Cahill describes the prospect of death: ‘I’m not being boastful about this, but once you made your peace with God, I think death is very easy to face. The only way I can equate it, is often I’ve heard people saying, “He died a lovely death” because they were prepared to die. Once you’re prepared to die, I think death is easy faced. That’s where religion plays a big part in my life.’
On a Sunday afternoon, all of the condemned were brought into the solicitor’s room. ‘The solicitor looked at the six of us. He says, “I have good news for everybody except Tom. The rest of you have been reprieved. Tom,” he says, “you’ll die.” And it was a shock to everybody. At this stage we didn’t expect to be reprieved; we thought we were all going to be executed because it was only three days away. There was a tremendous silence and the first one to break the silence was Tom Williams. He says, “This is how I wanted it from the start. Don’t grieve for me,” he says. “I’m happy to die.” And that was the saddest moment in my life. We were taken away from him and we were given a guarantee that we’d see him again before Wednesday. The authorities never kept their promise. We didn’t see him again. We were taken to the penal servitude wing. The last memory I have of Tom Williams was on the day of his execution. The chap in the cell above me rapped on the floor and he says, “Joe, jump up to your window.” I jumped up to the window and I looked out and I saw his funeral going to the back of the hospital for burial. That’s my last memory of Tom Williams.’
One man who volunteered to combat the IRA was Wallace Clark. Clark was a member of the B Specials, the largest of three arms of the Ulster Special Constabulary. He entered the constabulary in 1950, the third generation of his family to join, and became a District Commandant. The B Specials had a sinister reputation; they were greatly feared by Catholics. In an interview with Bobbie Hanvey, Clark challenges the reputation: ‘The general view of the Catholics was that the B Specials were heavily biased, tending to brutality, and did a lot of quiet killing – which is all untrue if you look at the statistics. But they were all so frightened of the Bs, which gave us a very strong moral position, in that a B man was very rarely attacked in his house. They were stewing in their own juice, they demonized the Bs so effectively. We did a lot of our work at night dressed in black or very dark green. That’s one reason it was so easy to demonize the B Specials. It created the “bogeymen” image.’
Clark explains why he joined: ‘I think sort of family pride, like it applied to a lot of men in the B Specials. It was public service, the country was under threat. I felt I could do my little bit in putting down terrorism.’ The B Specials were a part-time force. ‘They operated around home, they kept their rifles at home, their uniforms at home, and turned out to parade locally. Initially, we drilled a lot in Orange halls but not because of any tremendous connection with the Orange Order. We were sometimes accused of being run by the Orange Order, which was absolute bunkum. The Orange Order hadn’t the organization or structure to run a force like the B Specials.’
As a commandant, Clark had eight sub-district commandants under his command, each of whom commanded about thirty men. ‘With that organization, and with the rifles at home, we could put down twenty-four roadblocks within ten minutes of getting the alarm. Because the men could turn out quickly. We had these funny old uniforms with a stand-up collar, and you could pull it over your pyjamas, and you could pull on your black trousers. We patrolled the roads, and guarded the checkpoints, or key points at times of high tension. We had two categories – “drill category” when the IRA weren’t in the active stage of warfare, and “patrol category”, when we were turned out every night, walked along the roads, checked cars, and had a good look at enemy movements. We could switch from drill category to patrol category within twenty-four hours.’
In 1956 the IRA began a border campaign – Operation Harvest – with the intention of forcing British troops out of Ireland. At this time the IRA was only a shadow of what it was to become. Internment was introduced in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and within two years the campaign had ground to a near stop. According to Clark: ‘The IRA lost that campaign and they made a formal declaration of defeat in February 1962. They weren’t very effective, and they weren’t getting popular support. They were limited in the amount of weapons and ammunition they had, and I never like to underrate my enemies, because there are plenty of clever and brave men in the IRA, but it didn’t show in that campaign. They missed lots of opportunities where they could have done a great deal more damage. The funny thing was, you’d mix with IRA men locally. You’d go down to the post office, and see fellows who had been IRA-active, and I would have no objection to having a chat with them.’
The most famous IRA operation of the campaign was the unsuccessful attack on Brookeborough RUC barracks, carried out on New Year’s Eve 1956. Two IRA men were killed during the attack, which quickly entered the annals of romantic republicanism; thousands of mourners attended the funerals of the two dead southern volunteers, and Dominic Behan wrote the song ‘The Patriot Game’ about one of them, Fergal O’Hanlon from Monaghan.
Paddy O’Regan, an IRA volunteer, was wounded in the leg during the attack by two bullets from a Bren gun fired by a police sergeant. He considers that Operation Harvest was ‘an honourable campaign in as far as we could make it, and I suppose that was reflected in the fact that there were very few people killed on either side’. The IRA had a policy of non-sectarianism at the time: ‘We were instructed not to attack the RUC because they were a police force, but they were given a number of days to stand aside, and when they did not, they became targets. On the other hand, the B Special constables were looked on as a Protestant sectarian force, so we were told that we were not to attack them at all.’
The IRA’s next campaign would prove to be a much longer and more bitter affair, with far fewer rules of engagement.
As western democracies underwent a social shift in the Sixties, away from the conservatism of the past, it appeared as though Northern Ireland was being dragged along with them. Terence O’Neill, the fourth Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, took office in 1963 and spoke of introducing ‘bold and imaginative measures’. He began visiting Catholic schools, having his photograph taken with nuns, attending civic receptions in Catholic towns, and attempting to introduce what he described as ‘long overdue reforms’.
O’Neill’s attitudes were not those of a lone man crying in the wilderness. In the early Sixties some young Protestants were even willing to countenance a united Ireland. One man who attended Foyle College, a Protestant school in Derry, remembers: ‘Most of my school friends were very pro a united Ireland in those days. We’d have discussions, and we decided that we would still hold onto British culture, but we hoped for a united Ireland where both cultures were valued and accepted. I expect that after the Troubles started, many of these people retrenched back into more black-and-white attitudes.’ But even before the Troubles, most people in Northern Ireland were not so liberal in their outlook. O’Neill’s attempts to bring the province into the twentieth century were darkly observed by a man whose feet were planted somewhere in the seventeenth: the Reverend Ian Kyle Paisley.
O’Neill and Paisley were very different men. Educated at Eton, a member of the Guards during the Second World War, speaking with an English accent, O’Neill was at the Anglo-Irish end of unionism. To read his autobiography gives a touching sense of the man; his genuine belief in reform shines through, and he writes in an endearingly Pooterish manner: ‘For some years we had been in the habit of taking the car to Britain for a holiday in August. Our second stop was with Jean’s cousin Jack…’ The overall impression is of a quiet, well-meaning man, who became involved with events and personalities far bigger than himself.
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