697. The Troubles: Murder in Belfast (Part 1)

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 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 he 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 have 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 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. Oh God, we pray for a great smashing of the chains of apostasy in this land. Open the eyes of thy people. Open the eyes of the Protestants of Alstair. Help them to see that through headgammonism their heritage is being bottled, their liberties are being sold, and Lord, may they shake their dust from off their feet, and come out and join with us in this battle, that we may stand together in the name of the Lord of hosts. We thank thee, the Thou didst bless the reformers, as they fought this battle in the 6th century, as thou blessed the covenant us, as they re-fort this battle in the era of the peridons. And thou wilt bless us in the 20th century, for God is still the same, and he has not changed, nor ever will, and his truth shall reveal, and his word is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and these Irish Presbyterian ministers, and Methodist clergymen, and Church of Island Rectors, if they need to be rectified, they would all take respect to Rome. Well, we're not going. You can go if you want, but we will not go. So to anyone under the age of 40, that will sound as though I have been having a stroke, but to anyone who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, that I hope will be a very familiar sound, because it is the reverend Ian Paisley, and he was giving a sermon there entitled, "Why am I a Protestant on the 1st of March 1965?" And dominant, he was the voice of hard-line Protestant Ulster fundamentalism, wasn't he? He was the sworn foe of that whore of Babylon, the Church of Rome, and the champion of the Ulster loyalist cause, and the thing that sensational about Ian Paisley is that, I mean, he really does sound like he is ringing all the Reformation-greatest hits. He sounds like he stepped out from the pages of a 16th or 17th century anti-papist tract. But the amazing thing about that, I mean, he made it in the year that help was released, when London was starting to swing, when the mini-skirts were coming out, NASA's preparing to send a mission to the moon. The 60s are turning very, very groovy, but I mean, Ian Paisley, he's not groovy, is he? Whoever asks you to say about him, he's not groovy. No, and I don't think he would wish to be called groovy-ton. I'm have to say that was a tremendous, that was a tremendous first of Ian Paisley. So you were riddled with uncharacteristic self-doubt before that recording. I've been practicing quite a lot this morning. I think fair-minded observers will agree, that was a tremendous performance. I woke up my friend Loss with the stench orientations of my rhetoric, lying in a bed like a swattern. That's why, Delta. Well, we'll come back to Ian Paisley later in this episode. I mean, he is an extraordinary character. I mean, it's amazing to think that he ended up as First Minister of Northern Ireland in coalition with Sinn Fei, by the way. And with Martin McGinnis, wasn't it? They were the chuckle brothers, because they just met a whole time chautling with each other. That's a twist. A twist that actually nobody could possibly have expected. No. Anyway, for four decades or so, his was one of the sort of identifiable trademark voices of a conflict that claimed thousands of lives, including the lives of almost 2,000 entirely innocent civilians, British and Irish. And today we call this conflict the Troubles, which is a very euphemistic way to talk about one of the darkest episodes in modern British and indeed Irish history. To give people a massive overview, it began with sectarian rioting in the streets of Northern Ireland, but it escalated to something much more sinister. Effectively, a low-level civil war between rival paramilitary groups and the British army, and indeed murderous bombing campaigns, both in Ireland and in Britain. And at the peak of the violence in the early 1970s, which has appeared where we're talking a lot about in this series, almost 500 people were being killed every year, and a bomb was going off in Belfast every single day. And the victims of the Troubles included not just British MPs, but as viewers of the crown will know, the Queen's second cousin, Lord Mount Baton, the last vice-roy of India who was killed by a bomb in 1979. And of course, it also killed shop assistants and barmen and singers and hairdressers and housewives and school children who were shot and blown up because they had the wrong name or they had the wrong, they belonged to the wrong church or because they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So this series is going to look at the first years of the Troubles, how they came and how they reached their peak at the end of 1972. And of course, it is a very contentious subject. I mean, lots of listeners, whether they're British or Irish or indeed from elsewhere, they may have very strong views and they may remember or have people who are involved in the conflict. And then Tom, obviously, we should say right to the beginning, we are obviously British and we live through it. So it's not like we don't have preconceptions, but there are a lot of books now about this written by, you know, very fair-minded balanced historians, both British and Irish and indeed people from Northern Ireland. And I think it is actually perfectly possible to try to give a balanced, fairly balanced account. And that's what we're going to try and do. I think, I mean, I think that that is true. I think a certain degree of distance has enabled studies of the Troubles. Yeah. I mean, so there was that brilliant series on BBC once upon a time in Northern Ireland that I just always impeccably balanced and fair. And I know that you are an impeccably balanced and fair man. Oh, that's kind. So I look forward to you emulating that. Wow. They're fresh of them. So actually, even where you start the story is a political choice in itself. Right. Because the coming of the Normans, right? So you could go really far back. I mean, a lot of people in Britain, when they tell the story, they sort of assume that the violence just exploded out of nowhere. It was carried out by psychopathic extremists who were motivated by or exploiting ancient hatreds. And it's senseless, inexplicable or all this kind of thing. Now, of course, if you're an Irish nationalist, you would start the story much earlier. You would say, well, you shouldn't start in the 1960s. You should start with maybe with the Normans arriving in Ireland, maybe with Elizabeth I or Oliver Cromwell, the plantation of Ulster, the importation of tens of thousands of English and Scottish colonists. And they would say you should start the story there. Unfortunately, we no longer live in a world where the rest of history can do 13-part series. And we have done the story of Ireland before. So I think a sensible compromise is if we just pick up the story at the end of our last Irish series that we did, which is the early 20th century. For people who haven't heard this series, they're beginning the 20th century. In 1900, there are about four and a half million people on the island of Ireland, and they are subjects of the United Kingdom. And most of them, three quarters of them are Catholic, and a quarter of them are Protestant. And the Protestants are mostly concentrated in the north-eastern part of the island, so that is in the province of Ulster, and around the city, the industrial city of Belfast, the place where the Titanic was built. If you want to hear more about that, we did a whole series about the Titanic and its origins in Belfast. And in the first 20 years or so of the century, massive controversy about Ireland's political future, the nationalists who are mostly Catholic want home rule or independence, but the unionists who are typically Protestant want to stay part of the United Kingdom. And the unionists in the northeast are so bitterly opposed to the prospect of home rule from Dublin in a Catholic dominated island, that in 1912, almost half a million of them, led by Sir Edward Carson, sign a covenant pledging to use all means necessary to fight against home rule. And the legacy of this will reverberate down the generations, long into the 1970s and beyond. I suppose it kind of offers a historical precedent for paramilitary activity, doesn't it? Absolutely it does. It's a kind of heroic model of, well, if you're not a paramilitary, you'd call it gangsterism. Yes, of course. And almost all of the paramilatures we will meet in this series would look back to the events of the 1910s and 1920s and say, "I'm doing as my forefathers did before me." So absolutely, the history really matters. So 100,000 of these people who signed the covenant organized into the paramilitary volunteers and they smuggle tens of thousands of guns into Ulster and they were preparing for civil war. But then the First World War intervened. And a lot of the volunteers went off to fight, a lot of them fought at Gallipoli, or indeed at the Somme, which became a kind of sacred moment for the Protestants of Ulster, 1916. But also in 1916, at Easter, there was a nationalist uprising in Dublin, and that was followed by guerrilla campaign largely in the south of Ireland, the Catholic bits of Ireland, that undermined British authority completely. So, Dominic, I'm sure you've been to the Shackkilt road and the Falls Road. So the Shackkilt road is the protestant, you know, the street, the protestant heartland of Belfast and the Falls Road is Catholic. They're separated now by peace walls, aren't they? Yeah. But there are kind of checkpoint Charlie-type places where they join. And on one side, there are murals of the Battle of the Somme, poppies, graveyards, British military heroes. Yes. And on the other side, all up the Falls Road, there are kind of murals of the Easter Rising. And it's like kind of the history is literally written onto the bricks. It is absolutely. Two rival histories describing the same period, but in completely different terms. Exactly right. So anyway, back to the story. In 1922, the British agreed a treaty that would turn Ireland into a free state, a dominion under the crown, and basically put it on the road to independence as a republic, which it becomes in 1949. But there was a catch. Two years earlier, the British had allowed six counties in the northeast to form a separate entity called Northern Ireland, with its own parliament in Belfast. And the treaty that they do in 1922 allows this entity to opt out of the new free state and to remain as part of the United Kingdom. And the Parliament of Northern Ireland immediately says that's what it wants to do. And so this is what gives you the partition of the island of Ireland. Can I just ask, there was never, there was never any question that they would just become a kind of independent state. No, too small to be a state of it, and dependent on money from Westminster. So this is the sort of theme that comes up again and again in the 70s, where British prime ministers will say, we're giving you all this money. Why can't you? Why can't you do what we want you to do? But it is a theme, isn't it also that the Protestants of Elsa don't really like Britain? Well, they don't really like British governments. They like the idea of Britain, but not the reality of British governments, I think it's fair. So I think they think the British governments are not good at defending British interests and that they're better at it. Yeah. And they regard the British as weak and they think the British don't understand their unique situation, which I guess is kind of true to degree is probably true. So anyway, the partition of Ireland and the South, you have 26 counties, overwhelming Catholic majority, capital in Dublin, this in 1949 becomes the Republic of Ireland. And then in the northeast, there are six counties Northern Ireland. It's a self-referring bit of the United Kingdom, capital in Belfast, Parliament at Stormont on the Stormont estate in Belfast and a two thirds Protestant majority. Now, Ian Paisley in that reading, he called it Ulster and lots of people do call it Ulster. Actually, it's only six of the nine historic counties of the province of Ulster. So this is a very good way to annoy Irish nationalists if you call it Ulster because they will point out. It's actually not all of Ulster. Every geographical expression in the story annoys people. It doesn't do so British Isles, Ireland, whatever. I mean, it always pregnant with annoyance for everyone. Every name is a choice, basically. And I'm sure there were lots of people who say, well, you got this wrong. You should have said this. You should have said the other. I mean, we're going to try our best. And I speak as the man who uttered the word London dairy in the Dublin GPO. Yeah, you corrected Paul Rouse when we did a series about Ireland. He corrected a professor of history, University College Dublin. I was just, you know, stucking up for Ulster. Yeah, you were reminding him that there are two words for it. Ian Paisley would have been proud of you. So to nationalists, partition is the original sin of modern Irish history, a blight that should be rectified. I think most historians, including most Irish historians would agree that partition was probably inevitable. They're basically, once the Ulster volunteers had, you know, as it were, signed their covenant, they'd armed themselves. They were never going to be forced into a united island without a civil war. And they're basically that was the choice. You partition the island or it all kicks off and you have a civil war. But even if you had a civil war, what do you do? Yeah, where are they going to go? There's, you know, a million people or whatever it is. With gums. Yeah, I mean, that's not good. No. So at the time when Ireland was partitioned, I think a lot of nationalists just assumed that over time it would wither away. Partition would wither away. The six counties one day would agree to join a united island. It was their destiny. And obviously that didn't work out. Northern Ireland has an entity proved much more resilient than they had expected. But that said, from the start, there's a serious fracture line that runs through Northern Ireland. So the Union's leaders, when they basically took six counties, they had guaranteed themselves a two-thirds Protestant majority. They could have asked for more counties, but of course, those counties had a lot of Catholics. They didn't want them. So they've got their two-thirds majority. So they're gera-manding. I mean, you could say effectively, yes. Yeah. But what that means, of course, is that one third of the people in this new state are not Protestants. They are Catholics. So this is half a million people who are not best pleased at the idea of living in a majority, Protestant unionist state. And partly as a result of this, this whole process was accompanied at the time by considerable violence. Now, the early 20s is a very violent time across Europe. There are all kinds of ethnic conflicts and there are border disputes and all of these kinds of things. And by those standards, not a lot of people die, but by the standards of the islands of Britain and Ireland, a lot of people do die. So between the summer of 1920 and the summer of 1922, there's this intense street fighting between the IRA and the security forces, especially in Belfast. And by the time it's over, more than 500 people have been killed, most of them Catholics, civilians, 10,000 Catholics driven out of their jobs, 25,000 Catholics driven out of their homes by violence and by arson and so on and so forth. I mean, one difference between Ireland and other parts of Europe in the wake of the First World War, that the violence in Ireland is kind of, it's a continuity and doesn't Churchill has that kind of famous phrase about the flood, isn't it? And as the water subside, we see the dreary steeples of manor and tyrone that they're still there. And that I guess is part of what gives the story around this the sense of ancient hatred. The idea that there's no solution to the situation. Well, to some extent, people are the prisoners of history and the stories they tell and the lessons they learn when their children. And you have generations of people who have grown up being told stories of separatism, of separate identity, of antagonism and so on. History is woven into the texture of life in Northern Ireland, it will come to the parades, the marches, the celebrations of battles of the 17th century and things. I mean, it really, really matters and it cannot simply be put aside or wished away. I mean, and that's one of the lessons of the story that continuity kind of gives you a context that people find it very difficult to escape, I suppose. But also that politicians in London view this with a kind of frustrated sense of battle and which is kind of what Churchill is saying there. You know, nothing has changed. No, exactly. And in fact, the longer time goes on and the more that the Irish question is away, which had been so big in the late 19th century, the more that it recedes, the less that people in London understand it. So by the time you get to the 60s and 70s, you have a generation of politicians in London, takes someone like James Callahan. We'll talk about him later on. He was the grandson of somebody who had left Ireland in the famine, but his family had ended up converting from Catholicism to baptism. Does James Callahan understand Ireland? No, not really. He's not really interested in it. It's something that happened a long time ago to him. But to people in Belfast, this is going to living history. It's real. And the fact that the British don't understand it is enraging to them because it matters so much to them. Anyway, back to the states of Northern Ireland. All this fighting in the early 20s had two obvious consequences. First of all, if you're part of the one third Catholic minority, you do not regard this state as a safe space by any means. It's actually a very unsafe space for you. It's a immigration. There is some immigration. Yes, there are thousands of people who cross the border to the Republic. Again, by the standards of European population transverse of the 20s. It's not enormous, but it's not nothing. You know, there are people who definitely move south because they think this is going to be a very unwelcoming place for us and Protestants moving from the south to the north. Not so much more so that Protestants, I think, would move from the south to Britain. Right. Here are people who lived in the big houses. The Anglo-Iarish going to Protestant ascendancy and so on. So obviously, if you're Catholic, there are loads of families who sort of bear the scars, sometimes physically, the fighting. There are a lot of people actually later on who were involved in the IRA or whatever in the 60s and 70s, who had parents and grandparents who had been told them stories about what happened in 1920 or 1921. But then for Protestants, for the Protestant majority, they don't regard this as an entirely safe space either because although there are a majority in their own state, they are not a majority on the island. They feel, we're surrounded by Catholics, we're besieged by Catholics, there is a state to the south that aspires to a united island so that wishes us ill and wants to destroy our state. That's how they see it. And they say, we've also got this fifth column inside our own borders. We've got, you know, a third of our population are Catholics and we can't trust them. And is there anxiety at this stage about the demographic potential of Catholic families tending to have more children than Protestant families? Which is a kind of, people talk about that a lot now. Was it an issue back then? People talked about it a lot. They talked about it a lot throughout the 20th century. So Terence O'Neil, who is the Northern Island Prime Minister and the Sixth is, made a very contentious speech at the end of the decade when he said, and he, this was guarded as him being too soft by a lot of units. He said, we should treat the Catholics more nicely because they have loads and loads of children. And if we treat them more nicely, they will behave better and they will have fewer children and they won't overtake us demographically. Basically, nobody liked this speech. It's quite a lot to unpack there. Yeah, it's a lot going on. But yeah, absolutely. People often would talk about that. I mean, I don't think it's that they feel demographically we're going to be overwhelmed very quickly. What they feel is the people in Dublin want to undermine us, which a lot of them frankly do. They think they look south and they say, well, you know, this newly effectively autonomous and going to be independent Ireland is turning itself into a kind of Catholic run state with the church having overwhelming power. This is the one thing we dread. We don't want this. And we have all these people within our own borders who we don't think we can trust, who would like to, you know, who would like to undermine us. So that's why, I mean, there's a defensiveness that gives you the slogan, no surrender, which is, of course, one of Ian Paisler's favorite phrases, isn't it? Yeah. So those tensions. So they're in the 20s. And then when most people in Britain tell the story, they sort of stop there and they'd say, well, that's fast forward to the 1960s because nothing got kind of nothing happens in between. But that's actually dead wrong. Lots of stuff happens in between. It's just we don't ever learn about it in Britain. So for example, in 1935, I mean, this will surprise loads of people. There is massive rioting in Belfast. There are gun battles. There are snipers on the top of buildings. British troops have to be sent to clear the streets with armoured cars. 11 people are killed. 100 people injured. 2,000 people are driven out of their homes. And then actually that inspired reprisals across the Irish border. So there were attacks on Protestant homes and shops in Limerick. There were burnings of church of island churches and Methodist chapels in rural Ireland and so on and so forth. And in the background, the whole time, the Irish Republican army. So, you know, there'd been all this stuff in the 1910s and 1920s with the LARA. The IRA had split in southern Ireland and what became the Republic, it had fought civil war. The IRA never went away. It's still there all this time. So most IRA men, once the British signed the treaty and the civil war was over, they did go home. They put their guns away. That was an end to it. But not all of them did. So at any given point, there were still a few hundred active IRA men with guns and that is still enough to kill people and they do kill people. So in January 1939, again, most people in Britain don't know this happened. In January 1939, the IRA launched a new campaign against Britain and they called it the "S" plan, the sabotage plan. And when you go, I mean, it's astounding how little known this is when you go through what happened. There were bombs in London and Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool and Blackpool, all over. There were bomb attacks on railway stations, banks, post office. There were bombs on the London Underground. Most notoriously, there was a bicycle bomb in Coventry City Centre in August 1939 that killed five people, the youngest of whom was 50 and the oldest 82. I mean, I suppose that further developments in Coventry City Centre, the following year have slightly obliterated the memory of that bomb. Yeah. Of course, isn't it funny that Coventry is, you know, obviously a bomb by the Germans. Everyone remembers that. So this 1939 bombing, which otherwise would be very, you know, very well known very salient, yeah, is basically been wiped from our national consciousness. But what happens to the IRA? In World War II, both the British and the Irish governments massively crack down and they started interning IRA suspects without trial. Ireland actually executed six IRA men during the Second World War including the chief of staff of the IRA. They executed him for killing a guard and Irish policeman. So the Irish are just as tough on the IRA as the British are. Now against this background, the people who run Northern Ireland, the unionists, have absolutely no intention of loosening their grip. And the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland was called Sir James Craig. If you look Google him, he really does look like a boiled egg and someone has painted a face. Does he have a massive mustache? He does have a mustache. Yeah. Of course he does. I mean, with the name like Sir James Craig, you couldn't know. He undoubtedly has a mustache. Yeah, no question. So he was very explicit about this. He gave a speech in the 1930s. He said, "I'm not going to do the accent because my Northern Irish accent is not as good as yours." He said, "In the south, they boast of being a Catholic state. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state." That's good, don't worry. Thank you. It's understated though. And it's a bit wobbly. He's not wrong. They are a Protestant state. The judges, the magistrates, the civil servants, are almost entirely Protestant. The Royal Ulster Constabulary, the RUC, the police, who can play a massive part in this story. They're about nine to one Protestant. And the RUC has an armed, kind of paramilitary reserve called the B-specials that people sign up for. And these are exclusively Protestant really. They are the sort of the bullwork, the enforcers of unionist supremacy. When things kick off in the streets, you call for the B-specials and they come out of their orange order lodges with their guns and they are the people who will basically restore order. So in the seventies and eighties, the comparison was often made between Northern Ireland and South Africa by nationalists and Republicans. But there's kind of an element of truth there, isn't there? To a degree? It's a very inflammatory comparison. I mean, if the entire apparatus of the state is controlled by one faction, then it's not, I mean, there's no way you could describe it as a properly functioning democracy. No, no, you absolutely couldn't. Well, come on to this. You absolutely couldn't. And it's an overtly sectarian. I mean, it's not racist, but it's sectarian. It's not racist. It is a sectarian state. Exactly. And Sir James Craig, or somebody that would say, I mean, he might quibble with the word sectarian, but he would say, you know, we're a Protestant state. End of story. If you don't like it, go somewhere else. This is how we're going to run things. You know, we know what we're doing. Pipe down. He would absolutely say that. And critics would say, well, that's what the Afrikaners or whatever say in South Africa. Some people in Northern Ireland would be offended by that. Some people would lean into that comparison and say, well, we kind of are like the birds. We are hardy frontiersmen. We've carved out a state in the face of overwhelming odds. You know, we've built something really precious and special. And we want to defend it. And don't you tell us what to do? I don't want to plunge into this because it's murky waters, but on the the Shank Hill and Falls Road murals, the Shank Hill is full of the Israeli flag and the Falls Road is full of the Palestinian flag. Absolutely right. Absolutely. Yes. There is a self-image. The unionist, especially some years ago, would have said, we are like the chosen people, we're like the children of God, the children of Zion, all of that kind of thing. Well, I mean, in Paisley, definitely would have done. It in Paisley undoubtedly would. And of course, among nationalists, the comparison with the Palestinians, you know, dates goes back to the seventies. So absolutely, yes. Two things about the IEC, the police, which is important for people to member. Number one, they are much, much more powerful than a police force in Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe. There was special legislation in 1922 that gave them special powers. They can search without a warrant. They can arrest you without a warrant. They can intern you as a suspect without trial. They can impose a curfew, a ban on a march or a ban on a newspaper at will. So they have a lot of leeway and the IUC, like their political masters, are very closely tied to a group called the orange order. And the orange order is basically a fraternal organisation, a fraternity at brotherhood. It was founded in 1795. It was dedicated to the defence of Protestantism and the union with Britain. It's of course named after William of Orange from the glorious revolution. And almost every single member of the B special reserves and almost every single unionist MP is an arrangement belongs to an orange lodge. So where does that leave you if you're a Catholic? In 1967, the Times did a big investigation into the status of Catholics in Northern Ireland and describe them as Ulster's second-class citizens. And that's where you can see why. So the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble, who entered in the Nobel Prize, didn't he? In 1998, and his Nobel Prize-winning speech, said that Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics, which was a sort of a big concession for an Ulster Unionist leader to have said. And he was right. A lot of Protestant firms will not employ Catholics. If you have a Catholic name, if your name was, I don't know, Liam O'Hara or something, you probably would not get a job. You wouldn't even be interviewed for a job given a chance of a job in the big Harlan and Wolf shipyards. Roman Catholics are twice as likely to be unemployed as Protestants. And they have no political power, really, because Northern Ireland has a first pass of the post-political system in which the boundaries have been ruthlessly gerrymandered to ensure a permanent unionist majority at storm unto the Parliament. This is even more glaring at the local level. You can only vote if you're a rate-payer, if you pay local government rates, and you pay them if you own your own house, or if you rent a house, or you can vote if you're the spouse of somebody who, you know, the wife, usually, of somebody who owns or rents a house. Now Catholics are poorer. They're more likely to live in extended family groups or with their parents, and as a result, lots of Catholics can't vote in local elections. As a result of that, in the cities or the places where you have, you know, Catholic majority, so the city of Derry, or County Tyrone, or County Famanna. Power is still controlled by the unionists because they have more people who own their own homes. And that means they control public jobs and crucially housing. May sound very banal, but it's a massive deal in this story, because the housing stock in Northern Ireland is terrible. It's really, it's Victorian, it's crumbling, you know, one in three houses, either doesn't have running water or it doesn't have a flushing toilet. So young couples in particular, they want to get out of their parents kind of crumbling Victorian terrace and they want a new home of their own. But because giving people a home means giving them votes, unionist councils don't like giving homes to Catholics because it gives them two more votes, right? Husband and wife if it's a young couple. So they don't like building homes in Catholic areas, right? Yeah. The chairman of NS Killin House in committee 1963, we're going to see that the right people are put in these houses, we're not going to apologize for it. Now it does work the other way around. So in nationalist councils like Neury, they built lots of new houses in the early sixes and they gave only a tiny handful of them to Protestants. But the big losers from all this are the Catholics and one place above all becomes emblematic of this. And this is the second city of Northern Ireland, a city in the far west of the country. It was originally a settlement called Derry, then in 1613 a consortium of London guilds basically was set up to colonize the area. They built a new walled city and because they were London guilds, they called it London Derry. And hence you have the name controversy, which actually in this period the sixth is isn't really is it? Everyone calls it Derry. Everybody calls it Derry. Yeah. It only really became a big controversy once the troubles kicked off and then it became a kind of a point of pride to call it either Derry like Paul Rouse, that former guest, or London Derry is used in the general post office in Dublin. So we'll just call it Derry for sure. Derry in 1965 or so is a two to one Catholic city. So 36,000 Catholics are 18,000 Protestants. But it's always been controlled by Protestants through gerrymandering. So they're always redrawing the boundaries of the wards to give themselves a majority on the council. You say when I was thinking about this, I wondered whether you would say, "Journey, the British government wouldn't stand for this, this is outrageous." But the truth is we shall see is that British have absolutely no interest in what happens in Northern Ireland at all. I appreciate that. I'm just wondering if it is under British law illegal. Good question. I don't think it is. Some Catholic solicitor would have undoubtedly taken its court. It's not illegal, I think, because the council set the boundaries. The council decide the ward boundaries. So this is the devolution that Andy Bernard wants about the right of councils to gerrymander. Right. We'll see. Anyway, so to go back to Derry, basically almost every Protestant family who wants a house gets one, but there are 2,000 Catholic families on the waiting list for housing. And we will come back to this in the next episode, because there's no accident that this is where the troubles really kick off in earnest against this background. So just to finish by talking about the Catholics before we go to the break, imagine Tom, you're a young Catholic in the early '60s in Northern Ireland. What is your name? Shamestay Murphy. Yeah, Shamest, whatever. Exactly. So you're identifiable by your name. You have no flat. You have no vote in local elections. You may be don't have a job. You feel that the system is stacked against you, and it has been for the last 40 years. Where do you look for hope? The Virgin Mary. Yeah, you probably might be to the Virgin Mary, exactly. You might look to the sort of Northern Irish nationalist party, but they are very small. They're very ineffective. I mean, in 1962 and 1965 in the Stormont Parliament, they were 9 out of 52 seats. I mean, they're barely even an opposition, really. And they are generally seen as a bit old-fashioned, very Catholic, very rural, not terribly effective. Kind of devolera type, a little bit. Yeah, but devoleras are very wily and ruthless politician, and they are not. Right. Then you have the IRA. Now, the unionist hardliners talk all the time about the IRA. They're obsessed with the IRA. They say the IRA is always out there, which I mean, to be fair, it kind of is. The IRA had rebuilt after the Second World War, and it had launched a new guerrilla campaign along the border in 1956 called Operation Harvest. And this campaign had been a complete and utter disaster. Both Belfast and Dublin, in fact, Amon de Valera, reintroduced internment without trial. They interned loads of IRA people and they completely broke the back of the organization. And so in 1962, the IRA had called off this campaign. They dumped their weapons and madly, a few years later, they sold their weapons to the Welsh. Oh, to the free Wales army. Great, to people thinking this stuff about islands, about Wales as well. There's actually too much Welsh history, so much Welsh history and the rest of history. They're everywhere. It's unbelievable. Right. So the IRA gets a new chief of staff who's from Dublin called Catholic Goulding. And Goulding says, "Listen, we have been wasting our time here. This has been a terrible mistake." And you said later, the notion that the IRA was going to rise up someday in free Ireland and get rid of the British was a ridiculous pipe dream. I mean, that's a hell of a thing for the guy running the IRA to say in the early 60s. And this boat Goulding, he's actually very close to some Marxist academics and to people from the British Communist Party. And they persuade him, the IRA's future lies in socialist activism. So he's listening to the British. He's listening to British academics. I know which is mad. Never listened to a British academic. Instead of blowing up post offices and stuff, why don't we work to build a non-sectarian workers alliance that will fight both imperialism and capitalism. And the people who were running the IRA in the 60s say, "Yeah, actually, brilliant. Let's do that." Because of course, that goes with the momentum of the 60s, right? It feels right. Yeah, of course. So do they start going to conferences in Gouldsmiths? They do. There's probably men with Polonex. They have a lot of seminars. There are a lot of, there's a lot of talking shops about smashing capitalism. They're massively into this. Now, if you're an older IRA veteran, you are not pleased about this at all. So a lot of older IRA men are culturally conservative Catholics. They are not Marxists. So Joe Cahill, who was an IRA veteran who had been jailed for killing a policeman in 1942. He said, "The movement was being led off the true path of republicanism. Ultra-left politics were taking over. Sooner or later, they would have to be a showdown. And he's right and there will be a showdown. I mean, people say that Sinn Feinard doing the same at the moment, that they're coming Corbinist, really. Exactly, that they're sort of caught between, you know, the Catholic nationalism on the one hand, and the slightly woolly Marxist internationalism. Yes, he on the other. Now, we'll come back to this later in the series, but the point really is that they've gone very, very quiet. So a future member of the provisional IRA, Billy McKee's quote from him, "I believe that it was dead, completely dead, and it was, except in the minds of myself and other old Republicans." So, to return to the original question, if you're a Catholic, where are you looking for help? The original alternative, of course, you could look to Dublin. Now, in theory, the Republic of Ireland claims the whole island. Article two of the Irish Constitution, the National Territory consists of the whole island of Ireland. And Irish politicians will always say, if they're asked, "Well, our goal, of course, is unification of the entire island." In reality, since the 1920s, governments in Dublin have shown no interest in advancing this at all and done absolutely nothing about it. And again, this is something that will surprise, I think, a lot of listeners. Twice in the Second World War, the British said to the government in Dublin, "We will give you a united island if you abandon your neutrality and join the Allies." After Pearl Harbor in 1941, Winston Churchill sent an incredible telegram to Amon de Valera. "Now is your chance, now or never, a nation once again." So, the nation once again is a kind of Republican slogan. Churchill was using it, and de Valera just completely ignored him. Didn't want to abandon neutrality. And also, of course, if you are a politician in Dublin, you don't really want those 1 million Protestants who have a tendency to sign governance and join volunteer groups to fight you. I mean, that's an issue right the way up to the present, really, isn't it? To the present, exactly, of course. So, in 1959, De Valera, the great champion of Irish independence and Irish republicanism, retired as T-Shock, and he became president of the island and kind of kicked up stairs. And he was succeeded by a man called Sean Lermass. I mean, it's unbelievable. He's called Lermass. I know, I know. I mean, anything more calculated to alarm me and paisley than Lermass. We should come to this. Lermass had fought in the Easter Rising, and he'd also been in the IRA. But in private, Lermass said to people, come on. That the island's going to be partitioned for a long time yet. Like, there's no point in winging about this. There's not going to change any time soon. So, Dublin's not really interested in the Catholics in Northern Ireland. And if they're not really interested, people who are even less interested are politicians in London. Now, there are some Labour MPs. There are always Labour MPs who campaign against discrimination against the Catholics. So, this goes back to your point on how could this happen in Britain. Well, I kind of think, I mean, it's a massive bloc on the British state that it's allowing this to happen, I think. But the British state, first of all, it's running an empire for most of this period. So, I mean, it's not like there are other places where there are, you know, interesting local arrangements. But by the mid '60s. Yes, and people in the '60s start to say this. So, you have a Labour of Backbench, what's it called, the campaign for democracy and ulster that kicks off in the mid '60s. You have newspapers like The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, drawing attention to this and saying, it's kind of not right that these people don't get houses, and they don't really get to vote in local elections and stuff like this. But here's why people don't get massively excited about it. Ever since the 1920s, most British politicians have worked in the assumption of the Irish question which had dogged Britain for so long has been solved. It's done. It's finished. The people in the North, we fixed it because they've got their own parliament. We'll just let them get on with it. It's not perfect, but we absolutely don't want to interfere because they have a tendency to start arming themselves and we don't want to stir them up again. What has happened in Britain is that Northern Ireland has vanished from the national consciousness. It virtually never appears in the newspapers. It's never mentioned in TV bulletins, news bulletins. Most people never think about it at all. I mentioned Jim Callahan before. Jim Callahan, grandson of Irish immigrant. And I quote, "Most members of parliament knew less about it than we knew about our distant colonies on the far side of the earth." And I think that's true. There's loads in British newspapers about Cyprus in the 1950s. There's loads about Kenya. There's loads about Malaysia. There's virtually nothing about Northern Ireland. And actually people think, well, what's the point? Nothing is ever going to change. The unionists hold every single Westminster seat. The nationalists are totally irrelevant. The IRA have been beaten. And frankly, most people in Northern Ireland, they might be Protestant. They might be Catholic. But this is the 6th is. It's the affluent society. They're more interested in buying a new TV or a new washing machine than they are about refighting the kind of the battles of the past. So this is the Sandbrook perspective. Well, that would be the Sandbrook perspective. And I would be wrong all about washing machines. In this instance, my washing machine, a centric view of history would be absolutely discredited. Because everybody thinks life is going to go on. Everything is going to be the same forever and ever. And they are wrong because things are about to change very dramatically. Indeed. And Dominic, we will find out how and why after a break. This episode is brought to you by Amazon. Tom Thrat history changes 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 revolutionise 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 end 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/sustainability. Hola, camaradas, it's Dominic here. Sorry to interrupt the episode, but I just thought you'd like to know that we've been thinking about something that you've been writing to us a lot, one of the most requested subjects ever since we started the rest of this history, which is the Spanish Civil War. Now, I can tell you exclusively that plans are a foot for us to do the Spanish Civil War at some point, hopefully next year in 2027. But as a little taster or teaser, on our sister show, the Book Club, my co-presenter, Tabby and I have just released an episode on perhaps the emblematic novel of the Spanish Civil War, which is Ernest Hemingway's book for whom the bell tolls. So in this episode, we do dig into the history. We talk about the clash between fascism and idealism, we talk about the roots of the conflict, and of course the way in which it drew in so many foreign intellectuals and artists and writers, Hemingway, of course, among them. And many of you will know that Hemingway was in Spain during the war, he was a correspondent in Madrid, which was under siege by Francois forces, and he draws on that experience in for whom the bell tolls, to tell a story of an American volunteer who's part of a guerrilla unit who are fighting Franco's troops. So if you keep listening at the end of this episode, we will have an exclusive short clip which discusses the history of the Spanish Civil War. There have been disappointments and frustrations, but progress has been so marked that there is no excuse for pessimism about the future. The six counties, unlike their neighbours across the border, belong to the British welfare state. They share too, as they richly deserve, many of the fruits of the affluent society. The processes of modernisation have been carried far, and they are not halted. On the contrary, they are on the march. So welcome back to the rest of the history, and that ringingly optimistic, Groovy 60s perspective was in the Times on the 12th of April 1965, looking ahead to a bright new future for Northern Ireland. Great to see the Times with its finger on the pulse. Always. The paper for top people. And I suppose that top people sitting in their gentleman's gloves, reading those words, it would have seemed beyond the bounds of possibility to them, that within a few years, there would be bombs going off everywhere in the streets of Belfast and Dairy. British soldiers are trolling those streets. Hundreds of people have been killed every year, and the carnage of it all spreading to the British mainland. Yeah. So what goes wrong? I mean, what happens? What happens? A big question. That's what the series is all about, Tom. So let's start on the 25th of March 1963. So this is the day that Captain Terrence O'Neal becomes the 4th Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. So 1963, Haramut Millenus Prime Minister in Britain. The Beatles are about to launch their greatest salt on the charts. You know, they're only months away from going to America. the swinging six days a kind of poised to happen all of this and Northern Ireland is going to get an exciting dynamic modernizing new Prime Minister. And this is Captain O'Neill. So Captain O'Neill is almost 50 years old. His father was an Ulster Unionist. His father was the first MP to be killed in the First World War. He was born in London, brought up in London. He went to Eaton. He spent his summers in Northern Ireland. He served in a tank brigade in the Second World War. Two of his brothers were killed in the war, but he wasn't. And afterwards he became an Ulster Unionist MP. His father had before him, and then he rose to become Northern Ireland's Minister of Finance. And then in '63, the party grandies chose him to succeed the elderly Lord Brookborough as Prime Minister. Now O'Neill knows that when he takes the reins he is facing a big challenge. But in his mind, that challenge is primarily economic. So in our previous series when we talked about Ireland or indeed when we did the Titanic, we talked about how Belfast was different from other cities in Ireland. It's made of brick, you know, not stone. It feels like a northern English city transplanted across the Irish Sea. It's an industrial powerhouse. It makes all its linen and the mills and it's got its shipyards and it's got chimneys and smoke and the sand of hammers and all of that kind of thing. And of course that's brilliant if you're in 1900. But if you're in 1963, this is the kind of place that's going to be left behind by the harsh winds of global competition. Even in the fifties, jobs in textiles and shipbuilding had been shrinking dramatically, and unemployment was going up and unemployment was already higher than in the rest of Britain and earnings lower than the rest of Britain. So if you're an Ulster Unionist, this has political consequences because you look at the electoral map and there's a slow, steady advance of a northern Irish Labour party that's appealing to kind of working class people and saying, you know, times are tough, we're going to better represent you than the old stuck up Unionist grandies. And so for Terence O'Neill, he thinks, well, my priority is to revive the Irish, northern Irish economy by getting new investment. And I'm going to look abroad for that investment. I'm going to get multinational companies, Michelin, Ford, ICI, these big names, they'll come to Northern Ireland because their labour costs are cheaper. But there are two issues with this issue number one. Most of this happens in Belfast or the east of the country, the places that are more urbanised and have better transport links with the island of Great Britain. But in the West, which is more heavily Catholic, where unemployment is already higher, these companies don't want to invest there. So these places feel like they're being left behind. And people there say, well, Terence O'Neill talks a good game, but he only cares about the Protestants in the East, doesn't care about us at all. But then the other thing, a sort of more counterintuitive thing about all this new investment, it's very disruptive to Northern Ireland's existing arrangements. Because if you're, you know, Ford or Michelin or something and you arrive, you're the sort of, you're like people from madmen or something, you've got a kind of sharp suit, you like a graph and a table and all that stuff. You've got all these time and motion studies. And then people say to you, well, you know, we'll be wearing our bowler hats and going on a big march. And obviously we can't have any Catholics. You stare at them in stupid action and disbelief and you say, well, that's not, you know, the Ford Motor Company does not operate that way or whatever, get with it. Exactly. And so there's a, there's a degree of tension between the newcomers, you know, the new investment, the new companies and then the people who basically are like, come on, we spend our evenings always that the orange launch and we sing our sick songs about the glorious revolution. Now, this would not have been insuperable for a sort of populist politician, for a more skillful communicator to handle. But Terence O'Neill is not that man. As we said, he's an old Etonian, he's married to an English woman and he has an English accent because he's been brought up in London. And so although he goes down quite well with the kind of country land owners, because he's very posh, the poor and more conservative working class Protestants, they see him as soft and a stuck up and as somebody who's totally oblivious to their concerns. So I already mentioned David Trimble, leader of the Alster Unist in the 1990s. He said of Terence O'Neill, he never spoke or behaved as if he was one of us. Which is, I think, Trimble. He has a slight look of the former editor of the Daily Telegraph. Charles Moore. And like Charles Moore, Charles Moore is the head of the rectory society or something. He loves an old rectory. And I believe Terence O'Neill lived in a Regency rectory and that's a very bad sign in the person. There's a not. Never trust a man who owns a Regency rectory. No, they're terrible people. So Terence O'Neill also lacks natural political skills. He's very loose. He's very shy. He's cold. One of his own ministers said he was distant and uninspiring. I would not have felt like dying in a ditch for him. And I don't think that's ideal. You know, it's not an unfamiliar. I mean, we've had prime ministers like that. In fact, quite recently, we've had a couple of prime ministers like that. But it's not the ideal type for this moment. So actually, after a couple of years, more conservative Protestants are beginning to wonder whether O'Neill is really the man for the job after all. And he keeps doing things that worry them. So, for example, in 1965, he became the first prime minister in Northern Ireland to welcome the T-shirt, the prime minister of the Republic of Ireland. This is Sean Lamass. Now Terence O'Neill said, "Well, it's good to have this boat, Lamass here, because we want to build bridges with our neighbours. We want to build bridges with the Republic." And one of his critics, who was the Presbyterian minister, said, "A bridge and a traitor are very much alike for they both go over to the other side." And the name of the man who said this was, the man we heard in that introduction, "Oh, it paysly." The Reverend Ian Paisley. So he's back in the show. Great, great to have him back. So Paisley is really an incredible character. I did worry that he would slightly take over this episode. And maybe that would be no bad thing. He is this colossal figure in the life of Northern Ireland. He goes from the most sort of strident demagoguery to power-sharing in the 1990s and 2000s, which just seems absolutely bonkers as a trajectory. And like everyone else in this story, he is profoundly shaped by history. So he's born in Omar in 1926. His father was a Baptist minister. His father had served in Sir Edward Castles' volunteers. And Ian Paisley himself becomes a Baptist minister. And he preached his first sermon when he was 16. Wow, he's a massive bloke. He's six foot four or something. Do you know what? He looks brilliant in a dog collar. Really, it really suits him. I think dog collars, when they're around a scrawny neck, look a bit weedy. But with him, he looks like a Celtic warrior with a talk. He probably wouldn't like that comparison, actually. Yeah, he could look like a Saxon warrior with the talk. He might take that. I don't know. Or a Scottish warrior, I suppose. So he's this fire brand fundamentalist style. In 1951, he set up his own kind of Calvinist church, the free Presbyterian church of Ulster. He believes in the literal truth of the Bible. He thinks the established churches of Ulster, which strike most observers, is quite hard line conservative churches. But he thinks they are weak, soft, rumesh sellouts. It's not best parallel, of course, with Southern evangelical preachers in the United States. Later in his life, he does forge very strong links with Bob Jones University in South Carolina, Bob Jones University. Are you aware of Bob Jones University? No. You're not. Bob Jones University is a big deal because Bob Jones University was anti-catholic ultra Protestant university, evangelical. I can't remember when it was set up, but George W. Bush went and gave a speech there in 2000 when he was campaigning for the Republican nomination. Was it set up by a guy called Bob Jones? Or did they just. Let's think of a funny name. Bob Jones, you laugh at Bob Jones University and you're afforded to do so. It has 3000 students, it has an endow into 20 million dollars. And the current chancellor, Bob Jones the third. Well, I take it all back. I apologize to Bob James. So anyway, he impassively forged links to Bob Jones University. And so there's a sort of. There are lots of Southern evangelicals who love he impassily. His calling card, rather like that, at Bob Jones actually, is absolutely red hot, evangelical, old-fashioned anti-catholicism. And if people enjoy anti-catholic rhetoric, this podcast is the place for it. Should I do it? Do you do it? Yeah, I think you should do it because you did the voice. Through popery, the devil has shut up the way to our inheritance, pre-scraft, superstition, and populism, with all their attendant voices of murder, theft, immorality, lust, and insist, have blocked the way to the land of gospel liberty. That's good. That's good. That is a view. Now, people may raise their eyebrows there about the least pre-scraft, and its attendant voices of murder and whatnot, but also lust and incest. He takes it very literally, doesn't he? Yeah, now, there's a lot of talk of lust and incest in he impays the sermons. He loves all this. So in his first prayer meetings. He used to, like, sort of jack in the box, a nun would pop up and he would say this nun has escaped from a Catholic convent and she was being, she was the victim of sexual overtures from monks and other nuns and I have rescued her and she has seen the light and she's going to tell us all about the evils of Catholicism. He had his own newspaper, the Protestant telegraph, some of its headlines, a priestly murder as exposed children tortured, monks turned out as sadists or probably my favorite thing that he said, when the moderator of the Church of Scotland made a courtier visit to the Pope, the headline in the Protestant telegraph was, "The Church of Scotland drunk with the wine of the fornication with the Roman or." And of course it's easy for us to mock and it's very easy and that's what we have been doing. But in Northern Ireland, where religious identity is so important, this finds a ready audience and he's a brilliant, brilliant speaker. I mean, that is the thing, isn't he? Yeah. There is a power to those tones. Toast there is. He's speaking with the tambour of John Fox and there's a kind of magnificent rhetorical role to it. But you know who would agree with you? Somebody very unexpected. The actor Liam Neeson, I will find you and I will kill you. That guy, that guy. Yeah, he was an early impression. Very early impression. He was born in a Catholic family, he was from County Antrim, but he was inspired by you basically to become an actor. He would go to see Ian Paes of Disgospel Hall and he said afterwards, "You could see this extraordinary performance, the charisma that he had, it was electrifying." And loads of people talk about this. So a man will be talking about it a little bit later. One of Paes's proto-shades, a guy called Noel Dockety, he was a teenage fundamentalist to become a printer and then he became a loyalist paramilitary. He said, "I was spellbound by his oratory. I felt this is a man that is doing the Lord's work and I'm going to do it with him. I saw him as a great ulsterman and a second Carson, again, harking back to the history of the early 1910s." Now in 6th is Britain, people laughed at Ian Paesley and they said he's, because he's a clown, he's a freak, he's a relic or whatever. But actually we have done so many people like this on this show. Different time periods, you know, Savanna Rola, the Ayatollah Khomeini, imposing charismatic, striking, rhetorically brilliant speakers who have a gift for giving these electrifying addresses that the channel the anxieties of their listeners. Well, I mean, it might sound shocking, but Martin Luther King on the progressive side. Yeah, but brilliant speaker. I mean, again, using the potency of biblical rhetoric. And like a lot of these people, Khomeini is a good example. He always dresses the same way. Ian Paesley has a costume. He's got a flair for publicity. So in this period, he always wears a black suit. He wears his white clerical collar, which you'd like into a talk. And he had something that he doesn't really persist with in later life, which is, here's this trademark raincoat, because 6th is a great age for a coat. This is a Ganex raincoat. I don't think it's Ganex like Harold Wilson's. It's more professional than that. It's this huge, because he's so massive. It's this massive, like, white, belted coat that he always wears. He does sometimes wear orange man sash, doesn't he? Oh yeah, wearing orange sash when the time calls for it. And he's very good at publicity stunts that are very attractive to the newspapers, and they look good on TV. So to give you some of his stunts, he first really came to public attention in 1956. He rescued a 15 year old Catholic girl called Moore Alliance. Moore Alliance had decided she wanted to join Ian Paesley's church, and her parents forbade it. So he and his supporters smuggled her to Scotland. You know, this was a massive story. I mean, they're basically kidnapped this teenager. And he was absolutely unrepentant. He called a big rally. Whenever he's in trouble, he calls a rally in the Ulsterhorn in Belfast, and he said, they're saying, I'm going to have to go to prison. I would be proud to do time for protest and liberty. Like he always says this kind of thing. That was actually Richard Nixon's voice. Two years later, the Queen he condemns. I mean, he's all he loves putting the boot into the British when they let the side down. The Queen mother and Princess Margaret made a courtesy call to Pope John the 23rd. He said, he said of them, they've been committing spiritual fornication and adultery with the Antichrist. I mean, accusing the Queen mother of fornication and adulter is strong stuff, I think, especially with the Antichrist. I mean, they will get you in the papers, wouldn't they? It would say stuff like that. Or when the Pope died in 1963, Terence O'Neill, a conciliatory gesture said, we will lower the union jack as a marker of respect, because after all, one in three of our citizens is actually a Catholic. Paisley, we're absolutely berserk at this. He said, I can't stand the lying eulages now being paid to the Roman Antichrist by the Ascariots of Ulster. He said, the good news though, he said, the Roman man of sin is now in hell. Well, that's, that's something. Remember in the 80s, he disrupted the European Parliament? Yeah, he did. There was lots about about the Antichrist and the horror of Babylon and stuff. He was an MEP at this point, wasn't he? Was he out? And the Pope, Pope John Paul II came to address the European Parliament, and he and Paisley started, that was bundled out of the hall, shouting, I'd denounce you as Antichrist. He had massive jowls by that point, and they would kind of wobble all over his chest. Yeah, well, anyway, we come to the Westminster General Election of 1964, and this story, this really is, the politics are Northern Ireland in microcosm. So we're in West Belfast, which is historically over the city's four seats, the most competitive, because it contains the heavily Catholic Falls Road, which you mentioned earlier. One of the candidates was a guy called Liam Millen, who was an IRA man. He'd been active in the border campaign, and he is standing as an independent Republican. And in the window of his election office in the lower falls, he hangs this big Irish tricolor flag. Now, under the Stormont flags and emblems act of 1954, the RUC are empowered to take down any flags that they think are likely to provoke breach of the peace, and this legislation was aimed specifically at people flying the Irish flag. But the police aren't completely stupid. When people fly it in Catholic areas, they generally leave it alone. Just let me get on with the facility I want to do. Paisley is horrified by this. He calls a big rally, and he says, "I do not accept that any part of Ulster is Republican. I do not want to see the tricolor flying here." And under this pressure, the RUC decide, "Fine, we'll take it down." So on the 28th of September, a group of heavily armed police constables smashed down the door of this Blake's office, and they carry off the flag through a crowd of 2,000 people who were sort of jeering at them and throwing stones at them and stuff. And this kicked off the worst rioting in Ulster since the 1930s. In some ways, you could say this is a possible departure point for the troubles. There are thousands of people throwing stones and petrol bombs. People set a trolley bus on fire. And it ends with hundreds of RUC men, armed with batons, supported by armored cars and water cannons, physically clearing the falls road. And 50 people end up in hospital, as well as 18 RUC constables. And there's also a copycat rioting, or sort of tip for tap rioting, by the way, in Dublin. There's a crowd when they hear this, they're assembled outside the British Embassy, and they have to be held back by the Irish police and they're throwing stones at them. And this is the first point really since the war that the British paper's almost noticed Northern Ireland. So the times, there is a sickening familiarity about all of this, it says. Let's hope we're not returning to the bitterness and savagery of the orange and green vendetta. But from Paisley's point of view, this has been very effective. It's got his name in the newspapers once again. He's made a stand. The Irish flag has come down. He is the champion of Protestant liberty, as he would call it. And two weeks later, when the unionist candidate Jim Kielfeder wins Westbell fast, he makes a point in his speech of thanking Ian Paisley for his support. So that's the scene for two years in which Ian Paisley's becoming ever more strident in his attacks on what he sees as the soft, weak, English, untrustworthy Terence O'Neill. So the visit of Sean Lamass from Dublin, this is when Ian Paisley's going around shouting, no mass, no Lamass. And then he gets an even better gift a year later. It's going to be the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. And you said yourself, you know, on the Falls Road, they're all the murals to this day of the Easter Rising. They make a big deal of it. Of course, 1916, if you're a unionist, it's the year of the psalm. So it's like a history war, I guess, being played out in the streets of Belfast. O'Neill says, find that the Catholics have, if they want to have a march to celebrate the Easter Rising 50 years on, of course, we'll let them do it. You know, it will be mad not to, it'll just create great tension if we ban it. It tells a rally that by allowing this nationalist march, O'Neill is supporting murder, treason, sedition. Our forefathers suffered from bullets and bombs and one, we will do the same. You know, Ian Paisley loves very violent rhetoric. Then there's another confrontation June. 1966. This time he's attacking the mainstream churches. So the mainstream Presbyterian Church are holding their annual assembly. Paisley decides to lead 1,500 supporters to attack them for their Romanizing tendencies, as he thought it's it. Basically, you could never be hard enough from God the Lossesman, I think, for the Reverend Ian Paisley. And he leads his supporters through this very Catholic area deliberately. They're attacked by local youths and the melee ends with lots of stone throwing, fighting, people throwing bricks at the eye you see, all of this kind of thing. The magistrates then order Paisley to sign a court order to keep the peace, a pledge to keep the peace. And he says, no, I'm not going to do that. And they sentenced him to three months in Kremlin road prison. And that provoked yet more rioting thousands of his supporters going on the rampage, chanting his name, people attacking Catholic owned businesses, Catholic shops, and so on and so forth. At this point, Terence O'Neill, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland says, OK, enough. I've lost patience. I'm banning all marches, Protestant or Catholic, for the next three months. The RUC have the power to shut down all meetings with more than three people in, you know, no more of this. And he gives a very, very outspoken speech at Stormont. And he says, Paisley and his supporters call themselves loyalists. But to whom are they loyal? To the queen whose personal representatives they revile to the United Kingdom in which their fellow citizens view their conduct with a mixture of ridicule and contempt to Protestantism, many of whose leaders they have personally abused. I mean, it's good, it's good stuff. But O'Neill all the time is losing momentum. And it's Paisley, who is attracting momentum. And part of this is the sort of ratchet effect of sectarian rhetoric. But it's also the economic context, the fact that people feel anxious about the future, the fact that Northern Ireland feels like it's a changing society. And a lot of people don't like that. All of these kinds of things. And all the time, Paisley is attracting more recruits for his church. And for its political wing, which was called Ulster Protestant Action, he had set this up two-fold reasons really. One he'd said this would deter the IRA, but he also said, we want to keep loyal workers in employment in times of deep depression. So this is an economic context to this too. But this is not the only group that he's associated with. There's a whole series of sort of bewildering variety of factions and subgroups and whatnot. So I mentioned he had a protégé called Noel Dockety. In April 1966, with the anniversary of the Easter Rising coming, Dockety set up another group, a vigilante group called the Ulster Protestant Volunteers. The its state of name of this group is, we think the IRA can launch an uprising on the anniversary of the Easter Rising. And we're going to be ready for them. We'll have cells all over Ulster, and they will rise up on command. The name, the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, obviously to evoke Carson's Volunteers from 1912. The motto is the same for God and Ulster. And like Carson's Volunteers, they really want to get a hold of guns. So Dockety recruits very heavily among the B specials, the kind of police reservists, because they have been issued with revolvers and submachine guns, and they're allowed to keep their weapons at home. So this is a very useful thing for a paramount group. And Dockety said later, "My aim was to have a private army just like Carson did with the signing of the covenant, so Paisley would have had his own private army, and he would have been a second Lord Carson." Can I ask Dominic, would the Protestants in Ulster at this point be ahead of the Catholics in terms of army? Well, given the how many guns to be specials have, I would say probably yes. And actually when the IRA re-enter the story, let's say 1970, they don't have that many guns, and getting guns, if armor lights as they end up getting, becomes a real priority for them. Because of course they've made the cards on an arrow, which you should never do, giving no to guns to the Welch. Yes, of course. And the Welchnet want to give him back. Have you ever tried to reclaim a gun from a Welchman? I can't say I have. It's impossible. It can't be done. Okay. Well, that is a mistake, then. Yeah. So anyway, Noel Dockety, this guy, is going round in the Spring of 1966, trying to get guns and jettisonite. And he comes into contact at this point with another loyalist vigilante group that also looks back to Carstens volunteers. And this is a group called the Ulster Volunteer Force, the UVF. And this has been founded a few months earlier by a group of men who used to meet in the pubs in the working-class Protestant shanky area. And the chief among them, and a big figure in the story of the troubles, although he's not so well-known in Britain as some of the other figures, is a man called Gusty Spence, who was in his early 30s. Spence's father had been Carstens volunteers. Spence's father had also served in the First World War. Spence himself had been in the British Army. He'd been in Cyprus. He came home to Belfast. He worked as a scaffolder at the Harlanden Wolf shipyards. So he sort of ticks all of these different boxes. Yeah. Spence is a very hard man. He's no stranger to a brawl in a pub or something. He's a very keen member of the orange order. People look up to him because he's been in the army. There's a bit of an element, I think, about him and his friends of the old soldiers who are hanging around in the pub, talking about their old days trying to find something to do. They want to cause, basically. So in a way, that's kind of true of Matt Baton. Yeah. You know, all these kind of posh guys in the 70s wanting to immediately take over. General Sir Walter Walker, David Sterling, all of these people. Yeah. Yeah. They look back to the war or something, and they say, go on, that was brilliant. Wish we could have that back again, said of all these grubby political compromises and Harold Wilson's nasty raincoats. All of this. So I think with gusty spence and a lot of people like this, and this goes by the way for people on the Republican side, for people in the IRA, there was a sense of a romantic history of sort of outlaw violence and adventure and whatnot. It's all about the songs and the fiddles and the stories and all of that kind of thing. And they are almost willing to bring it back into being because at a time when jobs are scarce, life seems shabby and disappointing, this would give you a sense of excitement. And of course, if you, if you ally that to the fear of the others, then that becomes a very potent combination. The sense is that there is nothing inevitable about the troubles. People choose it. People choose it. They, as you say, they will it into existence. Yes, they absolutely do. And I think they, this, look, this search for a cause. And it's a cause that they're very familiar with. There's a really important part of the story. Spent said later, there were still a sense like with the old, ulster volunteers that you were for the cause. You would fight and die for it. Yes, fight and die for the cause. And that's so widespread among the people who join the different paramountry groups, whether loyalist or Republican, fight and die and kill. Well, this is the thing. So, do you remember when we did the series about the Irish War of Independence with Paul Rouse, he said all the ballads are about fighting and dying, but people don't write ballads about fighting and killing, but someone's got to do the killing. Yeah. And actually, this brings us very neatly to May 1966. And the first, arguably the first casualties of the troubles. At this point, Spence and his pals have already started petrol bombing, Catholic schools, Catholic shops and so on. In their minds, they are deterring IRA vandalism. This is their excuse. Of course, an external observed would say, this looks very much like a drunken sectarian vandalism and bullying to me. On the 7th of May, they decided to target a Catholic owned pub just off the shank Hill road. They say loads of Republicans hang out in this pub. We should blow this pub up. And they throw a petrol bomb through what they think is the landlord's window. But actually, it's the house next door. And it belongs to a Protestant grandmother called Matilda Gould, who was 77 years old. She was bedridden with severe arthritis. She can't get out of bed. She's horribly burned by this petrol bomb. And she dies seven weeks later of her injuries. And a lot of accounts point to her as the first victim, first modern victim of the troubles. And obviously, this was a terrible, a terrible mistake by the UVF to kill a Protestant grandmother. But in a sign of what's to come on both sides, they don't back down. They issue a statement two weeks later. From this day, we declare war against the IRA and its sprinter groups known IRA men will be executed mercilessly and without hesitation. We solemnly warn the authorities to make no more speeches of appeasement. So there's two issues there. One is the sort of omnipresent, annoying fear of the IRA that is there in loyalist minds the whole time. But the IRA are a shadow at this point. They're very quiet at this point. I mean, a loyalist would say, come on, the IRA's still there, aren't they? And yes, they are still there, but all even though they're not actively campaigning. But the other thing is the attack on the authorities for appeasement. You know, this rhetoric runs right through the 60s and 70s. And on the 27th of May, the UVF meet to discuss their next attack. They meet in a pub again. They say there's a bloke nearby called Leo Martin, he's a Republican activist. He's involved with the IRA. Let's go off and shoot him and they go off to the falls road to go and find him and they can't find him. And on the way back, having not found him, they see walking down the street towards them. A bloke who's been in the pub all evening, who's singing Republican songs. His called John Patrick Scullion, he's 28 years old, and they say, "Well, this bloke will do." And they stab him and they shoot him. And two weeks later, he dies in hospital of his wounds, and he's the second victim. And then a month later, a third victim. The evening of Saturday, the 25th of June, there were four young Catholics, four young blokes. They've been working in Belfast City Center, working late. They decided to go for a last pint at the Moulvern Arms just off the shankal road, because they know it stays open after hours. This pub, the Moulvern Arms, is a Protestant pub. But one of these bloke says, "It's fine. I know the landlord." Disguised called Andrew Kelly. He says, "Okay, I know the landlord. I have no problem with this going there." They get to the pub at that midnight. The pub is very busy. The landlord does know him. It's fine. They have no problem getting served. Great. They sit down with their pints. Unknown to them. Per sheer bad luck. The drinkers at the next table are gusty spence and his gang. And one of the gangs said to the police later, the conversation came up about the religion of these fellows. Spence asked the company if they would be Catholics. Spence then went up to the bar beside the four lads to buy a drink. When he returned to our table, he said, "I've been listening to their conversation. They're four IRA men. They're IRA men. They will have to go." Which they're not. They're not IRA men. They're absolutely not. The four Catholic gun Catholic guys have their pints. A couple of hours later, they leave the pub. A lead in the way is one of them. Peter Ward, who is 18 years old. And as soon as they get outside, the shooting starts. Andrew Kelly again. He was dead. Peter Ward, when he hit the ground. I was shocked to and I dropped down but they kept on shooting at me. There were four gunmen. They didn't say anything. Order remembers the flashes and the shooting. So one of them, this guy, Peter Ward, is killed. Spence and his gang were arrested and Spence and two others were sent to prison. Now, paisley always condemns shootings of this kind. He's very happy to ratchet up the tension rhetorically, but he almost always distances himself from actual violence. And that again is something you know, he's not unusual in that regard. There are loads of people in this story who are very happy to kind of stoke the flames, but when the bullets fly, they all say, "Oh, no, I don't agree with this, of course." Do you think that's a cynical take or is he acting on genuine principle when he condemns it? That is, I think, something that only he would know. The only he would know, if you're asking me my personal verdict, which not all this is what to agree with, I would say, I think there's an awful amount of cynicism from people in this story. So I'm not just talking about Ian Paisley, I'm talking about Jerry Adams or whoever. There are a lot of people who say, "I don't really support violence, I don't really encourage it, but everything that they do seems designed to encourage it because they believe it's in their political interests." Frankly, okay, okay. So yeah, I would take a very caustic view of such people personally. And actually, to go back to just to finish on Spensoncoe, these killings were just so terrible to us. To some people, they give them a kind of outlaw repeal. They seem exciting. One writer later called Spenter Loyalist Folk Hero, and there are lots of Loyalist gunmen who joined, apparently it was later, who say, "Yes, he was my inspiration. I really looked up to this guy. He was the one person who had the guts to take up the gun and to actually do something positive to defend our people." So I think that's an important thing to bear in mind. In Britain, what do people think of all this? Do you know what most people don't even notice? This is the summer of Swinging London. It's the summer of England's World Cup win. Most people are completely uninterested in Northern Ireland. It doesn't really fit the mood these stories. Who cares that some people in a far away place have been shooting each other if you're all your thoughts are of carnaby streets and miniskirts and stuff. But of course, in Belfast, people don't think that way at all. Terence O'Neill has been on a visit to France for the anniversary of the summer and he cuts it short to come back to Stormont and to denounce the Ulster volunteer force. He says, "It's abominable to compare yourselves to Carson and his volunteers. There's no connection between men who were ready to die for the country and the fields of France and this sordid conspiracy of criminals. And he ends with his really dramatic warning, O'Neill." He says, "Northern Ireland must choose me either the road to progress or return to the pointless violence of the past." When he gives the speech, the London press say, "Oh, this is great. O'Neill is laying down the gauntlets and people will undoubtedly rally to him because people don't want to go back to the sectarian ages of the past." But the biggest newspaper in Belfast, the Belfast Telegraph, which has a much better sense of the local mood, is much less optimistic. It says, "Ulster is in danger of being thrown back into a dark past. Thanks to those who have been sowing dragons' teeth and do not care how terrible the harvest may be. But Tom, that harvest will be much more terrible than anybody realises." So next time, we'll be looking at the civil rights movement. Hi, everybody. Dominic again. Now, here is the clip that we promised you from our show, The Book Club, which talks about Ernest Hemingway's book for whom the bell tolls, and specifically the history of the Spanish Civil War. Spain has not been involved in the First World War at all. It's been a backwater, basically. It's been really politically turbulent. There is a king. It's normally a parliamentary system. Most of Spain is untouched by the modern world. So it feels like there's these huge estates called the Latifundia, which go back to the Roman periods. I found this extraordinary. I had no idea until I saw a reading up for this. This is true of Spain and Portugal, actually. They would have absolute gigantic rural estates. Run by landowners, almost kind of feudal system. The peasants are enthralled to the landowner and to the church and whatnot. There are parts of Spain that have industrialised the vast country, the North and Catalonia, but those are obviously places with separatist movements. So Spain feels very fractured. There's lots of labour unrest. There's an anarchist movement. There's a socialist movement. There's a Communist Party. In the 20s, there was a coup and a general top power called General Miguel Primo de Rivera under the king. But that didn't really work out. They brought back democracy in the beginning of the 1930s, but it's incredibly polar ised and unstable between right and left. There are terrible strikes. So, for example, in the North in 1935, there are assassinations, there are paramilitary movements and whatnot. The son of the previous dictator, Primo de Rivera, sets up a little fascist party called the phalanche, which actually sort of gives its name really to be then co-operated by the right by the Conservatives who win the Spanish Civil War. Whether they're really fascists or whether they're just basically using the fascist label as an interesting question. So it all comes to head in 1936. There's an election in the beginning of the year, which means that a popular front, which is a left-wing alliance of liberals, socialists, to the left-wing parties, some of the separatists do more nationalist groups from the various, like the vast country of Catalonia, they come to power. And there's a lot of social unrests because they want to push through radical changes and the right don't like that. And in July 1936, the army launches right-wing elements within the army launch at coup. The reason the Spanish Civil War happens is the coup doesn't fully work. So basically, the trade unions, the big cities in Madrid, Barcelona and so on, stay loyal to the elected government. So Spain is divided between the rebels, the coup people in the army, and their allies who are often like big land owners, the Catholic church and so on, who want to defend the status quo. They've got half the country, often kind of rural areas more conservative and so on. But the big cities in Catalonia and so on, so Madrid, Barcelona, places like that, they stay loyal to the elected government. So on the one hand, you have what are called the nationalists, these are the forces of the right, the army, the coup plotters and so on. Effectively from day one, they have very, very strong international backing from Mussolini in Italy and then Hitler in Germany. And then on the left, you have the elected government who are the republicans and they get help eventually from the Soviet Union, which is something of a poison chalice. And they do appeal to Britain and France for help where they don't really get it. And they have helped from foreign volunteers. And this war becomes incredibly bitter and incredibly bloody. I mean, this is always the way with civil wars because people feel it's an existential struggle. The future of their country is at stake. They come to believe, you know, they're neighbors, the people in the next town, the land owners or the priests or the anarchists or whoever are going to kill them in their families. So we've got to kill them first. So in some places, there are horrendous, horrendous sadistic massacres and things. I think they found something like at the end of maybe start the 21st century or something that Spain had the highest number of mass graves off to Cambodia. So if you want to hear the full episode, just go to Apple, Spotify or YouTube and search for the book club. And there it is, marches of 1968, the fighting in the streets of Derry, your hero Jim Callahan, deciding to send in the troops after a lot of prefarrocation and the IRA preparing to re-emerge from the shadows. So, cut members can hear that episode and the entire series, and if you're not a member of, you can of course get membership at therestishistory.com, and as we may have mentioned before, membership does come with an incredible rate of supplementary benefits, including our fantastic newsletter, which includes guest story NSA's, book extracts, quizzes, prizes, just non-stop fun. So, all of that and more in your inbox every Friday. So Dominic, another excellent reason to become a member. So many reasons. So many reasons. Anyway, thank you everyone for listening. Thank you Dominic, and bye-bye. Bye-bye.