Who Was Responsible for the Troubles? by Liam Kennedy

Author:Liam Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2020-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

These recollections also suggest internal debates and changes of attitude on the part of some members of the IRA and Sinn Féin.149 Fanciful notions of “community courts,” “people’s justice,” and the “people’s army” emerged periodically, cresting at the beginning of the Troubles and again at the beginning of the 1980s. Ultraleft rhetoric served to cloak the ugliness of the implications. But the constant is that the beatings, shootings, and expulsions continued, though as the medical columnist manqué of An Phobhlacht reassured its readers and perhaps practitioners as well, “very few of those kneecapped suffer serious consequences from this injury.”150

EXPLAINING PARAMILITARY “POLICING”

There are many interlocking reasons why the practice of “informal” justice became deeply embedded in urban working-class areas of Northern Ireland and in some rural localities such as south Armagh. The first was the military or security imperative: paramilitaries needed to exercise control over certain territories and peoples so as to have relatively safe havens within which to operate (be it racketeering, carrying out attacks on the army and police, bombing public buildings and workplaces, or assassinating civilians).151 Unpredictable and uncontrollable antisocial elements within the community endangered these activities by drawing police attention. Paramilitaries had the power – it really did come out of the barrel of a gun – and so could exercise control over the communities from which they emerged. In time, given the longevity of the Troubles, given the cumulative brutalisation of populations, and given the narrowing of options facing local people, this control congealed as authority.

Sometimes the consolidation of authority needed the iron fist, as often as not taking the form of iron bars and guns. Authoritarian regimes, in a sense understandably so, tend to be intolerant of political competition from within the polity. Thus SDLP councillors such as James Fee of Crossmaglen in south Armagh or Hugh Lewsley in west Belfast were given severe beatings for criticising paramilitary activity. Lewsley was assured by his attackers that “the beating would end his television appearances.”152 We have already seen the fate of leading politicians such as Fitt and Devlin who criticised the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries from a nationalist and labour position, but there can be little doubt that less prominent public representatives were subjected to threatening behaviour. To varying degrees these were punishments but punishments of a political kind. Similar type intimidation or worse was deployed against witnesses prepared to give evidence in the formal court system.153 Attacks on politicians and expulsions seem to have been more characteristic of republican groups and their supporters than of loyalist organisations but both made free use of intimidation.

Second, there was the struggle for legitimacy and again this relates more to republican than to loyalist paramilitaries. The institutions of the British state were deemed illegitimate, hence the desirability of creating alternative institutions in nationalist areas, as happened in parts of Ireland in 1919–21. This included a military organisation (the IRA), a policing and sometimes judicial system (run by Sinn Féin and the IRA), and various cultural and Irish-language enterprises. The

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