as did two or three subsequent calls, and when the police cleared people away from the area, they inadvertently moved them in the direction of the real car bomb, which exploded killing seven people, three of them binmen working in the area. This time the IRA did admit responsibility but gave an explanation for the bloodshed that would form a familiar script in the years to come: proper and adequate warnings had been given but the information had been ‘changed and confused’ by British security forces. In other words the Brits were to blame. A statement issued the next day said the IRA regretted the civilian casualties but claimed the British carried ultimate blame for all the bloodshed in Ireland. Despite the words of bravado, the Abercorn and Donegall Street bombs were disasters for the IRA. They turned some Catholics against the IRA and emboldened others to speak out. Nationalist opinion had been fairly united up to then in opposition to the Unionist government and the British military and even though many had qualms about IRA violence they found it easier to stay silent as long as the British continued to behave as they had done in Derry on ‘Bloody Sunday’. That started to change in the spring of 1972 and then in July, in a way that ensured the reverberations would be profound and long-lasting.

The Abercorn and Donegall Street bombings would be dwarfed by what happened just two weeks after the ceasefire collapsed. On the afternoon of Friday, 21 July, between nineteen and twenty-two car bombs – the exact number varies in the different accounts – exploded throughout Belfast in the space of just over an hour; nine of them in an eighteen-minute period, six within three minutes. Nine people were killed and a hundred and thirty injured, some very badly. The greatest loss of life occurred at the Oxford Street bus station in the city centre where the car bomb exploded as the security forces were clearing the area, killing two soldiers and four employees of the Ulsterbus company. On the Cavehill Road in North Belfast a car bomb exploded outside a row of shops, killing two women and a fourteen-year-old schoolboy. No warning had
been received in that case. As television news programmes that night showed horrifying images of policemen shovelling the mutilated remains of torsos into plastic bags, the day was already being called ‘Bloody Friday’, the IRA’s answer to ‘Bloody Sunday’.

‘Bloody Friday’ was the Belfast Brigade’s response to the ceasefire breakdown, a message to the British government that the IRA could and would make a commercial desert of the city unless its demands were met. But the IRA leaders had miscalculated terribly and had badly overestimated the ability of the police, the British military and the emergency services to respond to so many warnings and devices in such a short space of time. The consequences for the IRA were devastating. Politically, ‘Bloody Friday’ placed the IRA ‘outside the pale of political negotiation’, as one account put it, and turned moderate Nationalist opinion on both sides of the border firmly against the Provos.
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It widened the gulf between constitutional Nationalism and those who favoured the ways of physical force, and set a pattern of mutual hostility that would last until the peace process, two decades later. The IRA’s difficulty was also Britain’s opportunity, militarily speaking. Ten days later thousands of British troops moved into ‘Free Derry’ and dismantled the barricades behind which the IRA had, since 1969, been able to move and organise freely while in Belfast soldiers constructed imposing military forts deep inside the IRA’s strongest areas from where they could launch patrols and conduct surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations against the Provos more or less at will. Operation Motorman, as the exercise was called, was the largest deployment of British military since the Suez crisis of 1956 and it marked the point at which the IRA lost the initiative in its war against the British and was forced on the defensive.

Brendan Hughes commanded the ‘Bloody Friday’ operation on behalf of the Belfast Brigade and had assembled the bombing teams from all over Belfast. But almost as soon as the first bombs exploded, he knew a disaster was in the making. There were too many bombs for the British to cope with and casualties were inevitable.