700. The Troubles: Bloody Sunday (Part 4)

0:00Hello, 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 forming 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 of history. The ultimate Victorian adventure. So to give you just a little taste, we will be in Africa in 1868. The Emperor of Abyssinia, Theodore II, has kidnapped 59 Europeans and is holding them hostage after descending into this demented rage because, one of his fellow monarchs, Queen Victoria, has declined to answer his letters. I'm not making this up. In the British, after months and months of fruitless waiting, have lost patience and they

1:00have sent a military expedition under General Napier, halfway around the world to save them in expedition that includes thousands of mules, loads of elephants and they've even had to build their own railway across the Highlands of Abyssinia or Ethiopia to try to get to his mountain citadel. It is a bonkers story. Yeah, it's absolutely extraordinary full-blown British imperial epic full of ludicrous behavior, mad characters, colossal moustaches, everything that we love on the rest of history. It is, though I say to myself, a guaranteed classic in the making. So you're probably thinking how can I get a ticket for this extraordinary Victorian adventure? Here is the answer. If you want to get a ticket for this event on Friday, the 4th of September, all you have to do is go to the rest of this history.com, it is as simple as that. You maybe have to part with some money, but it will be money very, very, very, very well spent.

2:01See you there. Mr Speaker, I am deeply patriotic. I never want to believe anything bad about our country. I never want to call into question the behavior 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. 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.

3:04What 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. 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 15 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 travels. A moment was the shooting and killing of 13 unarmed Catholics of Williams by British paratroopers

4:08during a protest march in Derry on 30 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 Wigery, 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 you too never accepted it. And their song helped to make bloody Sunday a cause celebra wherever popular music is listened to by earnest teenagers and bedrooms. 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 pounds. And the Savile inquiry, unlike the Wigery report, it blamed the paratroopers for losing

5:11control and for lying about it afterwards, hence Cameron's statement afterwards. So it's obviously it's an 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. So in the last episode we talked about the disaster of internment which was that August. The new story is about the torture of the people who are interned and then the sectarian bomb attacks that autumn. So the four steps, the red lion pubs, the McGurks bar attack and then the Balmoral furniture showroom. Now I'm in all this in October of that year, 71. The new Stormont Prime Minister Brian Fulkner flies to London and he has come to brief Ted Heath on the desperate security situation.

6:12And Fulkner 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. 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 time 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 Mordling, we talked about him last time for a clever, very corrupt, lazy office face on gin all the time.

7:15He'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 demoralized. And he said, so what do we do? Arm the Protestants and get out. And obviously, you know, this is an option. It's the DeGole option, isn't it, without Gerea. Right. Exactly. 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 of Northern Ireland. But an obvious difference is in Algeria, the people who want to stay part of France, the Pienois, as they're called, they are very much a minority. But in Northern Ireland, a majority of people there, if you regarded as a separate entity and a majority of people in that entity want to remain part of the United Kingdom. Well, so they've been there since the 17th century, haven't they? They've been there a long time. There are a million of them.

8:16It'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 at low level civil war. There would be a proper civil war. And the Republic of Ireland would have to get involved. And they'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. Yeah, completely the would, completely the would. 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 to desperate for this not to happen. So in 1975, I mean, we may be talking about this when we come to it in the future series.

9:17In 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 to unite it Ireland, right away. Please stay and hold the line. And there's an element in the Irish government thinking that still secretly has a little bit of that. I think so, I think undoubtedly. I doubt it. That it would be you'd be importing a large number of people who basically hate your state. And do you really want to do that? So people keep coming back to this idea, this sort of what they see is 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. This military intelligence says, the risk of doing this is if the Protestants turn against

10:18us, we will be fighting and 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 up. The retreat should come home. And then you would get the massive blood bath 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 Falkner 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. Any illusion of them being there are sort of jolly peacemakers, having fish and chips and cups of tears long since disappeared. They're in this quagmire, hence the Vietnam comparisons. 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 an in Peter Taylor's book, Brits about the experience of the army.

11:19He 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 have 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 letter boxes. I mean, that's the thing that kind of messes with the soldier's heads in 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 very sort of evocative passage, who 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

12:19and children laughing and jeering him as he lay there dying. And Myers, I mentioned him last time, Irish Catholic parentage, but born 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 four-bearance 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, especially when talking about the rank and file, the squad is, they are relatively poorly educated, young men. Lots of them in their late teens, early 20s, when you look at the ages and the casualty list is stunning how young they are, actually. They're often from working class estates 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.

13:21This is a book called Jim, who Peter Taylor quotes. You see these blocs dying in gutters in a war which is not classed as a war. It makes you bloody better 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. I can't just ask about the officers because I didn't know if you've seen the adaptation of saying nothing. Of not. I've read the book, but not seen the TV series. So about two sisters who join the IRA. And Rory Keneer plays a British intelligence officer absolutely brilliantly, I have to say. And he has kind of counterinsurgency experience from various British colonial engagements. And he is played with a very icy heart, I think it's fair to say.

14:25And is that how the British officer class see what's going on? Are they similarly, you're saying, you know, I hate these people, this guy that gets quoted, do you think the British officer class feel the same? It's hard to generalize, 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 early in the 60s and Aden or whatever. So I think it's probably fair that 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, the Union's population. I think they, they come to feel like, you know, it's us against the world, they're in an alien environment, everybody's against them.

15:27They don't understand it, they're sick of it, they're mates are dying. And that's true whether you're the old attorney and officer or whether you're the kid who left school at 16 and went straight into the army. I think because because the officer class will be complicit in what happens on bloody Sunday, just as much as the squaddies who do the firing. 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 armies, 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 London, dairy or dairy. And a reminder for people, you know, the name is the, it gives you a clue to its sort of fractured identity. It's about 60, 40 Catholic protestants. Economically, really struggling, the mood in dairy is very fractious and very bitter and

16:28has been since 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 dairy, you know, they're basically there's a big mural. It says you are now entering free dairy. There are barricades there. The entrances to the state, the boxide are guarded by vigilantes in masks and balaclavas who are often openly carrying guns. And the British army do not try and pull these barriers down. No, they do not. And from this area, from free dairy, gangs of unemployed teenagers who call themselves the dairy young hooligans. That's what it says on the tin, I guess. 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.

17:30So by the second half of 1971, there is a sense that, you know, the jittermouth authority in dairy has pretty much broken down. The Protestant business owners are outraged at this. They estimate their losses from arson at about four million pounds of all of the money then. They are furious that the IUC, 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 Colonel Derek Wilford who commands the first battalion of the parachute regiment. And Wilford says of these patrols in dairy, they just stood there in the road like aunt Salis and they never went forward. It was horrifying. In other words, he's embarrassed to be a British officer and this is happening. And the paras are the most 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

18:31Robert 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 dairy. And he says this is an embarrassment. We shouldn't have such lines on our maps. The local officers are being 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 people in the bogside are becoming emboldened. So on the 14th of December, Ford writes to his officers and he says the situation dairy 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.

19:35But he says the drawbacks are so serious that I want to hold off doing that for the time being. Because and I quote, the risk of casualties is high and apart from gunmen or bombers, so called unarmed rioters, possibly teenagers are certain to be shot in the initial phases. Much will be made of the invasion of dairy 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 armored cars, 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 sometimes wound or kill them. This is absolutely unacceptable.

20:36You have to get tough and he goes on to say the only way that we can restore law and order in dairy is to and I quote, shoot selected ring leaders amongst the dairy young hooligans after clear warnings have been issued. 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 point 22 inch ammunition. It's much less likely to kill people and it's much less likely to cause accidental casualties by quelling 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. Yeah, salitary violence. Exactly. So that was on the 7th of January, 1972. Now 11 days later, Brian Fulton of the Prime Minister announces a ban on all parades in dairy. However, the Civil Rights Group, Nick Ruff, which we talked about a couple of episodes

21:38ago, sounds very similar, doesn't it? Sounds like a kind of pro-smoking lobby. Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, this group, they have planned a civil rights march to protest against internments, 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. So they've scheduled, 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. D day? Perhaps. Possibly, but when I tell you this, the SAFLE report, which covers this day, comes to 10 volumes, 5,036 pages and about 2.5 million words. So you haven't listened to We Have Ways on D day, because I think there's a lot more. If you spend more, your brother and I will worry, surely, Arnhem. Arnhem, yes. It's always Arnhem with them, isn't it?

22:39Anyway, you and I are going to spend 2.5 million words and 5,000 pages on bloody Sunday. Big spoiler alert for the listeners, we are not. We're going to give a very simplified version. If you want to read the SAFLE 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 center because they want to avoid more attacks on the shops. So a close off the city center will 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 rioters as possible. But we'll be careful about this. 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. Heaven for Fend, not bad publicity. Basically, if you've got well-meaning people waving placards, leave them alone.

23:43If 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 and 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. And 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 an anonymous donor paid for him to go to Loughborough Grammar School. At Loughborough Grammar School, he turned out to be an absolutely brilliant classist and actor. So he was given a place at Radha, the Royal Academy of Traumatic 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.

24:49It's a very first world war in the trenches. Very much, although less first world war, after he left the Army, I was reading a bit of his of him today in this blue, my mind, after he left the Army with a perhaps a slight check of reputation, he grew a pony tail and became a Belgian antique stealer. It's an unexpected development. 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. He always has his men kind of blacking up with their faces and wearing camouflage. He says, you know, we're fighters and killers. We're not messing around here. What kind of camouflage do you wear in dairy? You kind of dress up and look like concrete or something. Dresses a towel block. Yeah. A bit old. I don't know. You're wearing it in case you suddenly sent him a layer at a moment's notice. Well, anyway, he asked himself what a Marcus Arilius do. A Marcus Arilius would be wearing green combat fatigues. No, he wouldn't. He'd be dressing up as ballads, fooling the rioters.

25:50Pounding. So even before Bloody Sunday, the Paris, these Paris had a reputation, shall we say. So a few days beforehand, the then young journalist Simon Hoggert called them in print. They are the troops most hated by Catholics and 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 Paris. And in Peter Taylor's book Brits, he quotes officers who said, at the time, it is mad to be using them to police and non-violent civil rights march. But of course, Ford wants to use the powers precisely because he thinks it will be violent. The atmosphere in Derri is very tense. Just three days before the march, the IRA had ambushed an RUC patrol car and they'd kill two policemen. And Ford's officers on the ground say to him, look, this march may start peacefully. But the Derri young hooligans backed up by the gunmen, this is a quote, the Derri young

26:54hooligans backed up by the gunmen 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 sort of behind barricades and things. The Paris 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 power and you wake up first thing in the morning, probably the threat of the sniper is the first thing you think of. But the powers have the reputation they do because they are going home 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.

27:56When you dig into 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. Or 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 marches turn right going towards the bogside. They're going to stop when they get to free deri corner, as it's called. The entrance to hear speeches, people denouncing in turn. Now back at William Street by the barricade, blocking off the city centre, there are some scuffles between rioters and the Paris.

28:57Teenagers 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 in a 59 year old man, but they don't kill anybody. But that is what they've basically ordered to do. To wound, to wound huligans and rioters. 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 drain pipe. So this is not long before four o'clock. A 355, Lieutenant Colonel Wilford asks permission from the commanding officer in deri. He says, I want to send in the Paris to pick up your bows, that's his phrase. And 12 minutes pass and then he gets the confirmation from the overall deri commander. As follows. It's fine. Send in a parasympanet to do scoop up op through barrier 14, not to conduct running battle down Rosville street.

29:58Now, this last sentence is totally ignored because a few minutes later, a convoy of armored personnel carriers come screaming down the road down Rosville street into the bookside. 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 Paris claimed later that it was at this point that they came under fire from snipers on top of the high rise flats overlooking the scene. This I think the several inquiries 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.

31:01What 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. It's a terrible story, but it's not unknown. I suppose the Vietnam comparison that Ted Kennedy made, is that kind of me lie or something? Yeah, it's soldiers frazzled on the edge, commit atrocities. Yeah, I mean, this is the funny thing about it. It costs 200 million pounds to do this in glory, but I remember reading as researching my book on the early 70s at that point when the report came and I thought, this is exactly as I thought it always would be. This would be 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 over pumped up as it were, they're very hard men, they're 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.

32:05And 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 Daley, and you see the photos online, it's one of the ones that comes up immediately if you Google Bloodies Sunday. It's a priest and his waving a blood-stained hanker chief 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. The priest Edward Daley was holding his hand and giving him the last rights as he died. 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 and march, and if you tell them you're going to be attacked by snipers, you're making it quite likely that they

33:05will lose control. So this is a general thought, and actually said it himself. That's why I read the quotation out. He said it in December. The risk of casualties is high. So-called unarmed riot as 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 the books that I mentioned, he says we saw it as a job well done. I mean, this is possibly a heretical question. Yeah. Bearing in mind the military situation. Was this a job well done? In other words, did it serve as a salitriotrosity which made people think twice? No. If you're going to take such a cold, blooded view of it, which I mean, it's not this, but it's a quite fair question to ask, right? Yeah. It's the rich of the third, you know, they did it and they were right to do it kind of thing. Absolutely not. Because, I mean, the evidence is in what happens in the next 11 months in Northern Ireland

34:07and indeed in the next 20 or 20 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 corrods 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 clouser of itsian interpretation, then no absolutely not at all. And what happens to free dairy? Still there. Do they not go in and bulldoze it? No, not at this point. No. That happens much later, think of Operation Moteman, but not at this point. No. Just on the powers, actually, the job well done thing. I guess to the end of their lives, a lot of the powers, I mean, they maintained and presumably still maintained that they did the right thing. They were shooting in self-defense. 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, associate editor of the spectator.

35:09He went to the several inquiry and wrote a book about it. And he is incredibly scathing about the paratroopers. He calls them unrelenting liars. 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 purge themselves in the self-linkuari. I wonder if that's quite right. I think it's quite possible, in fact, psychologically very plausible that they made up excuses and then came to believe them. I mean, isn't that such a common thing that people do? 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. In the heat of the moment, in the chaos, people screaming, running away, sounds of gunshots, sounds of, you know, battle. You might come to 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.

36:09Not for this furious, isn't he, that Blair sets up the inquiry? Yes. Even if he's got a ponytail by that point. Yeah. From his belt and antique shop, he's absolutely outraged. As indeed, but 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. Well, because it's a terrible state on the reputation of the British army. So I mean, that's Cameron says, you know, it's unjustified and unjustifiable. 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 Paris had fired in self-defense and they were tremendous fellows. So Reginald Mortling the next day gave a speech in the commons. He didn't say a single word about the 13 victims.

37:10He 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? Yeah. Yeah, they had the MP. She physically attacked Mortling on the floor of the House of Commerce. Extraordinary things. 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 Mortling's constituency agent wrote to him afterwards and said, well, while it is never pleasant when people are shot dead, I must say I'm glad that 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. In the Guardian, the Guardian, the army has an intolerably difficult time in Ireland. At times it is bound to act firmly, even severely. Robustly, what might say? Robustly, exactly. And of course, a lot of unionists, certainly loyalists, said the more hard-line unionists

38:14in Northern Ireland are not terribly sad about it. So Time magazine interviewed a laborer in a Belfast pub who said, you know, after 13 people had been shot dead, he said, I wish it had been 1300 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 bombs and finally they burned down the chance to rebuild it. You know, it's kind of pretty big deal in a capital where basically nothing ever happens. 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

39:16and 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 say to you everything that people say about the British is true, they're murderers and then they lie about it. 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 forebears, had a very successful career, never said or sung anything political, really, and forms a new band and releases Giv Island back to the Irish because it's Paul McCartney. I was hoping he was Dennis Healy, but it wasn't, it was Paul McCartney. It's not Dennis Healy. Paul McCartney, that's, that is when he releases that single in the wake of bloody Sunday. So to quote one young man, another young man, events that day probably led more young

40:18nationalists 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 Jerry Adams and we will be hearing more about him after the break. This episode is brought to you by Amazon. Some throughout history, change has often been driven by businesses and institutions that end up having a massive impact on society as a whole. And there's probably no better example than the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford and his managers revolutionized production through their pioneering assembly lines and they influenced factories and working practices in countries all over the world. Another example of a business driving technological and social change is Amazon, which is increasing the number of its electric vehicles used for deliveries in Europe to over 10,000 by the

41:21end of this year, 2026. Now on top of that, over 50% of Amazon deliveries now come with less packaging or sometimes no added packaging at all. It helps to avoid unnecessary waste and it makes recycling at home that much easier. Find out more at amazon.co.uk slash sustainability. Hello everyone and welcome back to the rest of 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 dominate, I mean the massive, massive question is where does the province go from here? Yeah, so it's pretty clear I think that the Stormont Parliament is doomed. I think it's probably been doomed for a couple of years, certainly from the introduction of British troops.

42:22I 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 is sick of it and a lot of the politicians would love to pull out. So February 72, Heathen is 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 on ending partition. Maybe there's a solution where Northern Ireland remains technically part of the United Kingdom that has some sort of constitutional association with Ireland. I mean, that is kind of the solution that ultimately they get to, isn't it? 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, some people will

43:22say, 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 Alex Douglas Humus, on the right of the Tory party at this meeting 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're sort of a misdiad attachment to the possession of Northern Ireland, which is just not true at all. Well, that's the thing, isn't it? That both the loyalist and the nationalist paramilitaries, they have a stake in committing violence.

44:23The British army, despite running a mock 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. They would. No question they would. Basically, I think, you're in the army, 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? 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 power troopers 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 at the barracks. And is this the first attack on British soil?

45:25Well, it's English soil, isn't it? Because it tends to be England that gets attacked. Yes. Because that seems the obvious tactic. And it's surprising that they didn't do it earlier, really. 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, 1975 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. It was Catholic owned. But the reason they attacked it was probably because the upstairs 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

46:27a 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 20s were killed. They were both Catholics. 140 people were injured. I mean, it's some horrible stories of a woman who has been now shopping for her wedding dress, lost an arm and an eye. A paramedic afterward said the ambulances were washed 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. So many people injured. One of the doctors who came in was an anesthetist called Dr. Fred Berin. 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 Voxpops on the streets of Belfast and the results are absolutely blood-curdling.

47:32Because 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. 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 my mind. An elderly Protestant housewife. She says, yes, the British won't stay because the British are soft. You know, they can't rely on the British. They're still thinking that after bloody Sunday. But I think there were a lot of people who thought, remember that guy who said, why couldn't you shop 1300 rather than 13? Yeah, I suppose. And this old woman says, when the British leave, she says we will have to fight with that 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.

48:34And 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 calamity 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. And does that mean that people who are proactively for accommodation with the other side are targets? 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. Yes, I mean, actually, it's not Terence O'Neill. A good example of that. I suppose. You know, his premiership destroyed because he basically was regarded by, you know, his base as an appeaser. Kevin Myers in his memoir says, you know, politicians always spoke about a tiny minority of terrorists, but he's very caustic.

49:34He 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 polarized society in which a lot of people have 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 March. The first really major IRA car bomb, because previously they'd been bombs in parcels and things. This was in Lower Donigall Street in the city center. A midday, the street was full of shoppers and also school children 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 exiring 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

50:36of give all the quotations because they're so horrible. The carnage, the school children injured, glass everywhere, body parts everywhere, it's awful. So two days after this, Fulton is summoned to London and he finds Heath completely grim face and kind of curts. And he says, okay, enough now. This cannot go on. This is the end. You've got two options. Number one, you continue as Prime Minister in 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, an option two. If you don't take that, we're going to shut you down, shut down the Northern Irish Parliament. He will rule you directly from Westminster. And Fulton, I cannot, I mean, it's amazing that he didn't see this coming. He cannot believe it. He's completely taken aback.

51:36They 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 to Northern Ireland like a glorified county council and Heath with his legendary tact and charm. Says, well, you are. Yeah, that's fair. So Fulton 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. It injured 17 people in the Europa hotel next door. So the next morning Fulton rings Heath and he says, 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, he 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

52:37just been humiliated by the 1972 minus strike. I mean, Heath has basically had like an hour's sleep in the last six months. We're wondering, is rude. Yeah. Well, he's very rude. I mean, to be fair, he would be rude anyway. So he looks on TV, he looks gray and strained. He says, obviously, Stormrunner hasn't worked with shutting it down. I am sending my lieutenant, Willie Whitelaw, more of him later, to Belfast at Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. He's basically going to be the Imperial Pro-Consult in Northern Ireland. And he 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. Do you think Heath sees it that way? No, I don't think he's, of course, he doesn't see it that way. He's not an idiot. He's just saying, because you've got to, you can't end on a downfall. And beat note and say, we're all doomed. Everything's awful. Nothing's going to get better. So basically, everybody in Northern Ireland condemns him. The IRA says the war goes on now. Brilliant. The gloves are off with fighting the British. Fulton gives a press conference and says, this is a victory for those who shout, lie,

53:40denigrate and destroy it, shows that violence can pay. I mean, he's not wrong about that. No, I mean, I guess he isn't wrong. Absolutely, he's not wrong. The shipyard workers at Harland and Wolf descendents of the men who built the Titanic. They walk out. They march through Belfast. Chanting against Heath, the IRA and the Catholic Church. Did this sort of trinity there? And Ted Heath is kind of old in that company, isn't he? He's not a, he's the old one out. He's very anglic and looking man. He's not a Catholic, although he does like Europe. So yeah, that's true. That's true. And that's true. And there's a huge demonstration outside Stormont, a hundred thousand people with Ulster flags and orange order flags and all this kind of thing. So Heath's left hand at Willie White Law flies into Belfast. We met him in the Thatcher episode. We did. Everyone needs a Willie. 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.

54:43He has massive red cheeks and kind of little red veins running up to his oyster eyes, doesn't he? Oyster eyes. You've got to say oyster eyes by law when you talk about Willie White Law. And actually, he inspires great loyalty. I think he does a pretty good job with this, actually. The top, the civil servant in Northern Ireland, Kenneth Blumfield said it was one of the great pleasures of my life to enjoy the company and the confidence of that large, emotional, sometimes irassable, 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. That's the mordeling spirit. That is very much, actually more case. Yeah. I mean, the country is descending into the abyss, but we've got an absolute 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

55:45who are swung very much towards the more hard line extreme. Now a person who sadly, for fans of your accents has not featured much in glass cup 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. Well, he's become an MP, hasn't he? He's become an MP, so he's gone off to London, so he's not even there. Off-flesh pots of Westman's dark. Exactly, but also he's sort of all over the place politically at this point. He's been left behind a bit. He's sort of slightly willed this sort of crisis into being where he's 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 unist in favor of direct rule from Westminster and scrapping stormers. I suppose he thought stormers 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

56:49bloke. But William Craig had been O'Neill's home affairs minister. 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 hardliners hardliner. 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 on alternative universe 1970s Britain. Or what's his name in Reggie Parin? Oh, the bloke who wants to set up his own private army. Jeffrey Palmer. I think it's more sinister than Jeffrey Palmer, frankly. They have a very fascistic logo, which you can see online, which is a kind of blue V. That's never a good sign. Raleigh's, he has an honor guard that surrounds him.

57:51They wear uniforms with an orange sash, and they also do a kind of Nazi salute. Now, you know what it is? It's a national theater reimagining of a Shakespeare Roman play, daring and edgy. But no one's ever thought of before. That is exactly, starring Maxine Peek at Christopher Eccleston. Yeah. It's basically, it's a national theater play produced in 2012, imagining what will happen when David Cameron introduces fascism in Britain. That's what it is. Or in a line of the fossil fuels industry. So yeah. So Christopher Eccleston is so involved in this. Yeah. He totally is. He's Cori Lainas. Okay, but this bloke Craig, he is so aggressive. He gives a speech. It's a 60,000 people in Belfast, loyalists. He says, we must build up dossiers on the men and women who are menace to this country. Because one day, ladies and gentlemen, if the politicians fail us, it may be our job

58:54to liquidate the enemy. I don't feel you should be talking about liquidating the enemy. Well, those are the kind of comments of people who like the Odyssey from people on X. It's about you. Yeah, I know. It's just he or Musco. I know. We're at war. We must round up these people who like Christopher Nolan films and shoot them. I'll give you a flavor of the comments I got. But there's actually more to come from Musk's trick, William Craig. So at one point, he's invited to address the Monday Club, the hard, right conservative club at the House of Commons. Here's 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. And what does the Monday Club? What's their reaction to this?

59:55Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're here. Yeah, yeah. And then they start to wear a D-Jah, 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 Oxford Defence Association, the vigilante alliance that we talked about last time. So they at this point are at the absolute peak. They had not been prescribed by the government, unlike other parliamentary 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 and their dark glasses and military fatigues. They're very popular on the Protestant estates. And I think a reason for this is something underappreciated. I think I mentioned this in the first episode. I think massively underappreciated in the stories, 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%.

1:00:55Basically, there are a lot of 20-year-old men who left school five years earlier, four years earlier or whatever, and have nothing to do. So a slightly fine bar vibe. 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? It's fun. It's fun. Right. They like dressing up, they like being given a gun, they like hanging around with their mates. Violent boys' gouts. Completely. And the UDA, I mean, the UDA don't have the ideological aspirations of the IRA. They are basically vigilantes' stroke against us. They run... So there's no spiritual crisis for them. I don't think so. They run protection rackets. They will hijack lorries with TVs in or cigarettes or alcohol or something. I mean, that's again a difference with Paisley, isn't it? Because Paisley is a man of God, even if that is a God of Roth. So he does have to consider what the Bible tells him and the future of his soul and everything. But these guys, they're not... No, he and Paisley never hijacked a lorry carrying bottles of...

1:01:57What's a bush mills, is that a thing? That's like a Northern Irish thing, isn't it? Anyway. Yeah, and people, journalists, for going 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, just above the ground and went through the motions of less than agile, hand-to-hand combat. Just jump on people. That's right. And Kevin Myers said they were... He didn't take them seriously at all in his memoir and he says, they're the only terrorist group in the world to design their own regimental blazer. Completely go bad. Anyway, it'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,

1:02:58dragged 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. The official IRA killed 20 people and the provisional IRA killed almost 230 people. Now talking of the provisional IRA, they are cockahoeb with the demise of Stormont. I mean, 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 radicalized. As they see it, they are well on the way to achieving their goals. And when 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. And so that explains why at this point, spring's 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

1:04:01because as they see it, they're 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 would agree to peace talks would declare a ceasefire. And Willie White Law says, you know, publicly he says no, but obviously privately he's thinking, well, it would be mad not to talk to them. Six days later, he quietly met to 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. 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 Jerry Adams,

1:05:03who as you know, Tom maintains that he was never a member of the IRA. So he's been wrongly interned in his own mind, wrongly interned. Indeed, wrongly. Well, I mean, his entire presence in the next few minutes of this episode is bewildering a terrible. It's a blotery mistake and identity is a terrible case. Mistake and identity. What's that barman doing there? 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 Senior Civil Servant, Philip Woodfield, and the other is a senior MI6 officer called Frank Steele. I'm waiting for them. Waiting for them are an IRA man since the 1950s, good David O'Connell, and baffling me, Jerry Adams. So you're kind of intern workplace man. Yeah. Who knows? Who knows why he's there? So for three hours, they have this meeting and they agree a deal.

1:06:04They'll have a temporary IRA ceasefire. Steele, the MI6 man and O'Connell basically set up a telephone hotline so they can 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 defense of their past and they made no attacks on the British government, the British army, or any other communities or bodies in Northern Ireland. Their response to every argument put to them was reasonable and moderate. And he says to Whitehall, I think they genuinely want to cease fire 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 very quiet, self-contained, a self-discipline man.

1:07:04I know it's an unfashionable thing to say, but I liked him. And he has an remarkable exchange with Jerry 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. 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. How do you do that if you're just a department? So I mean, he would say through political means to remember she was Sinn Fein, but not the IRA. Wouldn't he? What do you not say? So two days later, then, that's 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 White Law. Four of them are long-standing IRA men,

1:08:06but two of them are much younger. One of them is Martin McGinnis, who is the second in command of the dairy IRA and was present at Bloody Sunday. And the author, yet again, mistaken identity. No one knows where he's there, Jerry Adams. And Martin McGinnis. Yeah, Martin McGinnis, exactly. Big fan of cricket and PG Woodhouse. Was Martin McGinnis a fan of cricket? He loved it. Yeah, he loved it. And he liked PG Woodhouse. Yeah, wow. My brother was some Jerry Adams's publicity agent. Of course he was, I'd forgotten that. Yeah. And Martin McGinnis was a very charming man. I mean, he got on very well with Ian Pacey as well. Of course, the chuckle brothers. Just to clear this up for listeners, your brother was Jerry Adams's agent in his capacity as a publisher. Yes, yes, his book had come out. Your brother was not a member of Sinn Fein. I mean, that's a hell of a twist. Although Jerry Adams had always sent him a Christmas card and they would be, you know, having Christmas. And there'd be a kind of a Christmas tree wrapped up

1:09:06in barbed wire. Oh my God. It stuck out in his Wiltshire cottage. And also Jerry Adams and Christmas cards, the best ever moment in the history of social media. Oh, yes. He's been Jerry Adams said. So we're trying to reinvent himself on social media as a vascular grandfather. And so he was having trouble with his Christmas lights. No one give me a lighter. Yeah, somebody replied and said, sure, you must know somebody who can fit a timer. But of course he wouldn't, because he wasn't a member of that organization. He had terrible problem with wind. And he was a great way. He was better out than it. 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 Mini van. The Mini van 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, because they're home of the White House Junior Minister Paul Chanan. It's a really hot day. White House is waiting for them. He offers them drinks. They refuse.

1:10:08There's some suspicion that they might have thought, White House could 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. And of course, there is a precedent for IRA men going to London, which we've done on the rest of history, the Anglo-Iris Treaty negotiations. And then all the talk was selling out and people becoming Michael Collins fording for the blandishments of the British. So 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 McStiefen. 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. His father was not Irish, but an English legal clerk. His mother was Bethan McGreen, born and bred.

1:11:10She did have Irish blood, but Ulster Protestant blood. But he's like the kind of guy who's an incredibly English, but insists on supporting Ireland in rugby. Exactly. He goes to a leading public school and wears an island rugby shirt. That's exactly the kind of man this is, although of more Bethan McGreen kind of vintage. So he was in the RAF. For some reason, I don't know. He got radicalized. He learned Irish. He changed his name, Gaelicized 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, which he was. But how many 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 passionate. And the anti-abortion. He had no sense of humor. His hard work, basically. So he's quite devolera. Yeah, a little bit. I mean, we talked before, when we were talking about the late führer of Nazi Germany, what a terrible person

1:12:11he'd be to have at your wedding. This bloke would be awful as a wedding guest. Because, of course, I get a light Hitler. It doesn't drink, doesn't smoke. And his only gunna talk to you with sort of, apparently, he would adopt a fake Irish accent. Kevin Myers in his memoir is very interesting about his... That's fake. Like that SMP. Yeah. The SMP woman who has the fake Scottson. Who changed its accent, depending on where she is. So he does the talking anyway, this meeting, presumably, in his accent. He reads a list of demands. He says, we need you to release or a prisoner's total British withdrawal. You've got till 1975 and have an all-Island referendum on ending partition. So he doesn't say you've got to get out, nigh. No, he does not. So the all-Island referendum on ending partition, of course, an all-Island 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.

1:13:12I mean, in all-Island referendum, yeah. Would it definitely... I guess the emotional case for it would be so strong, wouldn't it? But the practical code... I mean, we head and heart. The emotional case would be very strong. If you're living in, like, I don't know, waterford in 1972, and somebody says, do you now feel that life would be materially improved by the addition of Northern Ireland with all of its issues to your national unit? What would you think? I mean, I think the national case would be so strong. Oh, yes. I think you wouldn't be able to resist the promptings of your heart, but your head might say, hmm, not sure. Yeah, this is not ideal. Anyway, the IRA clearly misread this situation because there is no way the British are going to give it into this. And it became obvious, I think, to White Law and to Frank Steele, who was there. The IRA basically thought they'd worn on the British where 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.

1:14:13And he says to them on the flight back, yeah, 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. 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, ladies 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. 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.

1:15:17But actually, they don't withdraw. 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 you cannot surrender to the men of violence. No, but I mean, you can't, I mean, to blow, if you blow up British pubs in Birmingham, Gilford 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 Picadilly, if you're all of that stuff, once you do that, 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 the late 1990s. Yeah, a lot of liars would have been saved. But of course, the reason they don't do the deal

1:16:17is 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, a heretical thing to say, but I think there are quite a lot of people who enjoy the conflict, actually. On both sides, loyalists and Republican. One IRA man said, maybe you can't bomb a million Protestants into United Ireland, but you could have good fun trying. And I think there are a lot 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. And there are people in the British Army who find it exciting as well, aren't they? They kind of undercover British officers. What's his name? Robert Nyrak. Yeah, Robert Nyrak. So a couple of days later, the ceasefire ends, street battles again, a huge new surge of violence. And 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,

1:17:18to 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 that 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. This, of course, the hunger strikes under Margaret Thatcher in 1981. 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 to Northern Ireland in not an entirely joyful way. So in the afternoon, the 21st of July, that is two weeks after the failure of these talks. The provisional set of 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,

1:18:18the pictures showed policemen literally scooping up body parts into bags. And this went down as bloody Friday. And it actually did tremendous damage to the IRA. They lost them a lot of moderate nationalists 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 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, and his boy scouts belt, of which his son was very proud. And afterwards, the Reverend Parker set up a peace group

1:19:18in his son's memory. It was called Witness for Peace. And he held a 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 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. And Dominic, as you said, we will be returning to this story in due course, still a long way to go before we reach the Good Friday agreement. And there will as ever be more about this on this theme

1:20:19in 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. And if you feel there haven't been enough civil war on the podcast recently, there will be Rome's first civil war as Marius and Sulla. Start tearing chunks out of each other. So all of that to come. And if you want to hear the all four 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, this grim story. And thank you everyone for listening. Bye bye. Bye bye.