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When
the leadership of the Belfast IRA decided that the
opportune pretext to end the truce of 1972 had arrived,
chief of staff Sean MacStiofain knew little about
it but was tasked with preparing the statement announcing
its collapse. The leader of the IRA did so with words
displaying characteristic bellicosity, but this merely
belied his true feelings on the matter. He wanted
the truce to continue. Although he would later, with
justification, dispute Gerry Adams’ contention
in Before The Dawn that MacStiofain himself
had felt the truce talks with William Whitelaw had
brought republicans close to securing from the British
side a declaration of intent to withdraw, he realised
that a sustained truce was the only means to achieve
his idea of an all-Ireland conference.
Maria
McGuire in her book on her involvement with the IRA
claimed that MacStiofain was dependent on Belfast
as a means to secure his leadership and for that reason
was ‘taking the movement where Belfast wanted
it to go’. He was certainly the national leadership
figure who had identified most strongly with that
Belfast section of the pre-split IRA that was virulently
opposed to the leadership of Cathal Goulding. Belfast
was so strong within the republican ensemble that
no chief of staff could afford to lose its approval.
Goulding failed to keep the Belfast contingent satisfied
and ended up seeing it go on to form the Provisional
IRA. The latter were the dissidents or ‘rejectionists’
of their day, opposed to all and sundry who suggested
ending the war or wanting to go into Stormont.
So
central to post-1969 republicanism was its organisation
in the Northern capital that a key figure in the SDLP
in 1972 felt that one of those who attended the truce
talks in London was the power behind the IRA throne
and that ultimately he would have to be supped with,
and MacStiofain and O’Conaill bypassed, if progress
towards ending the IRA campaign was to be made.
Even
before the truce, MacStiofain had been told by both
Ivor Bell and Seamus Twomey that he would only get
to call one if he first secured the release from prison
of Gerry Adams in order that the latter could accompany
the others to the talks in London. This not only showed
that the balance of power lay in the North but also
that within the North it was heavily tilted in Belfast’s
favour. MacStiofain, in his truce manoeuvrings, had
been considering a request from the leadership of
the Derry Brigade to consider a cessation. Belfast
would determine whether he achieved it. Relatively
lightweight compared to its counterpart at the other
end of the M2, the Derry IRA had only one representative
at the London talks vis a vis three from Belfast.
In
preparation for collapsing the truce in Lenadoon,
the leadership of the Belfast IRA sent some of its
most seasoned volunteers into the area under the instructions
that once a volunteer and on-the-run prison escapee
gave a signal on the orders of Seamus Twomey, they
were to open fire on British soldiers. British military
fatalities would have occurred only the IRA volunteers
held their fire for fear of hitting members of an
irate nationalist crowd at the army billet observing
Twomey arguing with troops. But little time had passed
before the North was plunged back into full scale
guerrilla war. The decision taken by the Belfast delegation
on the plane returning home from the truce talks was
put into operation with devastating effect.
Although
there is a belief in some circles that the coordinated
and concerted bombing strike in Belfast thirty years
ago today was specifically designed as a response
to the breakdown of the truce, the operation was in
fact planned quite some time before the truce and
was put on hold in order to allow the ‘peace
initiative’ to become operationalised.
On
the 21st of July disaster struck. Civilians, soldiers
and one child lost their lives. Arguably, after the
Donegal Street bombing in March the IRA should have
been alert to the very real possibility that the organisation
was a long way off from developing a highly sophisticated
warning system that both it and the British state
security forces could manage between them if mass
civilian casualties were to be avoided. Prior to that
the August 1971 bombing of the Electricity Board of
Northern Ireland offices on the Malone Road in which
one person died had indicated to the IRA leadership
that greater precautions would need to be adopted
if civilian fatalities were to be avoided. The shooting
dead the following month of the toddler Angela Gallagher
by an IRA sniper attacking the British Army not only
underlined this need for greater protection for the
public, it caused a furious dispute within the Republican
Movement, with MacStiofain blowing a fuse when Sinn
Fein President Ruairi O’Bradaigh described the
child as ‘one of the hazards of urban guerrilla
warfare’. While O’Bradaigh genuinely felt
his comments had been taken out of context MacStiofain
claimed to be appalled at what he regarded as the
callous insensitivity of the statement.
In
spite of all the warning signals, the IRA failed to
take heed and in publicity terms paid the price. On
the day that became known as ‘Bloody Friday’
they extended their reach at the expense of their
grasp, lost control of the operation and in addition
to the fatalities allowed the British state to get
up from the moral floor where it had ignominiously
lain since Bloody Sunday and begin punching again
to its own chant of ‘Bloody Friday’.
If
my recollection is correct, within three hours of
the bombings Belfast Sinn Fein were distributing a
leaflet, Friday - The Facts, but to little
avail. Words on paper could prove no match for graphic
imagery of limbs being shovelled into plastic bags.
Nor was it a challenge to the 250,000 copies of the
British Government’s The Terror And the Tears.
Armed with a new found moral advantage the British
moved to close down the no-go areas militarily through
Operation Motorman while politically at the Darlington
Conference in the autumn, they presented their alternative
to republicanism - the framework that in 1998 lay
at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement.
Within
the year the IRA was on the ropes. Having lost the
initiative both militarily and politically, operations
came to be more rurally based. The insurrection in
the cities had all but fizzled out. It took the coming
together again in 1977 of the three truce plenipotentiaries
of five years earlier to act as a catalyst to its
revival. And within the year Bloody Friday raised
its head once more. On a Friday evening in February
1978 the absence of any developed warning system led
to the organisation’s Belfast Brigade wiping
out 12 innocent people in a ball of fire at La Mon
House. Guaranteeing civilian safety from IRA operations
had become the labour of Sisyphus.
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