700. The Troubles: Bloody Sunday (Part 4)

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That's better, H-E-L-P dot com slash rest is history. 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 forming live at the Southbank Centre in London, and better yet, we'll be hosting the Southbank Centre in London, we will be doing something completely new, something that no one has ever heard before on The Rest is 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 he is holding them hostage after descending into this demented rage because one of his fellow-mothers, monarchs, Queen Victoria, has declined to answer his letters. I'm not making this up. And the British, after months and months of fruitless waiting, have lost patience and they have sent a military expedition under General Napier halfway around the world to save them. An 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 behaviour, mad characters, colossal moustaches, everything that we love on The Rest is History. It is, though I say so 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 to go to therestishistory.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. See 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 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. 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. 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 Saville 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 during a protest march in Derry on the 30th of January 1972, a day that has gone down in history as a day of protest and a day that has gone down in history in infamy as Bloody Sunday. And the Saville 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, you too never accepted it. And their song helped to make Bloody Sunday a cause celebre wherever popular music is listened to by earnest teenagers in bedrooms. So Tony Blair set up the Saville Inquiry as part of the peace process in 1998, and it was incredibly expensive. It cost almost 200 million pounds. And the Saville 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. So in the last episode, we talked about the disaster of interment, 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, "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 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, we talked about him last time, very clever, very corrupt, lazy, off his 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 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 De Gaulle option, isn't it, with Algeria? Right, exactly. Now, why don't people do that? Well, a difference between Algeria and Northern Ireland, I can remember 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 Pieds-Noirs, as they're called, they're 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. Also, they've been there since the 17th century, haven't they? 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. 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. 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 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 us. 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. And there's an element in Irish government thinking that still secretly has a little bit of that. I think so. I think undoubtedly, undoubtedly, that it would be, 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 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. To 15,000. And obviously, they're not there. Any illusion of them being there is sort of jolly peacemakers having fish and chips and cups of tea has long since disappeared. They're in this quagmire, hence 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 19th. 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 letter boxes. I mean, that's the thing that kind of messes with the soldiers' heads in a way. And of course, it's very dangerous. So every month, soldiers are dying. Forty-two of them died in 1971, killed by the IRA. Sixty-four 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 lay there dying. And Myers, I mentioned him last time, Irish Catholic parentage, 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 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 subjects of today's episode. Now, even the soldiers themselves, of course, admit that they're not perfect. So most of them are not perfect. So most of these men, especially we're talking about the rank and file, the squaddies, they are relatively poorly educated young men, lots of them in their late teens, early 20s. 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 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. There's a bloke called Jim who. 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. And can I just ask about The Officers? Because I don't know if you've seen the adaptation of Say Nothing. I've not. I've read the book, but not seen the TV series. So about two sisters who join the IRA. Yeah. And Rory Kinnear plays a British intelligence officer absolutely brilliantly, I have to say. And he has kind of counterinsurgency experience from various British colonial engagements. Yeah. And he is. Played with a very icy heart, I think it's fair to say. And is that how the British officer class see what's going on? Do they similarly. You were 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 earlier in the 60s in Aden or wherever. 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 or 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 unionist population. I think they 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. Right, 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. The 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 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 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 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, basically there's a big mural. It says, you are now. You're entering Free Derry. There are barricades there. The entrances to the estate, the bogside, 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 Derry, gangs of unemployed teenagers who call themselves the Derry 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. 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. confrontations at the edge of the bogside where teenage 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 derrick 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 sallis and they never went forward it was horrifying in other words he's embarrassed to be a british officer when this is happening and the paras are the most the hardest of the heart 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 bog side are becoming emboldened so on 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 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 armored 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 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 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 shoot them so we're going to shoot people but not necessarily to kill them yeah salutary violence exactly so that was on the 7th of january 1972 now 11 days later brian fultner 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 sounds very sinister 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 internment which of course was introduced in august and that 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 saffel report which covers this day comes to 10 volumes 5036 pages and about two and a half million words so you haven't listened to we have ways on d-day because i think there's a lot more let's spend more your brother and al murray surely arnam arnam yes it's always arnam with them isn't it anyway are you and i gonna spend two and a half million words and five thousand 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 this 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 we'll close off the city center 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 rights as possible and we're going to keep the marches within the catholic 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 heaven for fend not bad publicity 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 and dairy have been too passive of course so as the arresting force he sends to dairy 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 grandmother and he was brought up by his grandmother and he was brought up by his grandmother 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 classicist and actor so he was given a place at rada the royal academy of dramatic arts where all the sort of top lovelies 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 the very first world war in the trenches very much although less first world war after he left the army i was reading an obituous of him today and this blew my mind after he left the army with a perhaps a slightly checkered reputation he grew a ponytail and became a belgian antiques dealer 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 his men he always has his men kind of blacking up and they're all blacking up and they're all blacking up and they're all blacking up with their faces and wearing camouflage he says you know that we we're fighters and killers we're not messing around here what kind of camouflage you wear in dairy you kind of dress up and look like concrete or something dress as a tower block yeah a bollard 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 well he asked himself what would marcus aurelius do and marcus aurelius would be wearing green combat fatigues no he wouldn't he'd be dressing up as bollards fooling the rioters so even before bloody sunday the powers these powers 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 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 in the powers 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 but of course ford wants to use the powers precisely because he thinks it will be violent the atmosphere in dairy 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 road in the middle of the road and ford's officers had to be sent to the police station and ford's officers had to be sent to the police station and ford's officers had to be sent to the police station and ford's officers had to be sent to the police station and ford's officers had to be sent to the police station and what they're particularly worried about 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 powers operational orders explicitly warn them you should expect ira to be able to 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 Teach them a lesson. We want some kills tomorrow. wait so we get to the day itself when you dig into like the savel 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 center 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 bog side they're going to stop when they get to free dairy corner as it's called the entrance to hear speeches people denouncing internment now back at william street by the city center 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 don't kill anybody but that is what they've basically in order to do to wound to wound hooligans and rioters and a few minutes later there is a sniper shot so enough 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 at 3 55 lieutenant colonel wilford asks permission from the commanding office officer in in dairy to he says i want to 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 dairy commander as follows yes fine send in a para subunit to do scoop up through barrier 14 not to conduct running battle down rossville street now this last sentence is totally ignored because a few minutes later a convoy of armored personnel carriers come screaming down the road down rossville street into the box side 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 snipers on top of the high rise flats overlooking the scene this i think the several 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 i suppose i mean the vietnam comparison that ted kennedy made it's 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 costs two hundred million pounds to this inquiry but i remember reading you know i was researching my book on the early seventies 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 so you know psychologically for 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 and they're they're very hard men they are trained killers they're also very young men they lose control they start shooting they find more than a hundred rounds into the crowd they hit twenty six people and they kill thirteen people and most of the people they kill a very young six of them of thirteen was seventeen years old most of the people they kill were running away running to safety some of them are 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 blood stained handkerchief as a white flag and they're trying to carry this guy to safety seventeen year old jackie duddy and duddy dies just moments later the priest edward daly was holding his hand and giving him the last rites 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 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 information that is available to them that's why i'm going to have to go back and look into it and i'm going to have to look into it i'm going to have to look into it and i'm going to have to look into it and i'm going to have to look into it and i'm going to have to look into it that a lot in the British press in the next few days. The Daily Mail. Our troops had 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 robustly one might say 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 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 chancery building you know it's kind of pretty big deal in a 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 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 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 um people of irish descent in britain so you could think of um a man who is the son of irish ancestors and irish forebears 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 i was hoping it 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 um bloody sunday 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 jerry adams and we will be hearing more about him after the break this episode is brought to you by amazon tom 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 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children and young people the treatments themselves can be incredibly harsh they can cause lifelong side effects like infertility or hearing loss and cancer research uk is working to change that because young people they shouldn't be being treated like that they shouldn't be being treated like that they shouldn't be able to grow up hearing the voices of the people that they love and living their lives to the fullest that's right and one clinical trial led by cancer research uk showed that giving another drug alongside chemotherapy nearly halved the number of children losing their hearing and today the treatment combination is being used by doctors across the world for more information about cancer research uk their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them visit cancer research uk.org slash rest is science hello everyone and welcome back to the rest is history it is now february 1972 um 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 the storm on parliament is due to the end of the year 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 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 february 72 heath in his cabinet have a 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 but 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 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 basically says our interests would best be served by 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 misty-eyed attachment to the possession of northern ireland which is just not true at all well that's the thing isn't it that that both the um the loyalist and the nationalist um 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 they would no no question they would basically i think if you're in the army you get the you know you're you're told you're being posted to northern ireland you don't think brilliant but you're 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 paratroopers uh 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 well 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 don't do it earlier really well don't forget they had attacked uh 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 in britain initially it's not really until 1974 75 that they move in earnest to attacking um britain but yeah it is the first it's the first of something that will recur very ominously so that was the official ira two weeks later and attacked by the provisional ira this time in belfast and this the target this time and this is a truly awful story the target is the abercorn restaurant in belfast city center so 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 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 20s were killed they were both catholics 140 people were injured there's a i mean some horrible stories a woman who has been out shopping for her wedding dress lost an arm and an eye a paramedic afterwards 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 barine 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 bc 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 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 i think it's the 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 they're still thinking that after bloody sunday but i think there are a lot of people who thought remember that guy who said why couldn't you shop 1300 rather than 13 yeah i suppose 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 this 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 that people who are proactively for accommodation with the other side are our 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 um yes i mean actually is not terence o'neill a good example of that yes i suppose 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 polarized 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 and he's like oh my god in horror then he gets the final straw which is on 20th of march um the first really major ira car bomb because previously there'd been bombs in parcels and things this was in lower donna gall street in the city center and 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 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 um the the carnage that 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-faced kind of curt and he's 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 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 fulton 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 him 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 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 and 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 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 just been humiliated by the 1972 minor strike i mean heath has basically had like an hour's sleep in the last six months well no wonder he's rude yeah well he's very rude i mean to be fair he'd be rude anyway so he looks on tv he looks gray and strained he says obviously stormwater hasn't worked with shutting it down i am sending um my lieutenant willie whitelaw more of him later to belfast as secretary of state for northern ireland he's basically going to be the imperial pro-consul in northern ireland and 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 he sees it that way no i don't think he of course he doesn't see it that way he's not an idiot you can't end on a downbeat 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 said 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 belgium they march through belgium they march through belgium they march through belfast chanting against heath the ira and the catholic church goodness what a trinity there and um yeah ted heath is kind of odd in that company isn't he he's not a he's the odd one out he's very anglican looking man he's not a catholic although he does like europe so he hangs around with a load of european catholics 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 he's lieutenant willie whiteley 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 classic 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 he has massive red cheeks and kind of little 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 of this actually the top civil servant in northern ireland 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 enjoy ourselves that's the maudling spirit that is very much 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 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 last couple of episodes. It's the Reverend Ian Peck. 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 he's a flesh pot of westminster 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 a crisis into being by his incredibly inflammatory rhetoric but now that it has arrived you know he's 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 favor of direct rule from westminster and scrapping stormers i suppose because he thought stormer 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 bloke called william christmas craig so william craig had been um 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 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 alternative universe 1970s britain or uh what's his name in uh reggie perrin oh um the the bloke who wants to set up his own private army jeffrey palmer 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 at rallies he has an honor guard that surrounds him they wear uniforms with an orange sash and they also do a kind of nazi salute now you know what it is it's it's a national theater reimagining of a shakespeare roman play daring and edgy that no one's ever thought of before that is exactly starring maxine peak and christopher eccleston yeah it's basically it's a it's a national theater play produced in 2012 imagining what david cameron introduces fascism in britain that's what it is or in in alliance with the fossil fuels industry so yeah so christopher eccleston is so involved in this yeah he totally is he's coriolanus 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 i don't feel you should be talking about liquidating the enemy well those are the kind of comments of um people who like the odyssey from people on x it's about you yeah i know let's just see your musk i know we are at war we must round up these people who like christopher nolan films and shoot them i'm just giving you a flavor of the comics 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 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 yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah they hear here and then they start talking about rhodesia surely i mean that's basically the 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 defense 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 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 conflict and the economic conflict and the economic conflict 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 early or four years earlier or whatever and have nothing to do so slightly vimar 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 they're fun it's fun right they like dressing up they're like being given a gun they're like hanging around with their mates violent boy scouts completely and the uda i mean the uda don't have the ideological aspirations of the ira they are basically vigilantes stroke gangsters they so there's no spiritual crisis for them i don't think so they run protection rackets they will hijack um 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 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 that's no in paisley never never hijacked a lorry carrying bottles of you know what's a bush mills 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 just jump on people crushing and kevin myers said they were he took that doesn't take them seriously at all in his memoir and he says um they're the only terrorist group in the world who 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 the official ira killed 20 people and the provisional ira killed almost 230 people now talking of the provisional ira they are cockahoop 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 radicalized as they see it they are well on the 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 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 as they see it the they are in the position of basically dictating the terms of the british surrender so on the 13th of june the british will agree to peace talks will declare a ceasefire and willie whitelaw says you know publicly he says no but obviously privately he's thinking well they'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 and the other condition he agrees to release a bearded young man who has been interned on a prison ship hms maidston 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 who as you know tom maintains that he was never a member of the ira so he's been wrongly interned yeah 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 bewildering mistaken identity is a terrible case of mistaken 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 uh two british officials drive to a country house outside derry one of them is white civil servant philip woodfield and the other is a senior mi6 officer called frank steel and waiting waiting for them are an ira man since the 1950s called david o'connell and bafflingly jerry adams so you're kind of intern work placement yeah who knows who knows why he's there so for three hours they have this um meeting and they agree a deal they'll have a temporary ira ceasefire uh steel 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 white law himself and woodfield reports to white law he says um 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 white law i think they genuinely want to cease fire and a permanent end to violence now sort of more um hardline listeners may say gosh this bloke's gone completely native but the mi6 man steel went even further he said of david o'connell he was a very quiet self-contained and self-disciplined man i know it's an unfashionable thing to say but i liked him and he has a remarkable exchange with jerry adams whom steel finds very personal and intelligent and steel 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 steel 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 steel no i've got to help to get rid of you british first how do you do that if you're just a barman so i mean he would say through political means through membership of shin fein but not the ira wouldn't he would he not yeah i guess he would so two days later they announced 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 whitelaw four of them are long-standing ira men but 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 other yet again mistaken identity no one knows why is there jerry adams and martin mcginnis yeah martin mcginnis exactly big fan of um 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 um jerry adams's publicity agent of course he was i'd forgotten that yeah and martin guinness was a very charming man i mean he got on very well with ian paisley as well of course the chuckle brothers just to clear this up for you 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 shin fein i mean that's a hell of a twist although jerry 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 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 when jerry adams said set on was trying to reinvent himself on social media as an avuncular grandfather yeah and said he was having trouble with his christmas lights can no one give me a lighter 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 organization he had terrible problem with wind and he was a great he was better out than in ah terrible i knew he was a bad man so they're flown they're going to go to london it's a farcical journey uh their car breaks down all six of the 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 is the home of the um of white laws junior minister paul channon it's a really hot day white law is waiting for them he offers them drinks they refuse um there's some suspicion that they might have thought white all's gonna poison them i think that's obviously ludicrous he wasn't going to poison them i think it's much more that they're going to poison them and they're going to 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 is history the anglo-irish treaty negotiations and then all the talk was you know selling out and people becoming you know uh michael collins falling for the blandishments the british so they they are determined not to do this and they're very stiff and serious and the tone is set by the ira a man who calls himself sean mcstephen 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 bethlehem green born and bred she did have irish blood but ulster protestant blood but he's like the kind of guy who's incredibly english but insists on supporting ireland in rugby match exactly he goes to a leading public school and wears an island rugby shirt that's exactly the kind of man this is although from beth of more bethnal green kind of um vintage so he was in the raf for some reason i don't know he got radicalized he learned irish he changed his name galacized 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 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 humor his hard work basically so he's quite de valera 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 of course i get like hitler doesn't drink doesn't smoke and is only gonna talk to you with sort of apparently he would adopt a fake irish accent kevin myers in his memoir is very realistic about his fake like that snp yeah the snp woman who has the fake scottish who changes her accent depending on where she is so he does the talking anyway at this meeting presumably in his accent he reads the list of demands he says we need you to release all prisoners total british withdrawal you've got 1975 and have an all ireland referendum on ending partition so he doesn't say you've got to get out nigh 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 position i mean an all ireland referendum yeah would it definitely i guess the emotional case for it would be so strong wouldn't it but the practical code it would be 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 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 i think i think you wouldn't be able to resist the promptings of your heart but your head might say not sure yeah this is not ideal anyway the ira clearly have misread this situation because there is no way the british are going to give that into this and it became obvious i think to white law and to frank steel who was there the 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 steel is with them the mi6 man is with them and they're going to go back to belfast and they're going to go back to belfast and they're the whole time and he says to them on the flight back i'm 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 steel remembered late he said i'm not going to go back to belfast and they 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 they're not stupid they're not stupid they're not stupid they're not stupid know this i mean that is why in due course they're going to start bombing the mainland but 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 um 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 piccadilly all of that stuff once you do that there then that will harden the british public against you i think the ira can completely misread the british republic 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 yeah 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 a 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 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 but i think there's a lot of people who actually found it very exciting all of that and there are there are people in the british army who find it exciting as well aren't they though you know kind of undercover british officers what's his name robert nirak yeah robert nirak 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 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 of the 21st of july that is two weeks after the first failure of these talks the provisional set off 22 bombs in the center 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 to the ira 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 and he was a member of the church of ireland chaplain and he was 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 and his boy scout's belt of which his son was very proud and afterwards the reverend parker set up a peace group in his son's memory it was called witness for peace and he held the services outside the church of ireland chaplain and he was 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 apparitionists and can you confine your peace activities to your day off and so he was sent to the church of ireland chaplain and he was sent to the church of 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 uh 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 in our brilliant newsletter which if you're not already signed up you can get by signing up to the good friday agreement and we'll see you signing up at the rest is history.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 uh 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 um and And if you want to hear 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 grim story. And thank you, everyone, for listening. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer, new members only. BJ's, home of the Save.