700. The Troubles: Bloody Sunday (Part 4)

How did Bloody Sunday erupt on the 30th of January 1972? Why did it follow on the heels of terrible violence? And, what were the consequences of that violent day? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the tragic events of Bloody Sunday, and the final attempt at peace in Northern Ireland. *The Rest Is History LIVE: The Ultimate Victorian Adventure* The maddest expedition in history and it’s NEVER been heard before on the show: join Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook LIVE at the Southbank as they tell the bonkers story of Queen Victoria ordering one of history’s most daring assignments ever. ⁠⁠⁠Tickets available for Friday 4th September⁠⁠⁠, the Saturday show is SOLD OUT. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  Hello. Now, before we go to today's episode, I have some insanely exciting news for you. On Friday, the 4th of September, Dominic and I will be performing live at the South Bank Centre in London. And better yet, we will be doing something completely new, something that no one has ever heard before on The Rest Is History, the ultimate Victorian adventure.

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• 3:53Speaker 00

  Mr. Speaker, I am deeply patriotic. I never want to believe anything bad about our country. I never want to call into question the behaviour of our soldiers and our army, who I believe to be the finest in the world. And I have seen for myself the very difficult and dangerous circumstances in which we ask our soldiers to serve.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear. There is no doubt, there is nothing equivocal, there are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong. What happened should never, ever have happened. The families of those who died should not have had to live with the pain and the hurt of that day and with a lifetime of loss. Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces. And for that, on behalf of the government, indeed, on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry. So that was former Prime Minister David Cameron speaking to the House of Commons on the 15th of June, 2010. And it was his response to the report of the Savile Inquiry, which had been set up 12 years earlier by Tony Blair to investigate the single most controversial moment of the entire troubles. And that moment was the shooting and killing of 13 unarmed Catholic civilians by British paratroopers

• 5:49Speaker 00

  during a protest march in Derry on the 30th of January, 1972, a day that has gone down in infamy as Bloody Sunday. And the Savile Inquiry was actually the second official British investigation. The first, under Lord Chief Justice Widgery, a splendid name, was conducted just weeks after the event. And that one largely exonerated the paratroopers. But most people didn't agree with that conclusion. Certainly the families of the victims never accepted it. And of course, U2 never accepted it. And their song helped to make Bloody Sunday a cause celebre

• 6:30Speaker 00

  wherever popular music is listened to by earnest teenagers in bedrooms.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  So Tony Blair set up the Savile Inquiry as part of the peace process in 1998. And it was incredibly expensive, cost almost £200 million. And the Savile Inquiry, unlike the Widgery Report, it blamed the paratroopers for losing control and for lying about it afterwards, hence Cameron's statement afterwards. So it's obviously a notorious date in modern British and indeed Irish history. And today we'll explore the context for Bloody Sunday. We'll talk about what happened that day in January, 1972, why it mattered and how Northern Ireland spiraled into hell, basically, in the worst year of the troubles. But first, by way of recap, let's pick up in the autumn of 1971.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  So in the last episode, we talked about the disaster of internment, which was that August, the news stories about the torture of the people who were interned. And then the sectarian bomb attacks that autumn. So the Four Steps, the Red Lion pubs, the McGurk's Bar attack, and then the Balmoral Furniture showroom. Now amid all this, in October of that year, 71, relatively new Stormont Prime Minister Brian Faulkner flies to London. And he has come to brief Ted Heath on the desperate security situation. And Faulkner says to him, look, this is dreadful. If these bombings continue, a breakdown in government might occur in a matter of weeks. And Heath says to him, I mean, this is very bad news.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  I agree, it's awful and this cannot go on. The British people, the British public is losing patience. Now, if you think about their options at this point, if we step back and think about their options, what can the British government plausibly do? So one option, which would be the sort of the John Lennon option, and of course, the option that the provisional IRA would like, the troops out movement, lots of people on the left who think this is Britain's Vietnam, but also lots of ordinary people in Britain who don't, you know, they don't give a damn about Northern Ireland. They don't understand why the British Army is there and why people are dying. This option would be to get out, to just say, fine, forget it, we're going home, we're going to leave you to your own devices. So the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling,

• 8:50Speaker 01

  we talked about him last time, very clever, very corrupt, lazy, office face on gin all the time. He's slightly of this mind. So there's a story about a group of community relations experts coming to meet him at his office, and they found him slumped in an armchair, and he was completely sort of exhausted and demoralised. And he said, so what do we do? Arm the Protestants and get out? And obviously, you know, this is an option.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  It's the de Gaulle option, isn't it, with Algeria?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. Now, now, why don't people do that? Well, a difference between Algeria and Northern Ireland, I can remember I actually had a, when I was at university, a tutor of mine encouraged me to see similarities between the situation in Algeria and that's in Northern Ireland. But an obvious difference is, in Algeria, the people who want to stay part of France, the, the Pinois, as they're called, they are very much a minority. But in Northern Ireland, a majority of people there, if you regard it as a separate entity, a majority of people in that entity want to remain part of the United Kingdom.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  Also, they've been there since the 17th century, haven't they?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  They've been there a long time. There are a million of them. It's a very unusual thing for a country to basically dismember itself, to throw away part of its own territory where the majority of the population want to remain part of that country. And perhaps more importantly, almost everybody looking at the situation agrees that if the British Army did withdraw, and if Britain did go home, as it were, the result would be an absolute sectarian free-for-all. There would be massive bloodshed, probably effectively, we've talked about a low-level civil war, there would be a proper civil war, and the Republic of Ireland would have to get involved.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  And there'd also be massive blowback in Britain, right? I mean, at the very least, there'd be hundreds of thousands of Protestant refugees presumably crossing to mainland Britain.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, completely the wood, completely the wood. And of course, this is why, the fact that it would be so chaotic, this is why, in the course of the 1970s, in private, the Irish government are desperate for this not to happen. So in 1975, I mean, we'll maybe talk about this when we come to it in a future series, in 1975, the Irish government actually get in touch with Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, and they say, we want you to put pressure on the British, do not withdraw, it's the last thing what we in Dublin want. We don't want a united Ireland right away, please stay and hold the line.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  And there's an element in, in the Irish government thinking that still secretly has a little bit of that.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  I think so. I think undoubtedly, undoubtedly, that it would be, you'd, you'd be importing a large number of people who basically hate your state. And, you know, do you really want to do that? So people keep coming back to this idea, this sort of what they see as another kind of semi-nuclear option, scrap self-government in Northern Ireland and put it under direct rule from London. Heath hesitates to do that still at this point. Why? Because the Ministry of Defence have told him that if you do that, you can't be certain that local public officials will follow your orders. There might be a complete breakdown of public services, the whole country might fall apart. British military intelligence says, the risk of doing this is if the Protestants turn against us, we will be fighting, and

• 12:01Speaker 01

  I quote, fighting both sides in the middle of a civil war. At this point, the British public would say, well, this is mad, we should all come, our troops should come home. And then you would get the massive bloodbath anyway. And so after all this, Heath and his ministers decide, what are we going to do? We'll just keep doing what we've been doing. We'll muddle on, we'll muddle through. And crucially, we must keep Brian Faulkner in power, because if he falls, we have no other option. So where does this leave the British Army on the ground? We haven't really talked much about them in this series. Initially, there were about 7,000 of them. This has now doubled to 15,000. And obviously, they're not there, you know, any illusion of them being there as sort of jolly peacemakers, having fish and chips and cups of tea has long since disappeared. They're in this quagmire, hence

• 12:45Speaker 01

  the Vietnam comparisons. It's this sort of, I think the weird thing about it for them is it's like a parallel universe, kind of apocalyptic Britain. So there's, in Peter Taylor's book, Brits, about the experience of the army, he talks about this young officer who flew into Belfast for the first time in August 1971. And this officer looked down, and he said, you could see roads that had been blocked and barricaded, you could see fires from bonfires, burning cars and burning houses. And he said, the mad thing is that all this was happening in a city of the United Kingdom with red telephone boxes and red letterboxes. I mean, that's the thing that kind of messes with the soldiers' heads, in

• 13:25Speaker 01

  a way. And of course, it's very dangerous. So every month, soldiers are dying, 42 of them died in 1971, killed by the IRA, 64 of them died in 1972. I mentioned in the last episode, Kevin Myers, the RTE journalist, his memoir, Watching the Door. There's a moment in that, a very sort of evocative passage. He remembers in the summer of 1972, being on this burned-out kind of Belfast estate, and watching a teenage IRA gunman open fire on a British patrol, and one of the British soldiers being left bleeding to death in the middle of the street, and children laughing and jeering him as he laid there dying. And Myers, I mentioned him last time, Irish Catholic parentage, Bob O'N

• 14:09Speaker 01

  in Leicester, ended up working for Irish TV. In his memoir, he actually says, the one thing that's underrated is what he calls the forbearance and good cheer of the British troops. He says they're under the worst provocation, and it's amazing that they behaved as well as they did. Of course, that's not an argument you often hear, and may seem incongruous, given the subject of today's episode. Now, even the soldiers themselves, of course, admit that they're not perfect. So most of these men, you know, especially, we're talking about the Rankin-Far, the squaddies, they are relatively poorly educated, young men, lots of them in their late teens, early twenties. When you look at the ages in the casualty list, it's stunning how young they are, actually. They're often from working-class estates

• 14:51Speaker 01

  in the cities of Northern England. These are people to whom turning the other cheek does not necessarily come naturally. And many of them actually come to hate the people of Northern Ireland. This bloke called Jim, who Peter Taylor quotes, "You see these blokes dying in gutters in a war which is not classed as a war. It makes you bloody bitter, and it fills you with hate. I hated the people in those areas with an intensity that used to make me feel almost physically sick." And Jim, in his interview, he talks about, you know, we would go in, we would kick in their doors, we would smash their windows. When we got a chance, we would smash in their TV screens. And I think you can see in the context how that would seem, how young men probably would behave like that.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  And can I just ask about the officers? Because I, I don't know if you've seen the adaptation of Say Nothing?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  I've not. I've read the book, but not seen the TV series.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  So about two sisters who joined the IRA?

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  And Rory Kinnear plays a, a British intelligence officer absolutely brilliantly, I have to say. And he, he has kind of counterinsurgency experience from various British colonial engagements.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  And he is played with a very icy heart, I think it's fair to say. And I, is that how the, the British officer class see what's going on? Do they similarly, you're saying, you know, I hate these people, this, this guy that gets quoted. Do you think the, the British officer class feel the same?

• 16:18Speaker 01

  It's hard to generalise. Not all of them hate the local people, of course, but I think a lot of the British officer class, I mean, if you're in that position, the chances are that you might have served in the colonial engagement earlier in the 60s in Aden or whatever. So I think it's probably fair, there's quite a few of the British officer class view it through a colonial prism, as it were, to use the kind of jargon. I think they don't, they come to see, they come to have contempt or a dislike, a contempt for dislike of the locals on all sides. So you don't find, you know, it's not like they're, falling over themselves to pour syrup over the, the unius population. I think they, they

• 17:01Speaker 01

  come to feel like, you know, it's us against the world, they're in an alien environment, everybody's against them, they don't understand it, they're sick of it, their mates are dying. And that's true whether you're the old Etonian officer, or whether you're the kid who left school at 16 and went straight into the army, I think.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Right, because, because the officer class will be complicit in what happens on Bloody Sunday, just as much as the squaddies who do the firing.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Well, when we come to Bloody Sunday, I mean, the single most best-known British soldier involved in Bloody Sunday is very much an officer-class kind of person, as we shall see. So the Catholic population, at this point, the relationship between them and the army is, is just incredibly toxic. The Catholic population view the army as bullying occupiers, the army view them as their enemies, and nowhere is this more pronounced than the city where the British Army had first arrived, which is Londonderry or Derry. And a reminder for people, you know, the name is the, is gives you a clue to its sort of fractured identity. It's about 60, 40 Catholic Protestant. It's economically really struggling. The mood in Derry is very fractious and very bitter and has been since

• 18:10Speaker 01

  the late 60s. In fact, the scars of the fighting in 1969 at this point have still not healed. There are still burned out shops, burned out businesses. There are huge barricades that block off Catholic estates. So particularly in an area that is called Free Derry, you know, they're basically, there's a big mural. It says, you are now entering Free Derry. There are barricades there. They are the entrances to the estate. The bogside are guarded by vigilantes in masks and balaclavas who are often openly carrying guns.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  And the British Army do not try and pull these barriers down?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  No, they do not. And from this area, from Free Derry, gangs of unemployed teenagers who call themselves the Derry Young Hooligans.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  That's what it says on the tin, I guess.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  That's what it says on the tin, exactly. They go out on kind of raids into the city centre and they will loot shops and they will try to burn Protestant owned businesses and things like this. So by the second half of 1971, there is a sense that, you know, legitimate authority in Derry has pretty much broken down. The Protestant business owners are outraged at this. They estimate their losses from arson at about £4 million. A lot of money then. They are furious that the RUC, the police and the British Army are not protecting them. And every day there are these sort of scuffles and confrontations at the edge of the bogside where teenagers will throw stones at British Army patrols, but the patrols won't go in. And some, there are some people in the army who find this incredibly frustrating and humiliating. One of these people is a man called Lieutenant

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Colonel Derek Wilford, who commands the first battalion of the parachute regiment. And Wilford says of these patrols in Derry, "They just stood there in the road like Aunt Sally's and they never went forward. It was horrifying." In other words, he's embarrassed to be a British officer and this is happening.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  And the paras are the most...

• 20:05Speaker 01

  The hardest of the hard, as they see themselves. And Wilford's view is shared by the new British commander in Northern Ireland, Major General Robert Ford, who arrives in the late summer of 1971. Ford looks at the maps and he sees black lines on the army maps that mark Free Derry. And he says, "This is an embarrassment. We shouldn't have such lines on our maps. The local officers have been too soft. And actually, by being too soft, they invite provocation and they put our men's lives at risk. And men are dying. So pretty much one a month is being shot by snipers and killed, and probably twice that number being wounded." And Ford thinks this is getting worse because basically the, the people in the bogside are becoming emboldened. So on

• 20:49Speaker 01

  the 14th of December, Ford writes to his officers and he says, "The situation in Derry is deteriorating. It's insane that we have abandoned part of the second city of Northern Ireland to 40 IRA gunmen and 500 hooligans and we've done nothing at all about it." He says, "The correct military solution," these are his words, "would be to cross the line into the no-go area, go in hard and root out the IRA. But," he says, "the drawbacks are so serious that I want to hold off doing that for the time being." Why? Because, and I quote, "The risk of casualties is high and apart from gunmen or bombers, so-called

• 21:30Speaker 01

  unarmed rioters, possibly teenagers, are certain to be shot in the initial phases. Much will be made of the invasion of Derry and the slaughter of the innocent." So these are very prescient words from Major General Ford. Anyway, over Christmas, there's no improvement. So on the 7th of January, Ford writes another report and this becomes incredibly controversial later on. He says, "Things are getting even worse. Our armoured cars, when they go, when they pass, they're surrounded by these teenagers and attacked. And the soldiers get out. And when the soldiers get out, snipers on the high-rise Rossville flats shoot at them and

• 22:11Speaker 01

  sometimes wound or kill them. This is absolutely unacceptable. We have to get tough." And he goes on to say, "The only way that we can restore law and order in Derry is to," and I quote, "shoot selected ringleaders amongst the Derry Young Hooligans after clear warnings have been issued." You know, "We have to shoot some of these teenagers." But, he says, he goes on to say, "We do not want to have unnecessary casualties. We don't want to bring a firestorm of criticism down upon us. So we will use a particular kind of ammunition, so 0.22 inch ammunition. It's much less likely to kill people and it's much less likely

• 22:52Speaker 01

  to cause accidental casualties by killing people in the vicinity." In other words, I think what Ford is basically saying is, "I want us to shoot people but not necessarily to kill them."

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, salutary violence.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. So that was on the 7th of January, 1972. Now, 11 days later, Brian Faulkner, the Prime Minister, announces a ban on all parades in Derry. However, the civil rights group, NICRA, which we talked about a couple of episodes ago.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Sounds very sinister, doesn't it? Sounds like a kind of pro-smoking lobby.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, this group, they have planned a civil rights march to protest against internment, which of course was introduced in August. And this march is scheduled for Sunday, the 30th of January. And this is the day that will go down as Bloody Sunday.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  So they've scheduled, they've, they want to do this march, which is technically illegal. And we come now to the day. Probably no day in recent British history, perhaps all British history, has been chronicled so exhaustively.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  D-Day?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Perhaps. Possibly. But when I tell you this, the Savile Report, which covers this day, comes to 10 volumes, 5,036 pages and about two and a half million words.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  So you haven't listened to We Have Ways on D-Day because I think there's a lot more.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Let's spend more, your brother and Al Murray, surely Arnhem.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  Arnhem, yes.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  It's always Arnhem with them, isn't it? Anyway, are you and I going to spend two and a half million words and 5,000 pages on Bloody Sunday? A big spoiler alert for the listeners, we are not. We're going to give a very simplified version. If you want to read the Savile Report, it is online and we'll see you in 10 years. So here is what happens. The army and the police authorities in the city agree that if the march goes ahead, which it clearly is going to, the march is going to defy the government's instructions. They want to keep it out of the city centre because they want to avoid more attacks on the shops. So we'll close off the city centre, we'll keep the marches within the Catholic areas. If it turns violent, they say, "We're going to use the army to scoop up as many

• 25:01Speaker 01

  rioters as possible. But we'll be careful about this. You know, we'll, we'll proceed with caution. The army should only go in after specific orders and don't confuse rioters and marches. You know, we don't want bad publicity."

• 25:17Speaker 00

  Heaven forbid, not bad publicity.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Basically, if you've got well-meaning people waving placards, leave them alone. If you've got people throwing bricks at you with masks on, they're the people you arrest. Now, who's going to do the scooping? General Ford thinks that the army in Derry have been too passive, of course. So as the arresting force, he sends to Derry the hardest and most aggressive men that he has. And this is Lieutenant Colonel Wilford's first battalion of the Para Regiment. Now, they're the hardest men. Wilford himself is a really remarkable man, actually, to be commanding such men. Amazing story. So he came from, I think, Leicestershire. He was born to a single mother. He was brought up by his grandparents and

• 26:02Speaker 01

  an anonymous donor paid for him to go to Loughborough Grammar School. At Loughborough Grammar School, he turned out to be an absolutely brilliant classicist and actor. So he was given a place at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where all the sort of top lovers go. He turned it down and ended up joining the army. His idea of relaxation is to read Virgil and Marcus Aurelius in the original, in Latin.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Very First World War in the trenches.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Very much, although less First World War. After he left the army, I was reading an obituary of him today and this blew my mind. After he left the army with perhaps a slightly chequered reputation, he grew a ponytail and became a Belgian antiques dealer.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  It's an unexpected development.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  It's a massively unexpected development. Anyway, in 1972, this bloke commands one of the most feared battalions in the British Army. They are ultra-professional, ultra-aggressive. His men, he always has his men kind of blacking up with their faces and wearing camouflage. He says, you know, "We, we are fighters and killers. We're not messing around here."

• 27:07Speaker 00

  What kind of camouflage are you wearing in Derry? You kind of dress up in, it looked like concrete or something.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Dress as a tower block.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  A bollard.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think you're just wearing it in case you're suddenly sent to Malaya at a moment's notice. Well, anyway. But he asked himself, "What would Marcus Aurelius do?" And Marcus Aurelius would be wearing green combat fatigues, no?

• 27:27Speaker 00

  No, he wouldn't. He'd be dressing up as bollards, fooling the rioters.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Pouncing. So even before Bloody Sunday, the paras, these paras had a, a reputation, shall we say. So a few days beforehand, the then young journalist, Simon Hoggart, called them in print, "They are the troops most hated by Catholics in troubled areas." And he said, "Other British officers regard them as little better than thugs in uniform." And actually, other officers thought it was a great mistake to send in the paras. And in Peter Taylor's book, Brits, he quotes officers who said, "At the time, it is mad to be using them to police a non-violent civil rights march."

• 28:10Speaker 01

  But of course, Ford wants to use the paras precisely because he thinks it will be violent. The atmosphere in Derry is very tense. Just three days before the march, the IRA had ambushed an RUC patrol car and they'd killed two policemen. And Ford's officers on the ground say to him, look, this march may start peacefully, but the Derry Young hooligans backed up by the gunman, this is a quote, the Derry Young hooligans backed up by the gunman will undoubtedly take control at an early stage. And what they're particularly worried about, and this may actually remind people of a very unlikely parallel, which is the German invasion of Belgium in 1914. What they're really worried about is snipers, you know, people shooting from roofs and from

• 28:54Speaker 01

  sort of behind barricades and things. The paras' operational orders explicitly warn them, you should expect IRA terrorist activity, almost certainly snipers, petrol bombers and nail bombers will support the rioters. And snipers are their biggest fear. Snipers had killed 24 soldiers in the course of 1971. So when you, if you're a para and you wake up first thing in the morning, probably the threat of the sniper is the first thing you think of. But the paras have the reputation, they do, because they are gung ho, because they're not frightened. So one of them later remembers his commanding officer's words the night before, let's teach them a lesson, we want some kills tomorrow. Anyway, so we get to the day itself.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  When you dig into like the Savile inquiry, you know, unless you've got like 10 years to spend reading this stuff, it's daunting, the amount of detail, minute by minute detail. But actually, the big picture of it is pretty straightforward. Lunchtime, the marches assemble and they set off just before three o'clock in the afternoon. There are about 12,000 of them. And the atmosphere, contrary to expectation at first, is pretty relaxed, pretty upbeat. Actually, there were people at the time said it was almost like a carnival atmosphere. People were quite jolly. They set off, by half past three, they're approaching the city centre. It is of course blocked off, sealed off by an army barricade on William Street. So at that point, most of the marchers turn right, going towards the bogside.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  They're going to stop when they get to Free Derry Corner, as it's called, the entrance to hear speeches, people denouncing internment. Now, back at William Street by the barricade, blocking off the city centre, there are some scuffles between rioters and the paras, teenagers basically throwing stones at the British Army. And this is where the first shots are fired. The paratroopers fire five rounds and they wound a teenage boy and a 59-year-old man, but they didn't kill anybody.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  But that is what they've basically in order to do, to wound, to wound hooligans and rioters.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  And a few minutes later, there is a sniper shot. So he's an official IRA man, he fires a single shot, he misses the soldiers and he hits a drainpipe. So this is not long before four o'clock. At 3:55, Lieutenant Colonel Wilford asks permission from the commanding officer in Derry, he says, I wonder, can we send in the paras to pick up yobbos? That's his phrase. And 12 minutes pass and then he gets the confirmation from the overall Derry commander as follows, yes, fine, send in a paras subunit to do scoop up op through barrier 14, not to conduct running battle down Rossville Street.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Now, this last sentence is totally ignored because a few minutes later, a convoy of armoured personnel carriers come screaming down the road, down Rossville Street into the bogside. And paratroopers jump out and they immediately start grabbing people from the crowd, hitting them with kind of rifle butts, firing rubber bullets at this stage at them and so on and so forth. And it's a scene, you've seen it so many times in this story, in this series, the story of the troubles, chaos, hundreds of people screaming, people running away in panic, some people taking refuge behind rubble barricades, throwing stones and things, but most people just running away. And the paras claimed later that it was at this point that they came under fire from

• 32:23Speaker 01

  snipers on top of the high-rise flats overlooking the scene. This, I think the Savile inquiry established beyond any possible doubt, is just not true. There were no witnesses that saw snipers, there were no guns found, there were no bullets found afterwards, there was nothing. What effectively happens in the next few minutes is that the paratroopers completely lose control. I mean, it's not an unfamiliar story with people policing crowds, you know, it's a terrible story, but it's not unknown.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  Well, I suppose, I mean, the Vietnam comparison that Ted Kennedy made, it's that kind of melee or something.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  It's soldiers frazzled on the edge, commit atrocities.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, this is the funny thing about it. It cost 200 million pounds to do this inquiry, but I remember reading, you know, I was researching my book on the early 70s at that point when the report came and I thought, you know, this is exactly as I thought it always would be, this would be the, the outcome. Because psychologically, from everything we know about how people behave in these situations, this makes complete sense. They sort of panic, they're overpumped up, as it were, they're very hard men, they are trained killers, they're also very young men, they lose control, they start shooting, they fire more than 100 rounds into the crowd, they hit 26 people and they kill 13 people.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  And most of the people they kill are very young, six of them of the 13 were 17 years old. Most of the people they kill were running away, running to safety. Some of them were trying to help the injured, but we know that a lot of them were shot in the back. And the most famous image of the day is a Catholic priest called Edward Daly. And you can see the photos online, it's one of the ones that comes up immediately if you Google Bloody Sunday. It's a priest and he's waving a bloodstained handkerchief as a white flag and they're trying to carry this guy to safety, 17-year-old Jackie Duddy. And Duddy dies just moments later. And the priest, Edward Daly, was holding his hand and giving him the last rites as he died.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  And as you said, why this all happened is quite a straightforward, I think, question to answer. If you send trained killers, renowned for their aggression, to police a march and if you tell them you're going to be attacked by snipers, you're making it quite likely that they will lose control. So this is, I mean, General Ford had actually said it himself. That's why I read the quotation out, he'd said it in December, "The risk of casualties is high, so-called unarmed rioters, possibly teenagers, are certain to be shot, much will be made of the invasion of Derry and the slaughter of the innocent." Now, did the paras feel guilty after this had happened? The short answer is no. One of them says in, in the book, Brits that I mentioned, he says, "We saw it as a job well done."

• 35:14Speaker 00

  I mean, this is possibly a heretical question.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  Bearing in mind the military situation, was it a job well done? In other words, did it serve as a salutary atrocity which made people think twice?

• 35:31Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not. If you're going to take such a cold-blooded view of it, which, I mean, it's not, it's a quite a fair question to ask, right?

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the Richard, you know, they did it and they were right to do it kind of thing.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely not, because, I mean, the, the evidence is in what happens in the next 11 months in Northern Ireland and indeed in the next 20-odd years, which is, things got a lot worse and it complete, as we'll see, it completely destroys the reputation of the British Army and corrodes beyond measure the relationship between them and much of the local population. So absolutely not. If you were taking the most Machiavellian kind of possibly, or Clausewitzian interpretation, then no, absolutely not at all.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  And what happens to Free Derry?

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Still there.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Do they not go in and bulldoze it?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  No, not at this point, no. That, that happens much later, think of Operation Motorman, but not at this point, no. Just on the paras, actually, the job well done thing, I guess to the end of their lives, a lot of the paras, I mean, they maintained and presumably still maintain that they did the right thing, they were shooting in self-defence. And actually, a really interesting person who's written about this, a very unexpected person, is the extremely right-wing journalist Douglas Murray. So Douglas Murray went, you know, assistant editor of The Spectator, or associate editor of The Spectator, he went to the Savile inquiry and wrote a book about it. And he is incredibly scathing about the paratroopers. He calls them unrelenting liars.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  He says, you know, they lied and lied and lied about coming under attack, about what they did, about not shooting people in the back, all of this kind of thing. They perjured themselves in, in the Savile inquiry. I wonder if that's quite right. I think it's quite possible, in fact psychologically very plausible, that they, they made up excuses and then came to believe them. I mean, isn't that such a common thing that people do?

• 37:24Speaker 00

  Also, I suppose, you know, your subconscious could tell you that you're hearing things that prompt you to do something that you want to do anyway.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  In the heat of the moment, in the chaos, people screaming, running away, gun, sounds of gunshots, sounds of, you know, battle, you might come to, you believe, you know, you might think, you might assume you are under fire because you've been told it's possible, and then you start shooting and then you lose control over yourself?

• 37:49Speaker 00

  Wilford is furious, isn't he, that Blair sets up the inquiry?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  Even if he's got a ponytail by that point.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, from his Belgian antique shop, he's absolutely outraged, as indeed were not everybody. So if you go look into this, you can find plenty of people in the army who say, it's terrible that our brave boys were subject to this relentless investigation. You know, they're in a terrible situation, terrible pressure, leave them alone. Equally, you can find people in the army who say they were out of control, I knew they were out of control.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Well, because it's a terrible stain on the reputation of the British Army. So. I mean, as Cameron says, you know, it's unjustified and unjustifiable.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Right. Cameron said that, but that's not what British politicians said at the time. So at the time, the government line was that the powers had fired in self-defense and they were tremendous fellows. So Reginald Maudling, the next day, gave a speech in the Commons. He didn't say a single word about the 13 victims. He said, the paratroopers were defending themselves from people attacking them with firearms and with bombs, which just was not true. And actually Bernadette Devlin, remember her, the

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're the MP.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  She physically attacked Maudling on the floor of the House of Commons. Extraordinary thing. She basically came down and basically just laid into him because she was so upset that he was, you know, these people had been killed and then she saw it. He was smearing the victims. But actually, Maudling's constituency agent wrote to him afterwards and said, while it is never pleasant when people are shot dead, I must say I'm glad that at long last the troops have started to get tough. And you see that a lot in the British press in the next few days. The Daily Mail, our troops are doing an impossible job, impossibly well. Even The Guardian, The Guardian, the army has an intolerably difficult time in Ireland. At times it is bound to act firmly, even severely.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Robustly, one might say.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Robustly, exactly. And of course, a lot of unionists, well, certainly loyalists, said the more hardline unionists in Northern Ireland are not terribly sad about it. So Time Magazine interviewed a labourer in a Belfast pub who said, you know, after 13 people had been shot dead, he said, I wish it had been 1,300 of the bastards. But of course, it's terrible for Britain's image in Ireland and in America. In Ireland, there was a national day of mourning. There was huge demonstrations, this massive crowd assembled outside the British Embassy in Dublin. The police tried to hold them back. The crowd started throwing petrol bombers and finally they burned down the Chancery building. You know, it's kind of a pretty big deal in a capital where basically nothing ever happens.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  And the big winners from all this, I mean, you're asking, you know, what are the, if you're being sort of completely ruthless about it, what are the implications? Well, the big winners from this are not the British, they're not the unionists, they are the provisional IRA. So it's not a turning point, but it accelerates a process that's already underway. The breakdown and the legitimacy of the government, the collapse of the relationship between the British and the Catholics and republican paramilitary recruitment. Because basically, imagine that you're, let us say you're a middle-class Catholic, you know, who's not terribly sectarian. And, you know, you're of a moderate disposition. You look at this story and this story seems to

• 41:15Speaker 01

  say to you, everything that people say about the British is true. They're murderers and then they lie about it.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  And you could think about the impact of people of Irish descent in Britain. So you could think of a man who is the son of Irish ancestors, Irish forbears, had a very successful career, never said or sung anything political really, and forms a new band and releases Give Ireland Back to the Irish. Because it's Paul McCartney.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  I was hoping it was Dennis Healy, but it wasn't. It was Paul McCartney.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  It's not Dennis Healy. Paul McCartney, that's, that is when he releases that single in the wake of Bloody Sunday.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  So to quote one young man, another young man, events that day probably led more young nationalists to join the provisionals than any other single action by the British. From that day on, money, guns and recruits flooded into the IRA. And the name of that young man was Gerry Adams. And we will be hearing more about him after the break.

• 42:20Speaker 01

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• 44:57Speaker 00

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Rest is History. It is now February 1972 and Northern Ireland is reeling from the shocking events of Bloody Sunday, which happened on the 30th of January 1972. And I guess, Dom, I mean, the massive, massive question is, where does the province go from here?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's pretty clear, I think, that Stormont Parliament is doomed. I think it's probably been doomed for a couple of years, certainly from the introduction of British troops. I think it was always on borrowed time. But what happens next is far from settled. The classic idea that Irish Republicans have that the British are desperate to cling on to Northern Ireland is a fallacy. Actually, as we've discussed, a lot of the public are sick of it and a lot of the politicians would love to pull out. So in February 72, Heath and his cabinet have a big chat about it. And it's remarkable. All options are on the table. They talk about redrawing the border, let the Catholic areas join the Republic. We could have a referendum

• 46:00Speaker 01

  on ending partition. Maybe there's a solution where Northern Ireland remains technically part of the United Kingdom, but has some sort of constitutional association with Ireland.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  I mean, that is kind of the solution that ultimately they get to, isn't it?

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Yes, that is where they get to. And actually, a point worth making, I think, the place where they get to, the British would have taken that at any point after about 1970. It's absolutely, I mean, I know we joke about being a patriotic podcast, so some people will say, oh, they're very biased or whatever. But frankly, when you look at the history of it, it's not British obstinacy that stops the peace process happening in the 1970s. It's that of other parties. The British would absolutely have taken something like the Good Friday Agreement in 1972. And they would have done all the way through, I think. And in fact, Ted Heath's Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Hume, is on the right of the Tory party at this meeting,

• 46:55Speaker 01

  basically says, our interests would best be served by getting rid. Tell the unionists they should join a united Ireland. You know, the fact that somebody like that is taking that position would have come as a shock, I think, to a lot of Britain's critics. Because there's an assumption that people in Britain, I don't know, they sort of have a misty-eyed attachment to the possession of Northern Ireland, which is just not true at all.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  Well, that's the thing, isn't it? That both the loyalist and the nationalist paramilitaries, they have a stake in committing violence. The British Army, despite running amok on Bloody Sunday, don't feel strongly committed enough to an ideological position to do anything comparable to that. They'd much rather just pull out.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  They would. No question they would. Basically, I think if you're in the army, you get the, you know, you're told you're being posted to Northern Ireland. You don't think, brilliant, you know, let's get stuck in. You think, oh, no, really? So anyway, in Northern Ireland itself, the pace of events now is quickening. So the rate of killing increases in February 1972. The IRA alone killed 17 civilians. And then on the 23rd of February, you have news from England. The official IRA have detonated a car bomb at the paratroopers headquarters in Aldershot by the officers' mess. The troops were away, so the car bomb killed seven people. These people were respectively, five dinner ladies, a Catholic chaplain and the gardener

• 48:28Speaker 01

  at the barracks.

• 48:29Speaker 00

  And is this the first attack on British soil? Well, it's English soil, isn't it? Because it tends to be England that gets attacked.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:35Speaker 00

  Because that seems the obvious tactic. And it's surprising that they don't do it earlier, really.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Well, don't forget, they had attacked British soil in the 30s at Coventry in 1939. But it's, you know, they're supposed, they've got limited resources and they want to win the war on the streets of Belfast initially. It's not really until 1974, 75 that they move in earnest to attacking Britain. But yeah, it is the first, it's the first sign of something that will recur very ominously. So that was the official IRA. Two weeks later, an attack by the provisional IRA this time in Belfast. And this, the target this time, I mean, this is a truly awful story. The target is the Abercorn Restaurant in Belfast City Centre. So it was Catholic owned, but the reason they attacked it was probably because the upstairs

• 49:23Speaker 01

  bar of the Abercorn was very popular with soldiers on their evenings off. And the bombers were probably two teenage girls because people saw two teenage girls leaving a handbag. But the result is a horrendous scene. So it was a Saturday afternoon, the restaurant was packed with shoppers, mainly women, having coffee. Two women in their early twenties were killed. They were both Catholics. 140 people were injured. There's a, I mean, some horrible stories. A woman who was, who'd been out shopping for her wedding dress, lost an arm and an eye. A paramedic afterwards said the ambulances were awash with blood. It was the most distressing scene I've ever witnessed. And now here's the horrible twist. They call in all the doctors, you know, it's an emergency.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  So many people injured. One of the doctors who came in was an anesthetist called Dr Fred Breen. And he worked through the night on the wounded. And when he'd finished, he was taken aside and told, one of the two women killed was your daughter, Janet. I mean, just unbelievable. So you've got a sense now that things are really becoming unglued. And actually, I was listening to some BBC radio reports. They went to vox pops on the streets of Belfast and the results are absolutely blood curdling. Because people on both sides basically say, yeah, maybe the British should get out because then we can just crack on and have the civil war. So it's a Catholic man. He says, once they go, we'll have a proper civil war. The army of the Republic will probably intervene and help us, which is deluded, I think.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Mr Lynch won't let us down, he says. They barely have an army, exactly. Then there's an elderly, I mean, this is the one that always sticks in my mind, an elderly Protestant housewife. She says, um, yes, the British won't stay because the British are soft. You know, they, they're, you can't rely on the British.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  They're still thinking that after Bloody Sunday.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  But I think there were a lot of people who thought, remember that guy who said, why couldn't you have shot 1300 rather than 13?

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I suppose.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Um, and this old woman says, when the British leave, she says, we will have to fight with our bare hands. Shocking. And I think what is interesting about this, the reason I wanted to bring it up was the common view is so often that this is a conflict that is imposed on a great mass of peace-loving people by just a tiny minority of monsters. And of course, there are a lot of people who want peace. And most people in Northern Ireland never set off a bomb, never pick up a gun. It would be a gross calumny to accuse them of all being, you know, suffused with sectarian hatred. But the paramilitaries are successful because they fill a political need, because they do have support.

• 52:00Speaker 00

  And does that mean that people who are proactively for accommodation with the other side are, are targets?

• 52:10Speaker 01

  They're not targets, but they are, they find life, sometimes they find life very difficult. We will meet one such person at the very end of this episode, a very sad story. Um, yes, I mean, actually, is not Terence O'Neill a good example of that?

• 52:23Speaker 00

  Yes, I suppose.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  You know, his premiership destroyed because he basically was regarded by, you know, his, his base as an appeaser. Kevin Myers in his, in his memoir says, you know, politicians always spoke about a tiny minority of terrorists, but he's very caustic. He said, you know, for every active terrorist, there was probably a support group of at least 50 non-terrorists. Now, of course, that's not everybody, but you know, this is a politically very polarised society in which a lot of people are prepared to make excuses for their own side. And that's not, I don't mean, this is nothing uniquely Northern Irish about this. This is so often the case. So Heath is watching all this in horror. Then he gets the final straw, which is on 20th of March.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Um, the first really major IRA car bomb, because previously there'd been bombs in parcels and things. This was in Lower Donegal Street in the city centre. A midday, the street was full of shoppers and also schoolchildren going home for lunch. That the IRA, as was often their way, they telephoned a warning, but they did so, so late that it was impossible to act efficiently upon it. And they gave the wrong street name anyway in the warning. Bomb went off, it killed seven people, including two policemen who were examining the car and three bin men who were working in the road. A horrific scene. I mean, when you read reports of it, you know, I have to sort of, I don't want to kind of give all the quotations because they're so horrible.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  The, the carnage, the schoolchildren injured, glass everywhere, body parts everywhere. It's awful. So two days after this, Faulkner is summoned to London and he finds Heath completely grim-faced, kind of curt. And Heath says, okay, enough now. This cannot go on. This is the end. You've got two options. Number one, you continue as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, but we will run law and order for you. You lose responsibility for law and order. We're going to get rid of internment. We're going to have a new vote on the Irish border and you have to invite moderate nationalists into your, into a coalition government. That's option one.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  And option two, if you don't take that, we're going to shut you down, shut down the Northern Irish Parliament. We will rule you directly from Westminster. And Faulkner cannot, I mean, it's amazing that he didn't see this coming. He cannot believe it. He's completely taken aback. They have a nine hour argument about it. He says to Heath, I thought you were my friend. I feel betrayed by you. He's also very offended. He says to Heath at one point, you're treating the Parliament of Northern Ireland like a glorified county council. And Heath, with his legendary tact and charm, says, well, you are.

• 55:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  So Faulkner goes back to Belfast. When he gets to Belfast, of course, there's been another bomb. A bomb by the railway station destroys much of the railway station and injured 17 people in the Europa Hotel next door. So the next morning Faulkner rings Heath and he says, I'm, I'm out. I'm done. You know, I'm not going to do what you tell me. And so the following day, the 24th of March, Heath goes on TV across the United Kingdom. Heath, by the way, I mean, one thing we haven't really captured. Heath is absolutely shattered because you talked about the concatenation of events, I think, last time. Heath has just been battling to get European entry through the House of Commons and he's

• 55:43Speaker 01

  just been humiliated by the 1972 miners' strike. I mean, Heath has basically had like an hour's sleep in the last six months.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  Well, no wonder he's rude.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, he's very rude. I mean, to be fair, he'd be rude anyway. So he looks on TV, he looks grey and strained. He says, obviously Stormont hasn't worked with shutting it down. I am sending, um, my lieutenant Willie Whitelaw, more of whom later, to Belfast as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. He's basically going to be the Imperial Proconsul in Northern Ireland. And, and Heath tries to end on a jolly note. This is a chance at last to bring the bombings and killings to an end, but nobody in Northern Ireland sees it that way.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  Do you think Heath sees it that way?

• 56:25Speaker 01

  No, I don't think he, of course, Heath doesn't see it that way. He's not an idiot. He's just saying it because you've got to, you can't end on a downbeat note and say,

• 56:32Speaker 00

  we're all doomed. Everything's awful. Nothing's going to get better.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  So basically, everybody in Northern Ireland condemns him. The IRA says, the war goes on now. Brilliant, the gloves are off, we're fighting the British. Faulkner gives a press conference and says, this is a victory for those who shout, lie, denigrate and destroy. It shows that violence can pay. I mean, he's not wrong about that. No, I mean, I guess he isn't, he isn't wrong. Absolutely, he's not wrong. The shipyard workers at Harland and Wolf, descendants of the men who built the Titanic, they walk out, they march through Belfast, chanting against Heath, the IRA and the Catholic Church.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Did this, what a trinity there.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  And, um, yeah, Ted Heath is kind of odd in that company, isn't he? He's not a.

• 57:11Speaker 00

  He's the odd one out.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  He's a very Anglican looking man. He's not a Catholic, although he does like Europe. So he hangs around with a lot of European Catholics. And there's a huge demonstration outside Stormont, 100,000 people with Ulster flags and Orange Order flags and all this kind of thing. So Heath's lieutenant Willie Whitelaw flies into Belfast. We met him in the Thatcher episode.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  We did. Everyone needs a Willie.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Everyone needs a Willie. He's your classic, he's another of your absolute classics, 70s British politicians who looks like, you know, the most shambling woolly person you've ever met and yet was a tank commander in Normandy.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  He has massive red cheeks and kind of little, little red veins running up to his oyster eyes, doesn't he?

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Oyster eyes. You've got to say oyster eyes by law when you talk about Willie Whitelaw. And actually, he inspires great loyalty. I think he does a pretty good job of this, actually. The top civil servant in Northern Ireland, Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, said, it was one of the great pleasures of my life to enjoy the company and the confidence of that large, emotional, sometimes irascible, apparently spontaneous but infinitely cunning man. Imagine someone saying that about you, that's brilliant. And White Law, to be fair to him, he assembles the team and he says, I mean, the same thing to say, really, however awful things are outside, however many bombs go off, when we're together in private, we're going to enjoy ourselves.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  That's the maudling spirit.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  That is very much Reggie Maudling's spirit, yeah. I mean, the country is descending into the abyss, but we've got an absolutely terrific drinks cabinet. However, you know, the challenges that he faces are awful. So obviously the Catholics are completely alienated, but so now are a lot of the Protestants, who have swung very much towards the more hardline extreme. Now, a person who sadly, for fans of your accents, has not featured much in the last couple of episodes, is the Reverend Ian Paisley. And people may wonder why. And actually, this is quite a sort of a fallow period in Paisley's rhetorical career.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  Well, he's become an MP, hasn't he?

• 59:13Speaker 01

  He's become an MP, so he's gone off to London, so he's not even there.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  The flesh parts of Westminster.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. But also, he's sort of all over the place politically at this point. He's been left behind a bit. He'd sort of slightly willed this sort of crisis into being by his incredibly inflammatory rhetoric. But now that it has arrived, you know, he doesn't really know where he stands. So for example, Paisley was very much against internment. Paisley was also, unusually for a hardline Unionist, in favour of direct rule from Westminster and scrapping Stormont. I suppose because he thought Stormont was full of appeasers probably, or something. So this leaves a vacancy for a man who's largely forgotten now, but is a really extraordinary bloke, a bloke called William Craig. So William Craig had been O'Neill's Home Affairs Minister.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  And he's been moving steadily to the right. Craig sees this, you know, he basically sees the vacancy on the right of Ulster Unionist politics, and he thinks, I will be the hardliner's hardliner. And he founded his own party in February 1972 called Ulster Vanguard. And it looks like something, I have to say, if there are Ulster Vanguard listeners, I hope they're not going to be hideously offended, when I say it looks like the sort of fascist party you would imagine in a TV series set in an alternative universe 1970s Britain.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  Or, what's his name, in Reggie Perrin?

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Oh, the bloke who wants to set up his own private army, Geoffrey Palmer.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  Geoffrey Palmer.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  I think it's more sinister than Geoffrey Palmer, frankly. They have a very fascistic logo, which you can see online, which is a kind of blue V.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  That's never a good sign.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  At rallies, he has an honour guard that surrounds him. They wear uniforms with an orange sash, and they also do a kind of Nazi salute.

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  Now, you know what it is? It's a National Theatre reimagining of a Shakespeare Roman play. Daring and edgy.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  That no one's ever thought of before. That is exactly, starring Maxine Peake.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  Christopher Eccleston.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's basically, it's a National Theatre play produced in 2012, imagining what will happen when David Cameron introduces fascism in Britain. That's what it is. Or in alliance with the fossil fuels industry, surely. So Christopher Eccleston is so involved in this.

• 1:01:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, he totally is. He's Coriolanus.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Okay, but this bloke Craig, he is so aggressive. He gives a speech to 60,000 people in Belfast, loyalists. He says, "We must build up dossiers on the men and women who are a menace to this country, because one day, ladies and gentlemen, if the politicians fail us, it may be our job to liquidate the enemy." I don't feel you should be talking about liquidating the enemy.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  Well, those are the kind of comments of people who like The Odyssey, from people on X.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  About you.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  It's just Elon Musk talking about you.

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  We are at war. We must round up these people who like Christopher Nolan films and shoot them.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  I'm just giving you a flavour of the comments I got. But there's actually more to come from Musk stroke William Craig. So at one point, he's invited to address the Monday Club, the hard-right Conservative Club, at the House of Commons. He goes to the House of Commons. Drink has been taken, and he throws caution to the wind, and he says to his audience of Tory MPs, "If a British government stands in our way," and don't forget, there is a Conservative government at this point, he says, "I have 80,000 men ready to take up arms against them. We are prepared to come out and shoot and kill. I am prepared to kill, and those behind me have my full support. When we say force, we mean force."

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  And what does the Monday Club, what's their reaction to this?

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they hear, hear, and then they start talking about Rhodesia, surely. I mean, that's basically the vibe, isn't it? Now, you may say, does this man really have 80,000 people behind him? I don't think he has 80,000, but I do think he has thousands. So his movement was very closely allied to the UDA, the Ulster Defence Association, the vigilante alliance that we talked about last time. So they, at this point, are at their absolute peak. They had not been prescribed by the government, unlike other paramilitary groups. So they will march openly through the streets. You can see, you can Google photos of them. They will sort of wander through the streets in their dark glasses and military fatigues. They're very popular on the Protestant estates.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  And I think a reason for this, and something underappreciated, I think I mentioned this in the first episode, I think massively underappreciated in this story is the economic context. This is a point where, on a lot of these estates, unemployment among young men, it's at least 20%. In some estates, it's 40 or 50%. Basically, there are a lot of 20-year-old men who left school five years earlier, or four years earlier, or whatever, and have nothing to do.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  So slightly Weimar vibe.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Possibly, yeah. It's also, I mean, the one thing we haven't really talked about, I think also underappreciated, why do people join all these groups?

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  They're fun.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  It's fun. Right. They like dressing up, they like being given a gun, they like hanging around with their mates.

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  Violent Boy Scouts.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Completely. And the UDA, I mean, the UDA don't have the ideological aspirations of the IRA. They are basically vigilantes stroke gangsters.

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  So there's no spiritual crisis for them?

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  I don't think so. They run protection rackets, they will hijack lorries with TVs in, or cigarettes, or alcohol, or something.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  I mean, that's again, the difference with Paisley, isn't it? Because Paisley is a man of God, even if that is a God of wrath. So he does have to consider what the Bible tells him, and the future of his soul and everything. And, but these guys, they're not in.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  No, Ian Paisley never, never hijacked a lorry carrying bottles of, you know, what's a Bushmills? Is that a thing? That's like a Northern Irish thing, isn't it? Anyway. Yeah, and people, journalists would go out to the UDA training camps to inspect them, and they always scoffed at them. So Peter Taylor watched them training outside Belfast, and he reported as follows, "A series of overweight loyalists panted for breath as they monkey-climbed a rope suspended above the ground and went through the motions of less-than-agile hand-to-hand combat."

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  Just jump on people, crush them.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  And Kevin Myers said, he doesn't take them seriously at all in his memoir, and he says, "They're the only terrorist group in the world to have designed their own regimental blazer, complete with gold badge." Anyway, there's been too much laughter, because there's nothing funny about loyalist violence in the summer of 72. This is the bloodiest year, the troubles, it's the peak of sectarian killings. These loyalist paramilitaries probably killed about 120 people that year. And these people were not other paramilitaries. They are Catholic civilians, just walking down the street, dragged out of pubs, sometimes attacked in their own homes. And to put that into context, the British Army killed just under 90 people in 1972.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  The official IRA killed 20 people, and the provisional IRA killed almost 230 people. Now, talking of the provisional IRA, they are cocker-hoop with the demise of Stormont. I mean, they were only, they were only founded at the turn of 1970, and we're in the middle of 1972. The Northern Irish Parliament, which they hated, is gone, and the nationalist population has been well and truly radicalised. As they see it, they are well on their way to achieving their goals. I mean, one IRA man said as follows, "Everyone felt we were very close to victory. Most people on the ground felt it was only a matter of time before the British were finally going to admit defeat."

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  And so that explains why, at this point, spring, summer 1972, they do something which some listeners may be surprised by. They are very happy to talk to the British about ending this whole thing, because...

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  As they see it, they are in the position of basically dictating the terms of the British surrender. So, on the 13th of June, they held a press conference in Derry. If the British will agree to peace talks, we'll declare a ceasefire. And Willie Whitehall says, publicly he says no, but obviously privately, he's thinking, well, I'd be mad not to talk to them. Six days later, he quietly met two of their ceasefire conditions. So first of all, he awarded IRA prisoners special category status, which means they will not be treated as common criminals, they will be treated as political prisoners. So for example, they can wear their own clothes, which becomes a huge deal in the hunger strikes in 1981.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  And the other condition, he agrees to release a bearded young man who has been interned on a prison ship HMS Maidstone, and this young man has been accused of being a commander of a Belfast IRA battalion. This young man is the 23-year-old Gerry Adams, who, as you know, Tom, maintains that he was never a member of the IRA.

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  So he's been wrongly interned.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, in his own mind wrongly interned, indeed wrongly. Well, I mean, his entire presence in the next few minutes of this episode.

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  Is bewildering.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  A terrible, yeah, it's bewildering.

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  Mistaken identity.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  It's a terrible case of mistaken identity.

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  What's that barman doing there?

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  He's inexplicably being invited to all these meetings when he has nothing to contribute. So the day after Adams was released, two British officials drive to a country house outside Derry. One of them is Whitehall's senior civil servant, Philip Woodfield, and the other is a senior MI6 officer called Frank Steele. And waiting for them are an IRA man since the 1950s called David O'Connell. And baffling me, Gerry Adams.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  So you kind of intern, work placement.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, who knows, who knows why he's there. So for three hours, they have this meeting and they agree a deal. They'll have a temporary IRA ceasefire. Steele, the MI6 man, and O'Connell basically set up a telephone hotline so they could talk to each other. And the IRA will meet with Whitehall himself. And Woodfield reports to Whitehall. He says, the mood at this meeting, this again may surprise listeners, says the mood was very informal and very relaxed. The two Irishmen were respectable and respectful throughout. They made no bombastic defence of their past, and they made no attacks on the British government, the British Army, or any other communities or bodies in Northern Ireland.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Their response to every argument put to them was reasonable and moderate. And he says to Whitehall, I think they genuinely want a ceasefire and a permanent end to violence. Now, sort of more hardline listeners may say, gosh, this bloke's gone completely native. But the MI6 man Steele went even further. He said of David O'Connell, he was a very quiet, self-contained, self-disciplined man. I know it's an unfashionable thing to say, but I liked him. And he has a remarkable exchange with Gerry Adams, whom Steele finds very personable and intelligent. And Steele said to Adams, you don't want to spend the rest of your life on the run from us British. What do you want to do with your life? And Adams said to him, I want to go to university and get a degree. And Steele said, but we're not stopping you.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  All you've got to do is renounce violence and you can go to university and get a degree. And Adams actually stopped and thought for a minute or two, and then said to Steele, no, I've got to help to get rid of you British first.

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

  How do you do that if you're just a barman?

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  So, I mean, he would say through political means, through membership of Sinn Féin, but not the IRA, wouldn't he, would he not?

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess he would.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  So two days later, they announce a ceasefire to begin on Monday, the 26th of June, and then on the 7th of July, a really extraordinary moment. Top secret, an IRA delegation is flown to London for secret talks with Willie Whitehall. Four of them are longstanding IRA men, but two of them are much younger. One of them is Martin McGuinness, who is the second in command of the Derry IRA and was present at Bloody Sunday. And the other, yet again mistaken identity, no one knows why he's there, Gerry Adams.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  And Martin McGuinness.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, Martin McGuinness, exactly.

• 1:11:29Speaker 00

  Big fan of cricket and PG Woodhouse.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  Was Martin McGuinness a fan of cricket?

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  He loved it. Yeah, he loved it.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  And he liked PG Woodhouse?

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  My brother was Gerry Adams's publicity agent.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Of course he was, I'd forgotten that, yeah.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  And Martin McGuinness was a very charming man. I mean, he got on very well with Ian Paisley as well, of course, the Chuckle Brothers.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Just to clear this up for listeners, your brother was Gerry Adams's agent in his capacity as a publisher.

• 1:11:59Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, his book had come out.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Your brother was not a member of Sinn Féin. I mean, that's a hell of a twist.

• 1:12:05Speaker 00

  Although Gerry Adams would always send him a Christmas card and there would be, you know, happy Christmas, and there'd be a kind of a Christmas tree wrapped up in barbed wire.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:12:16Speaker 00

  It stuck out in his Wiltshire cottage.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  And also Gerry Adams and Christmas cards, the best ever moment in the history of social media.

• 1:12:23Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Is when Gerry Adams said, was trying to reinvent himself on social media as an avuncular grandfather.

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  And said he was having trouble with his Christmas lights.

• 1:12:31Speaker 00

  Can no one give me a lighter?

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, somebody replied and said, surely you must know somebody who can fit a timer. But of course he wouldn't because he wasn't a member of that organisation.

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  He had terrible problem with wind and he was a great, he was better out than in.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Ah, terrible. And he was a bad man. So they're flown, they're going to go to London. It's a farcical journey. Their car breaks down, all six of the delegates have to cram into one car, they're picked up by an MI6 minivan, the minivan gets stuck behind a farmer and some cows, a very Irish scene. And finally, they get to London. They're driven to Chelsea, to a place called Cheney Walk, which is the home of the Whitehall's junior minister, Paul Channon. It's a really hot day, Whitehall is waiting for them, he offers them drinks, they refuse. There's some suspicion that they might have thought Whitehall was going to poison them. I think that's obviously ludicrous, he wasn't going to poison them. I think it's much more that they are, because there's so many of them, they can't really relax because they're all watching each other.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  And of course, there is a precedent for IRA men going to London, which we've done on the rest of history, the Anglo-Irish treaty negotiations. And then all the talk was, you know, selling out and people becoming, you know, Michael Collins falling for the blandishments, the British. So they, they had determined not to do this and they're very stiff and serious. And the tone is set by the IRA chief of staff, a man who calls himself Sean McStiffan. And he is an absolutely extraordinary figure. I mean, he's basically a massive fraud, right? I mean, he is a massive fraud. So his real name, as it were, is John Stevenson. And he was from East London.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  His father was not Irish, but an English legal clerk. His mother was Bethnal Green born and bred. She did have Irish blood, but Ulster Protestant blood.

• 1:14:21Speaker 00

  But he's like the kind of guy who's incredibly English, but insists on supporting Ireland in rugby matches.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. He goes to a leading public school and wears an Ireland rugby shirt. That's exactly the kind of man this is, although from Beth, of more Bethnal Green kind of vintage. So he was in the RAF, for some reason, I don't know, he got radicalised, he learned Irish, he changed his name, gaylicised it, became ultra Catholic and basically became more Irish than the Irish. And what would drive him mad is that the other IRA men used to call him the Englishman.

• 1:14:55Speaker 00

  Which he was.

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  I mean, he was, exactly. But because he was more Irish than the Irish, so he was ultra Catholic, he didn't drink, he didn't smoke, he was passionately anti-abortion, he had no sense of humour, his hard work, basically.

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  So he's quite de Valera.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little bit. I mean, we talked before, when we were talking about the late Fuhrer of Nazi Germany, what a terrible person he'd be to have at your wedding. This bloke would be awful as a wedding guest because, like Hitler, doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and is only going to talk to you with the sort of, apparently he would adopt a fake Irish accent. Kevin Myers in his memoir is very articulate about his fake.

• 1:15:33Speaker 00

  Like that SNP.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, the SNP woman who has the fake Scottish accent.

• 1:15:38Speaker 00

  Who changes her accent depending on where she is.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  So he does the talking anyway at this meeting, presumably in his accent. He reads a list of demands, he says, we need you to release all prisoners, total British withdrawal, you've got till 1975, and have an all-Ireland referendum on ending partition.

• 1:15:53Speaker 00

  So he doesn't say, you've got to get out nigh.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  No, he does not. So the all-Ireland referendum on ending partition, of course, an all-Ireland referendum would mean the end of Northern Ireland. The British position is and always has been, and indeed from the 1990s, the Irish position is that this is for the people of Northern Ireland as a distinct unit to decide, but that's not the IRA's position.

• 1:16:19Speaker 00

  I mean, an all-Ireland referendum.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:21Speaker 00

  Would it definitely, I guess the emotional case for it would be so strong, wouldn't it? But the practical, it would be head and heart.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  The emotional case would be very strong. If you're living in like, I don't know, Waterford in 1972, and somebody says, would you now feel your life would be materially improved by the addition of Northern Ireland with all of its issues to your, you know, your national unit? What would you think? I mean, I think the national case would be so strong.

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  Ah, yes, I think, I think you wouldn't be able to resist the promptings of your heart, but your head might say, not sure.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is not ideal. Anyway, the IRA clearly have misread this situation because there is no way the British are going to give into this. And it became obvious, I think, to Whitehall and to Frank Steele, who was there, the IRA basically thought they'd won and the British were negotiating their surrender, and that was a complete and utter misreading of the situation. So it breaks up the meeting, they go back to Belfast, and Steele is with them, the MI6 man is with them the whole time. And he says to them on the flight back, I'm, you know, I'm so disappointed. And he says to them, I hope you're not going to go back to your bloody stupid campaign of violence. I said, if they really wanted a united Ireland, they were wasting their time shooting at British soldiers and bombing Northern Ireland into an industrial and social slum.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  They should be trying to persuade the Protestants that they would have some sort of satisfactory life, jobs, housing and so on, in some sort of linkage with the South. And Steele remembered later, he said, no, they said to me, we've got to get rid of you British first, and the way to get rid of you, as has been proved all over your empire, is violence. You will get fed up and go away.

• 1:17:59Speaker 00

  And you could see why that might not be a wholly unreasonable perspective, that we've been saying throughout that people in mainland Britain are weary and bored of it, they're not interested, they wish it would all go away. People in the IRA are not stupid. I mean, they must, they're keeping track of British public opinion, they must know this. I mean, that is why in due course they're going to start bombing the mainland. But actually, they don't withdraw.

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  No, they don't. But actually, one of the reasons, I think, is that precisely because the IRA do start bombing the British mainland, actually. So I think, once the IRA do that, there is no way the British would ever withdraw. Because

• 1:18:39Speaker 00

  You cannot surrender to the men of violence.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  No, but I mean, you can't, I mean, to blow, if you blow up, um, British pubs in Birmingham, Guildford and so on, if you blow up a coach on the M62, if you blow, you know, bombs in London, if you have bombs in Piccadilly, if you, all of that stuff, once you do that, there, then that will harden the British public against you. I think the IRA completely misread the British public in that regard. There was no way they were ever going to withdraw, once the IRA attacked Britain itself. The tragic irony of all this is that if they'd done a deal then in 1972, they'd have probably got what they got in 19, in the late 1990s.

• 1:19:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  A lot of lives would have been saved. But of course, the reason they don't do the deal is because they think they'll get a better outcome by fighting. I think there's that. Plus, I think, at the time, the conflict is not very old. And this is probably, again, an heretical thing to say, but I think there are quite a lot of people who enjoy the conflict, actually, on both sides, loyalist and, uh, republican. One IRA man said, um, maybe you can't bomb a million Protestants into United Ireland, but you could have good fun trying. And I think there are lots of people, as horrendous as it will sound to some listeners, who actually found it very exciting. Yeah, the safe houses, the smuggling of guns, the operations, all of that.

• 1:20:01Speaker 00

  And there are, there are people in the British Army who find it exciting as well, aren't there? Though, you know, kind of undercover British officers, what's his name?

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  Robert Nairac.

• 1:20:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, Robert Nairac.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  So, a couple of days later, the ceasefire ends, street battles again, a huge new surge of violence. So nine days after the end of the ceasefire, the IRA, the UDA and the British Army, between them, killed 42 people. And by the end of 1972, to give you the stats, there'd been 2,000 bombings, 2,000 armed robberies, more than 10,000 shootings, 5,000 people badly wounded, 479 people killed. And to be honest, there's only so many of these atrocities we can really inflict on an audience. So Heath makes one more attempt to find a peaceful solution. There's a massive loyalist strike in 1974. There's, of course, the hunger strikes, um, under Margaret Thatcher in 1981. We'll, we'll come back to that another time. But I'll leave you with just a story that I think says so much about what happened

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  to Northern Ireland, in not an entirely joyful way. So in the afternoon of the 21st of July, that is, two weeks after the failure of these talks, the Provisionals set off 22 bombs in the centre of Belfast, and they gave a series of hoax warnings that confused the authorities, that meant that they couldn't evacuate the scene. These bombs go off over the course of just over an hour, they killed nine people, and they seriously injured 130 people. And some of the bodies that were blown up, they were scattered so far that on the TV news that night, the, the pictures showed policemen literally scooping up body parts into bags. And this went down as Bloody Friday. And it actually did tremendous damage

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  to the IRA, um, lost them a lot of moderate nationalist support, and lost them support in America. And one of the victims, I mean, this is an awful story. One of the victims was a messenger boy who was 14 years old, called Stephen Parker. And he had spotted a car bomb in Cave Hill Road, and he was trying to warn people when it went off and he was killed. And his father, the Reverend Joseph Parker, was a Church of Ireland chaplain at a sailor's mission in Belfast. And he went along, he was asked to identify his son's body. And it was so badly, uh, injured, that he could only identify his son's body by a box of trick matches that his son had shown him the night before, in his pocket,

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  and his Boy Scouts belt, of which his son was very proud. And afterwards, the Reverend Parker set up a peace group in his son's, uh, memory. It was called Witness for Peace. And he held the services outside City Hall in Belfast, and also at the GPO in Dublin. And he would plant a white cross for every victim of the troubles. So, quite moving story. But here's the twist. People didn't like it. They didn't like him campaigning for peace. His own church did not like it. His own bishop said, can you please stop talking about peace? It alienates our parishioners. And can you confine your peace activities to your day

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  off? And so in 1975, the Reverend Parker and his wife left Northern Ireland for good, and they emigrated to Vancouver in Canada. And in the meantime, the killing went on.

• 1:23:13Speaker 00

  And Dominic, as you said, we will be returning to this, uh, story in due course. Still a long way to go before we reach the Good Friday Agreement. Um, and there will as ever be more about this on this theme in our brilliant newsletter, which if you're not already signed up, you can get by signing up at therestishistory.com. Next week, we will be heading right back in time to ancient Rome, to the Roman Republic, and two of its most famous names, Marius and Sulla. Uh, and if you feel there haven't been enough civil war, uh, on the podcast recently, there will be Rome's first civil war, as Marius

• 1:23:54Speaker 00

  and Sulla start tearing chunks out of each other. So all of that to come. Um, and if you want to hear the awful episodes of that right away on Monday, again, you can sign up for them at therestishistory.com. But for now, Dominic, thank you for taking us through this, uh, this grim story. And thank you, everyone, for listening. Bye bye.

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  Bye bye.

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

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