The British Army

From 1969 to 1976, the British army was in the forefront of the internal security enterprise. It served as the de facto police force in Catholic

[32] Michael McKeown, "Chronicles: A Register of Northern Ireland's Casualties, 1969–1980," Crane Bag 4, no. 2 (1980–1981): 3.

[33] Expenditure figures provided by RUC Headquarters, Belfast; proportions cited in John Brewer, Adrian Guelke, Ian Hume, Edward Moxon-Browne, and Rick Wilford, The Police, Public Order, and the State (New York: St. Martin's, 1988), p. 58.

[34] New Ireland Forum, The Cost of Violence Arising from the Northern Ireland Crisis since 1969 (Dublin: Government Stationary Office, 1983), p. 10.

[35] Ibid., pp. 10, 25–26. These figures do not include the cost of political administration of the province.

working-class areas, patrolling streets, searching houses, controlling demonstrations and riots, and implementing internment. The police focused primarily on the safer Protestant areas, where they investigated specific offenses and brought suspects to court. This differential deployment in the two communities produced what Boyle, Hadden, and Hillyard call a "military security" approach in Catholic areas and a "police prosecution" approach in Protestant areas.^[36]

Under the British Conservative Government of 1970–1974, a military victory over Republican insurgency was assumed to be possible, and soldiers were given a relatively free hand to deal with suspected troublemakers and uncooperative citizens.^[37] Soldiers' frustration with the security situation encouraged indiscriminate violence, and harassment of the civilian population became a feature of everyday life—during street checks, interrogations, raids, and general house searches. In the words of a former officer, the army did not "have hang-ups about using force of the most vicious kind whenever possible," and civilians often supplied "the excuse for a bit of physical intimidation."^[38] Burton's field study of Belfast during the mid-1970s graphically illustrates the traumatic repercussions of Catholic encounters with aggressive British soldiers.^[39]

Internment without trial of political suspects, which began in 1971 as mainly an army operation, was a costly mistake. It threw into question the Government's fidelity to the rule of law and was a boon to the IRA, which portrayed its detained members as political prisoners suffering summary punishment. For these reasons, the Gardiner Committee recommended in 1975 the phasing out of internment and of "specialcategory" privileges for convicted political offenders, as well as a fundamental reappraisal of security policy.^[40] The Labour Government (1974–1979) recognized the failure of internment and abandoned the view that terrorism could be defeated by military means. It hoped instead that conspicuous reliance on the law—with its presumed "higher

[36] Kevin Boyle, Tom Hadden, and Paddy Hillyard, Law and State: The Case of Northern Ireland (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975), pp. 42–47.

[37] Paddy Hillyard, "Law and Order," in Northern Ireland: Background to the Conflict, ed. J. Darby (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1983), p. 43. Other observers noted a "continual super-imposition by the security forces of 'executive justice' when decisions of the courts displeased them" (Boyle, Hadden, and Hillyard, Law and State, p. 135).

[38] A. F. N. Clarke, Contact (London: Secker and Warburg, 1983), pp. 53–54.

[39] Frank Burton, The Politics of Legitimacy: Struggles in a Belfast Community (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 106, 87.

[40] [Gardiner Committee] Report of a Committee to Consider, in the Context of Civil Liberties and Human Rights, Measures to Deal with Terrorism in Northern Ireland, Cmnd. 5847 (London: HMSO, January 1975), Lord Gardiner, Chair.

authority"—might succeed where military power had failed and might diminish both domestic and international criticism of British rule.^[41] One minister wrote, "I am certain that in our regular dealings with the United States ... to be able to say we were doing it [maintaining order] within the law was of inestimable value."^[42] Later, Conservative Secretary of State Humphrey Atkins (1979–1981) affirmed: "The aim is to defeat the terrorist by use of the law. Generally it means accepting the law of civilized countries."^[43]

The larger policy reorientation (after 1976) consisted of "Ulsterization" and "criminalization," whose broad objectives were to normalize and legitimize the system of control and to depoliticize Ulster's violence.^[44] Under Ulsterization, British troops gradually disengaged while the local RUC and UDR mobilized to fill the resulting security vacuum. Replacing the army's summary internment of suspects, the police investigated greater numbers of political offenses, which the courts adjudicated. Insurgent violence was officially shorn of its political dimension and defined as strictly criminal activity. In prison convicted terrorists were treated like ordinary prisoners. (Ten men died during the hunger strike of 1981 at the Maze prison—in which Republican prisoners demanded a set of privileges in accordance with their political status. The strike extracted no concessions from the Thatcher Government but revived waning popular support for the IRA, led to rioting in response to the deaths, and produced an upsurge in casualties from political violence for the year.)

Criminalization refers to the use of the criminal law and criminal justice system to depoliticize and delegitimate insurgent activity. In Ulster, criminalization is diluted by the authorities' reliance on emergency measures to arrest and charge insurgents, who are tried in special non-jury Diplock courts as terrorists rather than ordinary suspects. Balbus's study of ghetto riots in the United States in the 1960s assumes that criminalization will be successful: it "tends to depoliticize the consciousness of the participants" and "delegitimate their claims and grievances."^[45]

[41] Mike Tomlinson, "Reforming Repression," in Northern Ireland: Between Civil Rights and Civil War, ed. L. O'Dowd, B. Rolston, and M. Tomlinson (London: CSE, 1980), p. 191.

[42] William van Straubenzee, "International Law and International Terrorism," in Ten Years of Terrorism, ed. J. Shaw (London: Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies, 1979), p. 157.

[43] Belfast Telegraph, 26 September 1979.

[44] See Tomlinson, "Reforming Repression."

[45] Isaac Balbus, The Dialectics of Legal Repression: Black Rebels before the American Criminal Courts (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1977), p. 13.

Northern Ireland does not conform to these predictions, at least not in Catholic working-class areas. And it is doubtful that strict use of ordinary criminal laws and courts—as opposed to exceptional ones—would have the predicted effect. Catholic working-class areas are not so amenable to official constructions of reality. A 1978 poll found that 34.3 percent of Catholics disagreed with the statement that the IRA is made up of "criminals and murderers"; 46.3 percent thought that the IRA consists of "patriots and idealists"; 57 percent said that the authorities should "stop treating people convicted of crimes which they claim were politically motivated, as ordinary prisoners"^[46]

Ulsterization has not spelled the end of military activities but rather a progressive reduction in their scale. The strength of army forces fell from 22,000 in 1972 to 10,123 by May 1988, while the strength of locally recruited forces—UDR and RUC—rose from 15,000 to 19,237 during the same period. The remaining troops have concentrated in areas where Republican insurgents are most active or where criminal investigations are difficult (the southern border, West Belfast). Outside these hot spots the army has reverted to its conventional role of aiding the civil power and providing support to the police, as needed. At the same time the army has increased its involvement in surveillance and covert operations,^[47] which include attacks by the elite Special Air Services (SAS) on suspected insurgents.^[48] Between 1976 and 1988 the SAS was responsible for killing 23 Republican insurgents, some of whom were armed and on active-service missions at the time.^[49]

The narrowing scope of army operations after 1976 resulted in a corresponding reduction in military violence toward civilians. Compared to the public clamor over military brutality from 1969 to 1976, criticism of the army has become more muted; as the UDR and the RUC have grown prominent in the security field, Catholic complaints have centered on these forces. Still, 34 percent of Catholics and 5 percent of Protestants in 1979 wanted the army withdrawn.^[50]

[46] Edward Moxon-Browne, "The Water and the Fish: Public Opinion and the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland," Terrorism 5, no. 1–2 (1981): 41–72.

[47] Incidents of army involvement in kidnapping, assassination, death threats, and sabotage are described by former Army Intelligence Officer Fred Holroyd in Duncan Campbell, "Victims of the Dirty War," New Statesman, 4, 11, and 18 May 1984.

[48] The SAS was deployed in 1976 apparently to placate the Protestant community: "When the murder of a number of loyalists brought indignation to the boiling point, it was as a political device that the SAS was sent to Ulster" (Tony Geraghty, Who Dares Wins: The Story of the SAS [London: Fontana, 1981], p. 182).

[49] Times, 1 September 1988. Such shoot-to-kill operations by the SAS have generated less controversy than similar actions by the RUC's Special Branch.

[50] Opinion Research Centre poll, New Society, 6 September 1979.