with those ‘responsible for the peace of our beloved Province’ to ‘take immediate and appropriate action to ensure that peace will prevail during this dangerous period’. Local party members were people who took a ‘serious view … of the fact that preparations are in hand, by our political enemies, to have large scale celebrations on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916.’ Republicans were not only content to commemorate the past violent deeds of their ancestors, warned the East and Mid Tyrone Unionist Association. They were also intent on spreading fear by intimidating Protestants living along the border with an irredentist neighbour next door. ‘We fear that these celebrations could disturb the present peaceful state of Northern Ireland and lead to grave breaches of the peace,’ wrote the Honorary Secretary.12 Something had to be done, he urged, and fast.
What compounded frustrations amongst Protestants in his part of Mid Ulster was the political dominance of the old Nationalist Party, which had returned Austin Currie in the 1964 Westminster election. To those living in the Mid Ulster area there could be no compromise with nationalism wherever it reared its head, whether politically or culturally. A handful of members of the Orange Order, including several who wore the uniform of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC, known popularly as the ‘B-Specials’), an auxiliary force to the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), met in secret to plan for the worst. They were determined to step into the breach, should O’Neill’s government prove unwilling or unable to confront what these hardliners suspected was a direct threat to their security. Matters soon came to a head when local newspapers reported that up to 30,000 people planned to gather in Pomeroy for the town’s Easter Rising parade.
A few miles north of Pomeroy, in Magherfelt, nine prominent unionists from the area, who also held overlapping members of the Orange Order and, in some cases, the B-Specials, paid a visit to the local RUC commander for the area. They warned of ‘strong intervention by loyalists’ if republicans were permitted to hold a commemorative parade in a local centre known as the Loup, which would ‘probably result in the use of firearms’ if it was to go ahead. After he showed them out, the police chief reported to RUC Headquarters that he was ‘convinced beyond all doubt’ the men were ‘prepared, if necessary, to use sufficient physical force in order to prevent these celebrations taking place’.13 An undercover Crime Special Department (later renamed Special Branch) detective attending a local election meeting in South Derry also reported how republicans wished to hold a protest in a ‘peaceful and orderly manner’ but that if they were given any trouble would ‘give all the trouble that would be needed’. Applause and loud cheers greeted these defiant words.14 Tensions between both communities ran exceptionally high.
At Stormont, McConnell’s replacement at the Ministry of Home Affairs, Bill Craig, was busy poring over more detailed intelligence reports from the RUC about the steps they were taking to tighten up the security situation. Craig promised Inspector General Sir Albert Kennedy the fullest co-operation and support from the government as they moved to preserve law and order. The Minister informed Parliament that he had authorised the mobilisation of the B-Specials as a necessary precaution, ‘to deal with the threatened IRA outbreak which constituted a very serious threat to the peace of this Province’.15 Briefings provided by intelligence chiefs in London, far removed from Mid Ulster, concluded that 3,000 IRA members were armed and poised to take action.16 Such alarmism within security circles was now matched by Paisleyites, who stoked fears amongst grassroots Protestants of an imminent armed attack by republicans.17
Not far from Stormont on the Ravenhill Road, Paisley was busy playing to a packed congregation in his church, the Martyrs Memorial. ‘England had always been weak in the face of Roman Catholic onslaughts and now rebels were dictating the policies of the country’, he told his flock, many of whom were thrown into hysterics by his booming, uncompromising rhetoric. ‘Free Presbyterians had been branded extremists’, he said, ‘in a way that left them with few options to register their grievances.’ This only encouraged them to amplify their chorus of disapproval, argued Paisley. The more republicans and the unionist government played up to one another, the more extreme Free Presbyterians would become. ‘My fellow ministers and I are united in denouncing the action of the Northern Ireland government in allowing celebrations of the Easter Rebellion to take place’, Paisley told them. Concluding his remarks, the Free Presbyterian leader vowed to continue to ‘protest in the strongest possible manner’.18
When the report of the sermon by the RUC’s Crime Special Department eventually landed on Craig’s desk, it left him in no doubt that Paisley was planning to heighten tensions, though few knew what form his plan would take. Less than forty-eight hours after Paisley’s dire warnings, UVF members sworn in at Pomeroy were taking to the streets armed with pistols. They fired shots at the home of the Stormont Unionist MP for the area, Johnny McQuade, in an attempt to create the impression that the IRA had awoken from its self-imposed slumber. The feigned attack at McQuade’s home was by no means an isolated incident and there was soon a close correlation between the escalation of Paisley’s rhetoric and the actions of the UVF.19
Two days after the attack on McQuade’s house, twenty-five-year-old Noel Doherty, a member of Paisley’s church, was busy in his printer’s shop, composing an intemperate letter to Bill Craig. Doherty was born in Cuba Street on the Newtownards Road on 26 December 1940 and attended Beechfield Elementary School. In 1956, aged fifteen, he left school and joined the Free Presbyterian church. By 1965, Doherty had set up the Puritan Printing Company with Paisley, publishing their fortnightly Protestant Telegraph. He was mesmerised by the clergyman he affectionately dubbed ‘The Bishop’. Under Paisley’s tutelage, Doherty contested the 1964 Belfast Corporation election as a Protestant Unionist Party candidate. Although he failed to win a seat, the experience left him enthralled by the gravitational pull of radical, fringe politics. By April 1966, Doherty had established the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee (UCDC), a vehicle for rejuvenating Paisley’s flagging electoral fortunes.20
As he worked late into the night at his printer’s shop, Doherty allowed his frustration with the liberal unionist agenda to spill out of his pen and onto every page of every letter he drafted to Stormont officials. His correspondence grew in volume, especially those letters personally addressed to Bill Craig. They typically elicited the same tawdry answer from his Private Secretary, who informed Doherty that he ‘should rest assured that the Minister would read the correspondence’. The evasiveness of the Stormont bureaucrats infuriated the East Belfast man. These were wily men who worked for even wilier politicians, he believed. Doherty knew instinctively, from the moment he opened the official-looking envelopes, that his letters were going unread. Much to his chagrin, the government was showing no sign of taking the dire warnings of ‘the bishop’ seriously. The young East Belfast man resolved to make them listen. ‘My chairman,’ Doherty began his latest diatribe, ‘had certain plans for Easter about which he wanted to tell the Minister but, as the Minister would not see him, he must be held responsible for the consequences.’21
Doherty signed off the letter just as sharply as he had started it. This obstinacy by the government officials would not do. He would up the ante to force them all to pay attention to the chorus of Free Presbyterian criticism. By now his plans for forming a secretive, illegally armed unit within the UCDC, known as the Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV), were at an advanced stage.
***
‘I’ve called for the gelignite’, said the man with black curly hair and a long fringe. James Frederick Marshall, a forty-six-year-old quarryman from Bond Hill, Derrycrew, in Loughgall, was expecting the stranger. He had earlier been informed by his friend, twenty-nine-year-old Jim Murdock, a machinist by trade who lived at Grange Lower, Portadown, that someone would call to his home to collect the explosives ‘for a job in Belfast’. Marshall had carefully secreted them in an outbuilding on his farm, situated in rolling countryside just over seven miles due west of Portadown. The man with the curly hair who called to his door that evening was not alone. In the farmyard behind him sat a white Hillman Imp car with three other men in the vehicle. The car engine ticked over while the two men spoke in hushed tones about the secret work they were engaged in. Marshall led his visitor to the outhouse, where he encountered another man, who stood motionless with his hat pulled tightly down over the tip of his nose to disguise his face. Marshall was not alarmed by the presence of the strangers. Deep down he knew they were all brothers in a struggle