Ireland Since 1939 by Henry Patterson

Author:Henry Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141926889
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Her Majesty's Government is not allowing the Northern Ireland Government to do what they want to do: to issue statements about a timetable for proper action against the Catholic barricades and the extremists who seem to call the tune behind them. The result is that the Northern Ireland Government feel that the Catholics are getting away with it and they themselves are reduced more and more to the role of puppets… If and when we take over, and it will be a minor miracle if we don't have to, we shall, on present indications, have a pretty unfriendly majority party and majority community to deal with.17

Despite this, by the beginning of 1970 there was a facile optimism in the British cabinet and Whitehall that was reflected in an Irish Times investigation into the new relationship between Stormont and Westminster: ‘The British view is that the Northern Ireland problem “has been licked”.’18 At a meeting in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London in February, Wright informed Patrick Hillery, the Irish Minister for External Affairs, that ‘a lot of steam had gone out of demonstrations’ and that the only ones making trouble were ‘professional anarchists’. Irish fears about the growing support for Paisley, whose Protestant Unionist Party had recently won two council seats in Belfast, were dismissed with the claim that Chichester-Clark had a ‘moderate and united Unionist Party’ behind him and that the prospect was one of ‘steady improvement in the situation’.19 This ignored the reverberations from the violence of the previous summer in which thousands of people, most of them Catholics, had lost their homes. There was a dangerous new sharpness to sectarian tensions in Belfast from which both Paisley's Protestant populism and the infant Provisional IRA were already benefiting.

Traditionalist republicans had asserted themselves in the wake of the August violence. By September they had forced the Belfast IRA command to break its links with the national leadership, and by the end of the year the nucleus of an alternative republican movement had emerged, leaving Goulding's supporters to define themselves as the Official IRA. When in December an IRA convention voted in favour of ending the policy of abstention from the Dáil, Goulding's critics seceded and created a Provisional Army Council. In January 1970 the political wing of the movement, Sinn Féin, also split. While the largely southern leadership of the Provisionals – men including the new Chief of Staff Seán MacStiofáin and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh – were driven by a fundamentalist commitment to the main tenets of republican ideology, many of their new supporters in the North were motivated by a mixture of ethnic rage against loyalists and the RUC and the increasingly fraught relations between the British Army and sections of Belfast's Catholic working class.

Although the violence of August had created a reservoir of fear, resentment and anger that the Provisionals could exploit, recent research has pointed to slow and limited growth of the organization until the spring of 1970. The first ‘general army convention’ of the Provisional IRA was attended by just thirty-four people.

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