British government attempts to take the sting out of the IRA’s tail by suspending unionist rule at Stormont. Worse was to follow.
4
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
‘Anarchy will not defeat anarchy. Lawlessness will not defeat lawlessness. The only way in which this movement can be put down is by the Forces of the Crown, who must be supported by all law-abiding citizens in the duty that lies before them.’
Ian Paisley, speaking at Westminster on 24 July 1972.1
Oxford Street Bus Station, Belfast City Centre, 2:45 p.m., Friday, 21 July 1972
The depot manager of Oxford Street bus station heard the crash and thud of the bombs as he sat in his office. One explosion nearby shook the building and sent shards of glass flying inside. ‘Due to the bomb on the bridge going off some of my staff in the general office were in hysterics, so I calmed them down and then left the office to see if there was any more damage to the offices,’ he later recalled. It was about then that his telephone started ringing. ‘A caller from the Ulsterbus head office rang the Oxford Street bus station general office saying that a bomb had been left in a car outside the station.’ Two soldiers came in and asked if he could identify the car. A few minutes later the depot manager took the soldiers outside to a Morris 1100 car. Curiously, he noticed that it had one of the company’s official passes on it, a sign perhaps of how well-organised the attacks were that day. Just as the depot manager put his hand on the vehicle, a bomb inside the vehicle exploded. ‘I was thrown up into the canopy outside the offices and when I fell one of the steel beams pinned me down,’ he told the police. ‘I was conscious and knew that I was badly injured and a lot of my clothes were blown off. I saw a fire starting in the rubble near me and tried to get closer. There was smoke and dust everywhere and someone eventually pulled me clear.’2
A few moments earlier, thirty-nine-year-old Tommy Killops, fifteen-year-old Billy Crothers and eighteen-year-old Billy Irvine were searching the yard for suspicious vehicles. They too were caught in the explosion, their bodies were incinerated by the blast. Thirty-two-year-old soldier Stephen Cooper, who had arrived on the scene with his patrol, was also killed after dismounting from his vehicle. The warning that was passed to the depot manager was completely inadequate and received too late to evacuate the premises. It was the same story throughout the city as the IRA blitzed key infrastructural targets.
Nineteen-year-old David Ervine was sat in the top lounge bar of Clancy’s Tavern on the corner of the Albertbridge Road and Castlereagh Road across the Lagan in East Belfast when the explosions started. He was enjoying a quiet pint with some friends at the time. Glancing out across the city, he could see the puffs of smoke rising over the Belfast skyline, as one bomb after another detonated before his eyes. ‘I think it was the beginning of the end,’ he recalled. ‘It was so brutal, so raw.’ The day would go down in infamy as ‘Bloody Friday’. Resolving then to ‘hit back’, the young Ervine took up a ‘long-standing invitation’ to join the UVF.3 It was in this context that scores of young men began to flock to loyalist paramilitary groups, many of whom later recalled that Bloody Friday had pushed them ‘off the fence’, thinking that ‘the best means of defence was attack’.4
The noise of the explosions carried far and wide across Belfast. A group of children playing on waste ground overlooking the city in the Turf Lodge estate watched on in disbelief as the puffs of smoke went up. ‘We thought the world was going to end’, one of them recalled. Down below, the children could see the city centre, knowing it was packed with shoppers.5 Men, women and children strolling happily through its streets, basking in the beautiful sunshine, were soon running in blind panic and screaming for their lives as the buildings around them shook with the sheer force of the bomb blasts. RTÉ journalist, Kevin Myers, was standing on top of one of the tallest buildings in Belfast. ‘Smoke rose from almost a score of spiralling columns. The city was a bedlam of sirens, of loosened sheets of glass exploding on the ground,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘and most of all, of the wailing and the shrieking of the maimed and the hysterical, rising above the streets in a chorus of atonal dementia.’6
Remarkably, for the ferocity of the attack, only eleven people were killed and a further 130 were injured in the IRA’s indiscriminate terrorist attacks on the city centre that day. Some twenty-two bombs were detonated within a one-mile radius. ‘The figures,’ wrote Myers, ‘do not begin to capture the horror of that long-lost era. Nothing can.’7 What did stick in the minds of most people who watched the drama unfold on television screens across the world were the pictures of firemen shovelling bits of bodies into bin bags. It was imagery that became seared in memory of the teenage David Ervine.
UVF leaders now faced a dilemma in the wake of Bloody Friday. On the one hand, they were swamped by the influx of new members, many of whom, like Ervine, were eager to ‘hit back’ at the IRA. On the other hand, several influential community leaders, such as West Belfast Methodist minister and NILP activist Reverend John Stewart, were trying to wean the UVF away from violence and towards politics. Billy Mitchell, who led the powerful East Antrim UVF, was one of those senior UVF commanders who regularly met with Stewart. He said that Stewart ‘encouraged them to think in terms of bread and butter politics as well as the constitutional issue’.8 This was a crucial development, especially since other NILP activists, like Jim McDonald, had now entered the ranks of the welfare component of the UVF and were keen to develop its political awareness.9 Stewart believed that the UVF should ‘respond to republicanism through non-violence and dialogue’.10 It was to be a case of too much too soon, as the UVF faced internal calls from younger members to respond in kind to republicanism. Despite his failure to persuade the UVF to unilaterally halt its violent campaign, he was able to plant the seeds that would later re-emerge in a political form as the UVF sought to establish a class-based challenge to the Unionist Party, VUPP and DUP.
In response to the devastating bomb attacks on Belfast on Bloody Friday, British politicians in Whitehall ordered the army to retake so-called ‘no-go’ areas, which had been established primarily in republican areas. They were determined to smash the power the IRA had now come to hold over some communities. It was in these areas that people turned a blind eye through loyalty, fear and intimidation by paramilitary organisations. It was in these communities that terrorist bomb-makers could operate with impunity in constructing their instruments of destruction, where they could train their members and where they could plan for their renewed offences. London was not prepared to allow this to go unchallenged. Launched on 31 July, the army’s Operation Motorman, one of its biggest surges of troops since the ill-fated Suez intervention in 1956, successfully dismantled no-go areas and reasserted British government control over nationalist areas. Though government officials hoped for the best, loyalists confirmed their greatest fears, using the Security Forces’ offensive against the IRA as an excuse to lay firm roots in areas where loyalist paramilitaries held sway. It would draw the police and army closer towards conflict with Protestant armed groups, particularly with the UVF.
On 16 September 1972, twenty-six-year-old UVF activist, Sinclair Johnston, was shot in a confrontation between loyalists and the Security Forces during a riot at St John’s Place in Larne. Newspaper reports at the time described Johnston as a UVF sergeant working in the intelligence section of the organisation. On the day of his funeral, over 3,000 mourners turned out to pay their respects. ‘The first unit behind the coffins were the girls dressed in white,’ recalled Billy Mitchell, Johnston’s superior officer at the time. ‘Then the unit of the Command Staff in full black uniform and then civilians behind – although many of them would have been UVF. It would have been the first public showing of the UVF on parade.’11 Ranks of volunteers dressed in black leather jackets, Sam Brown belts, cap comforters and sporting dark glasses followed in military fashion behind the cortège.
Minutes before Johnston’s remains were interred, a colour party of three gunmen emerged to fire a volley of shots above the coffin. The carefully stage-managed event announced the UVF to the world, in a way that the Vanguard rallies had done for the UDA.
***
Glenvarlock Street, East Belfast, Afternoon, 28 September 1972
It was mid-afternoon when a young man with long curly black hair and blue eyes called