The Rest Is History - 699. The Troubles: Return of the IRA (Part 3)

Episode Date: August 23, 2026

What was the Provisional IRA, and why did they return to the fray at the high point of The Troubles in Northern Ireland? How did a series of bloody battles, including  the Short Strand Battle, brutally intensify tensions between the British Army and Catholic communities? And, how did the conflict spiral into attacks on civilians…? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the violent escalation of The Troubles. *The Rest Is History LIVE: The Ultimate Victorian Adventure* The maddest expedition in history and it’s NEVER been heard before on the show: join Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook LIVE at the Southbank as they tell the bonkers story of Queen Victoria ordering one of history’s most daring assignments ever. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Tickets available for Friday 4th September⁠⁠⁠⁠, the Saturday show is SOLD OUT. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton  Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Senior Producer: Callum Hill   Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 South Bank Centre in London. And better yet, we will be doing something completely new, something that no one has ever heard before on the rest is history. The ultimate Victorian adventure. So to give you just a little taste, we will be in Africa in 18, 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. And the British, after months and months of fruitless waiting, have lost patience and they have sent a military expedition. under General Napier, halfway around the world to save them, an expedition that includes

thousands of mules, loads of elephants, and they've even had to build their own railway across the highlands of Abyssinia or Ethiopia to try to get to his mountain citadel. It is a bonkers story. Yeah, it's absolutely extraordinary, full-blown British imperial epic, full of ludicrous behaviour, mad characters, colossal moustaches, everything that we love on The Rest is History. It is, though I say so myself, a guaranteed classic in the making. So you're probably thinking how can I get a ticket for this extraordinary Victorian adventure? Here is the answer. If you want to get a ticket for this event on Friday, the 4th of September, all you have to do is to go to the rest is history.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. 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 South Bank Centre in London. And better yet, we will be doing something completely new, something that no one has ever heard before on the rest is history. the ultimate Victorian adventure.

So to give you just a little taste, we will be in Africa in 1868. The Emperor of Abyssinia, Theodore II, has kidnapped 59 Europeans, and he is holding them hostage after descending into this demented rage because one of his fellow monarchs, Queen Victoria, has declined to answer his letters.

I'm not making this up. And the British, after months and months of fruitless waiting, have lost patience and they have sent a military expedition under General Napier halfway around the world to save them. An expedition that includes thousands of mules, loads of elephants, and they've even had to build their own railway across the highlands of Abyssinia or Ethiopia to try to get to his mountain citadel. It is a bonkers story. Yeah, it's absolutely extraordinary, full-blown British. Imperial epic, full of ludicrous behaviour, mad characters, colossal moustaches, everything that we love on The Rest is History. It is, though I say so myself, a guaranteed classic in the making. So you're probably thinking how can I get a ticket for this extraordinary Victorian adventure?

Here is the answer. If you want to get a ticket for this event on Friday, the 4th of September, all you have to do is to go to The Restis History.com. It's 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. Down through the centuries, the people of Ireland have been fast a wage at continuing an arduous struggle for freedom and equality. For generations, division and despair have scarred the countryside, often alone, often without notice from others throughout the world, brave men,

and women of Ireland have given their lives for the principles they hold dear. Today, the Irish struggle again. The crisis now, however, is especially serious because the hate and bitterness are taking a new and far more drastic turn. Ulster teeters on the brink of a civil war that threatens to engulf all of Ireland. The government of Ulster rules by bayonet and bloodshed. The soaring toll of death and violence is uncontrolled. Thousands flee their homes in terror.

Businesses are bombed and factories close down. Barbed wire roadblocks imprison every street corner. Young children stand on kerbstones and shout shrill in the roadblocks. insults filled with hate. Ulster is becoming Britain's Vietnam. So that was Senator Edward Kennedy taking time off from driving young women into tidal ponds and then pretending it never happened to make a helpful intervention on the plight of Northern Ireland in the United States Congress on the 20th of October, 1971.

And Dominic, this was a speech that went down in Britain like a cup of cold sick. And I suppose the members of the British population who particularly enjoyed it were the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland itself. But having said that, it did go down very well with Catholics in Northern Ireland, didn't it? And indeed, in Ireland more generally. Yeah, absolutely. So, hello, everybody. That was a remarkable attempt on Ted Canada's voice there. I thought, ironically, given their antagonism.

It actually sounded more like Jimmy Carter. I know. I finally got there after months of practice. I was trying to make it nasal, and for some reason it went southern. It's great to have Jimmy Carter back on the show, isn't it? Anyway, so this speech, yeah, it kicked off an absolute firestorm of controversy. So the British Embassy in Washington issued a kind of rare statement of rebuke. It said our troops in Northern Ireland are there to stop murder and bloodshed.

And actually, if a majority of people in Northern Ireland want to join, join the Republic of Ireland, we will not stand in their way. We're not holding them by bayonets and bullets and so on and so forth. And Kennedy's intervention is a sign, I think, of just how toxic Northern Ireland had become for Britain, for the image of Great Britain in the early 1970s. And his comparison with Vietnam, which was incredibly controversial in late 1971, given what was happening in Vietnam, was it accurate? Well, it's not that far-fetched. So at this point, at the end of 1971, about 200 people have been killed. Of course, nothing by the numbers being killed in Vietnam.

But the spectacle of an army trapped in a quagmire, you know, where it's hard to tell friend from foe, where there's no political solution in sight. I mean, there's a lack of napalm, isn't there? There is a lack of napalm, but there is the sense of a conflict spiraling out of control and politicians haplessly struggling to keep up. I mean, there are definite dissimilarities, no question. Sure. But rather as the Americans, when they first went into Vietnam, thought, well, this will be done and dusted quite quickly and we'll be able to go home. Similarly, when the British sent in the army, as we heard last time, in the late summer of 1969, and of course they sent troops to protect, largely to protect the Catholic populations of Belfast and London Derry. They thought, well, hopefully we'll be home, not by Christmas, but within a few months. And the story of today's episode is how all of that went wrong. How did things become so bitter and so murderous, so quickly, in a way that would lead outside observers to make a comparison with what was going on in Vietnam?

So let's kick off by reminding ourselves where we got to last time. So we had Northern Ireland established in the 1920s with this deep sort of fractalite, Protestant majority, Catholic minority, the Catholic minority feeling that they're treated like second class citizens and everything from jobs to housing. In the first episode last week, we talked about how things started to spiral downhill in the mid-1960s. Terence O'Neill's attempts to modernise, Ian Paisley's inflammatory kind of rhetoric, the anniversary of the Easter Rising, the first killings by the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1966. And then last episode, the emergence of the Catholic Civil Rights Movement, this sort of increasing sense of confrontation, the Battle of the Boggs'Its' as it was called in Derry, and Wilson and Callahan agreeing to send in the troops. So let's pick up the story in the midsummer of 1970, and specifically we're on the 21st of June.

Now, Harold Wilson, with his shiny Gannock's raincoat, is out. He's gone. He's gone from the story. He has lost the election. He lost it three days earlier on the 18th of June. And so, Tom, we welcome back to the show, a great yachtsman, a great organ scholar, but a man who hates of traditional county, and that man is Ted Heath, the worst man in history, apart from Jimmy Carter. You think Ted Heath is the worst man than Jimmy Carter? What he did to Rutland is unforgivable. Yeah. And the ridings. Mad counties, mad counties, and Heath is personally to blame. I think that's the takeaway from this series. So Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party, has just won the general election. He hasn't talked to all about Northern Ireland. He's talked about overhauling the British

economy to get rid of all the lame ducks in industry. But I mean, he's a conscious modernizer, isn't he? So he would have no interest in Northern Ireland, which he would see as a kind of antediluvian 17th century bog. Completely. Completely. And of course, he wants to be friendly to Britain's neighbours because he wants to get us into the common market. So Britain will join along with Ireland in 1973. Ted Heath would astound you to hear, given what we were saying Britain's politicians in the last episodes has absolutely no knowledge of Northern Ireland and no interest in it whatsoever.

So on the 21st of June, which is where we're kicking off, the Cabinet Secretary has the excellent name of Sir Burke Trend. Sir Burke Trend. Yeah, that's his name. That's an insane name. Well, that's his name. American-style name. I'm never going to be rude about an American name again.

So Sir Burke Trend sends him this briefing document and says, okay, this is the situation. You know, I'm going to tell you everything you need to know about Northern Ireland. And Sir Burke says to him, it's now 10 months since we're sent in the army, and we hope to bring them home quickly, but obviously that ship has sailed. And he says there are basically two scenarios. That's the best case scenario is that things stay exactly as they are, and I quote, stabilised by the presence of British troops and trembling on the edge of disaster but never quite tipping over. And Berk-Tren says the downside is that way's going to be very expensive in terms of men and money.

However, that's the rosy scenario. The worst possibility as follows. It could get worse and finally tip over the edge, the Northern Ireland government proving incapable of holding the position, civil war breaking out within the province, and Dublin being compelled to intervene. This would present us with a political and constitutional crisis of the first order. I mean, Dominant, you compared it, well, Edward Kennedy did, to Vietnam.

Yeah. But actually, what it sounds like is Iraq or Afghanistan. the briefings that American presidents were probably getting in the wake of the attempt to stabilize those governments. Yeah, you're not wrong. And actually, we will see there are attempts to basically do a sort of general David Petraeus-type surge. You know, in this similar kind of debates, do we get out, do we put in more troops? What do we do? Do we spend good money after bad, as it were?

It's not a bad comparison at all. So that's the picture. But what Serbirk Trend and Ted Heath do not know is that at this point, a new factor is about to enter the equation. Now, one group that we actually haven't talked about that much, which may surprise some listeners, is the Irish Republican Army, the IRA. And the reason that, as we've talked about before, they had this border campaign that failed by 1962. The leadership of the IRA abandoned guerrilla violence. They put on their polo necks, and they turned to kind of. Marxism and hanging around with academics. And they thought about, you know, they thought the future

of this movement is a workers' alliance to beat capitalism as well as imperialism. And that meant that during all the disturbances in 1969 that we talked about last time, the IRA are actually quite quiet. And graffiti went up in Belfast that summer. IRA equals I ran away. Now, if you're an older IRA man, if you've been active in that guerrilla movement, since, let's say, the 1940s even longer, you are very embarrassed by this. In fact, you're positively furious. So these older IRA veterans, often they're kind of cultural conservatives, very strongly Catholic. They don't have any truck with the Marxism and whatnot.

They're really fed up with this. They're like, why are we not getting stuck in? And then the other group, who I think are really important, are the younger militants, often in their late teens, early 20s, people who've seen action in the street fight. in Belfast and Derry in 1969. And they similarly think the IRA has basically vacated its historic role as the defender of the Catholic people of Northern Ireland. Someone should take up arms to defend our people against the loyalists and the IUC and all of this. And this comes to a head in December 1969.

There's a secret meeting of disaffected IRA men in Belfast. And they agree that they were split from the Marxist leadership. and they will set up their own rival IRA executive and army council, as they're called. And they call themselves the provisional IRA, partly to echo the text of the proclamation in the Easter rising of 1916, which had set up a provisional government of Ireland. And what happens to the original IRA? Were they still hang around? They have the official IRA.

And are they still a going concern today? They effectively wound up their operations in the early 1970s. But they are still active in the period of this series. Right. So they have gunmen. They have weapons. They have seminars. Yeah.

Well, they become radicalized to try and compete with the provisionals, actually. So they sort of take up the gun as well. But they end up merging, do they? Basically. No, they don't merge. I mean, there's also the INLA, which we don't need to get into them. You know, this is the nature of paramilitary groups. They tend to splinter.

Yeah, of course. So 10 days after this, so the. provisional IRA issued their first public statements. And they said, we're going to defend our people in the north. We're going to fight for the full political freedom of Ireland. And then early January, 1970, the political wing of the IRA, so it had always had this allied political party called Sinn Féin, that split into official and provisional factions on the same lines. And of course, as anyone who remembers the 1970s natism will know, it is the provisional IRA, the provos, that they are the people who dominate the headlines in Britain and in Ireland in the next

30 years or so. So just to talk about them, because they are the group that everyone knows as the IRA. A couple of really important points. Sometimes when you're reading about them, you will see people say, well, they were basically set up as a defensive organisation. They were set up to defend Catholic communities from attacks by Protestant mobs in 1969. And that's where the provisional came from. This is really just not true at all. So almost all of the original leaders of the provisionals. We'll talk about them a bit later, but a guy called Sean McSiefen, Ruria Brady, Davy O'Connell, Billy McKee. These are long-standing IRA men. These are people who have been in the IRA for 10, 20, 30 years. A lot of them have served time in prison, in Britain or in Ireland.

These are paramilitaries who are, you know, they believe in using force to get a united Ireland. Now, even younger people associated with the IRA come from longstanding Republican families. Let's look at one person who very, very vigorously denies that he was ever part of the IRA. Can you guess who this person is? Is this Jerry Adams by any chance? It is Jerry Adams, yes. So we're just putting on the record that he does deny he was in the IRA. He absolutely denies he was in the IRA.

The strange thing about Jerry Adams is Jerry Adams denies that he was in the IRA, but every single academic historian who writes about this believes that he was. So it's hard to know who to believe there, Tom. So Jerry Adams was 21 years old when the provisionals were established. Jerry Adams himself has always said, I was drawn into Republican activism through the civil rights movement. I was radicalized to join Sinn Féin because I was so shocked by the loyalist violence. That's important, isn't it, for the framing of the message for American audiences?

Because if you cast yourself as being on the side of the civil rights movement, I mean, who would object to that? Yeah, who would disagree with that? Now, it's important to say what Jerry Adams is saying here about being radicalized this way is just not true. Jerry Adams comes from a Republican family in West Belfast. His grandfather was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the 1920s. His father was in the IRA. His uncles were in the IRA. His father was jailed for an ambush on a police patrol.

So let's assume that Jerry Adams is telling the truth, and that he was never part of the IRA. The puzzle for me is why he wasn't, because given his background, it would be very strange for him not to have joined it, I would say. However, you know, it's a funny old world, isn't it? So maybe he wasn't. Now, the other point is about violence.

The provisional IRA, unlike the say in the civil rights movement, are not interested in reforming the Stormont state. No, they want to destroy it, don't they? They don't want to destroy it? They want to bring down Stormont, they want to drive out the British, and they want a united Ireland. And the way that they're going to do that

is what they call euphemistically physical force. And that is violence. And they're completely upfront about that. So this is the Republican news in September 1970. It says, the Irish people should realize that British imperialists do not respect, fear, or pay much attention to people who beg, grovel or crawl for favours or concessions. In other words, they only respect you if you fight back.

Now, of course, the IRA say, and they say this throughout, there are going to be civilian casualties, but this is a war. That is inevitable. It is worth it. You know, we're going to be doing terrible things, but it is worth it to get what we want, and the end will justify the means. And that is why, when you get to the late 1990s, that is why the older Republicans often feel so betrayed by the Good Friday Agreement and the deal that the IRA ended up taking. And by the older Republicans, you mean people who are from a generation before? Yeah, but also people who've been in there since the 70s. If you joined in 1970, right, and you're 20 years old, you are what, getting into your 50s, maybe by the time it all comes to an end. And the best part of your life,

you know, your prime years are behind you. And you've, and you've, spent those prime years doing things that you know are terrible things. You have killed innocent people, but you did it because you believed the end justified the means and the end was a United Ireland. And now your leaders tell you, actually, you did it so that you could get into coalition with Ian Paisley and run the waterboard. And you say, what? I mean, we waded through blood. We descended into hell. We basically, you know, sold our immortal souls for this. And that's why people feel so aggrieved when Jerry Adams and Martin McGuinness do the deal. I mean, you mentioned hell in immortal souls. Yeah. In that. I mean, do you mean that metaphorically?

Or are we talking about people who genuinely think that they have risked their immortal souls? I think there are quite a lot of people who are very pious Catholics. We know for a fact that a lot of IRA men were pious Catholics. I mean, they believe in this stuff. You know, they live in a world where they're surrounded by religious iconography. The iconography of the Irish Republican movement is very very, very heavily Catholic. I think when you read interviews with people, when they're looking back at their lives, they're looking about what they did.

They're obviously, you know, they're steeped in a kind of religious culture. And I think a lot of people did feel, you know, we did terrible things, but we did it in the name of greater good. Yeah. You know, and we've been sold out. I mean, this is obviously always puzzles people.

Why did the continuity IRA or the real IRA or whatever? Why didn't they just get around the table and accept the Good Friday Agreement? Well, I think this is why, because they just felt betrayed. Anyway, we're jumping ahead too much. Back to early 1970. So they've been set up the provisionals, their priorities to get guns, and they have powerful friends to help them do it.

So first of all, they have friends in the Republic of Ireland. This is an extraordinary story, actually. I don't think it's terribly well-known in Britain. In 1969, the Irish government had put aside £100,000 pounds as a sort of relief fund for Catholic families driven from their homes in the north. And basically at least two Irish government ministers. So Charles Hohy, later the Prime Minister of Ireland, the boss, the T-Shook, yeah, and a guy called Neil Blaney.

They collaborated with a Belgian businessman who had been in the SS to use this money. They diverted the money to buy guns in West Germany and they smuggled them to the IRA. This was a huge deal in the Republic of Ireland. There was a huge court case about it. And then the other place is America. Of course, lots of Irish Americans, lots of Irish Americans with very sort of, you know, misty-eyed memories of the old country, an instinctive suspicion and dislike of Britain. Including Ted Kennedy. Including Ted Kennedy.

And you have groups like Norahe, most famously, they raise money from Irish-Americans. A lot of that money goes to buy armolite rifles, which were made in California. And then they are smuggled across the Atlantic, including, amazingly, they would smuggle armolites across on the QE2. Oh, so like the Lusitania. Yeah, exactly. So by the summer of 1970, the provisionals have a pretty serious arsenal. They've got assault rifles, they've got semi-automatics. They've got about 1,000 active members, and that's people who are going to go and fight

on the streets, but it's also people running safe houses and things. They make their grand entrance at the end of June 1970. Now, Heath, Ted Heath has an unparalleled record, I think, in modern British history of making well-intentioned but disastrous political miscalculations. So his first one, this is the summer of 1970, are you going to ban the traditional unionist marches, the Orange Order marches and things? And he says, no, I'm not going to do that.

Because I've just come in as prime minister. I don't want to alienate Protestant opinion in Northern Ireland. But also, you said he doesn't know anything about Northern Ireland. No, he doesn't. It's true. I mean, to be fair, his following advice. He did end up living in Salisbury, so I'm going to occasionally rally to his cause. Okay, we're going to stick up for Ted Heath.

Yeah. Well, the instinctive thing, I suppose, you think, if I don't know much about this, I'm not going to intervene. I'll just be hands off for the time being. One British official in Belfast said, this was the greatest single miscalculation I've ever seen made in the course of my whole life, which is quite a big statement. And actually, he's probably right, because on Saturday, the 27th of June, there are a huge, Orange Order parades across Belfast. The inevitable fighting and rioting escalates into sort of massive street fighting and gun battles. And the fiercest fighting ends up being a place called the Short Strand, which is a Catholic enclave in East Belfast.

And it's a round of church, Matthews Church, Catholic Church. And this is where the provisionals first entered the story. There's a small group of them. They're armed with M1 carbines. They're positioned around the church. And there's the scene of them kind of blasting it. away at loyalist petrol bombers and the IUC. And about 30 people are injured. Three people are killed. Two of them Protestants, one of them Catholic. It's not one of the biggest street

battles of the troubles, but I would argue it's one of the most important because it's the moment that first really establishes the provost street cred. Everybody says they're back, you know. These are the people who are going to stand up to the authorities and defend, you know, Catholic areas and stuff. So Ted Heath's made one bad mistake. And just, days later, the authorities make an even bigger one which gives the IRA an even bigger gift. So on the late afternoon of Friday the 3rd of July, so this is what, not even a week later, British armoured personnel carriers move into the Lower Falls area of Belfast, kind of Catholic working class area. And they're going in to seal off one particular street

called Balkan Street, which is this kind of brick terraced narrow street. And they've been tipped off that there is an official IRA arms cash at number 24. So the official IRAs, Tom, the Marxists, the Poloneck people. And the British go in and they find the guns, but when they, as they come out of the house, there's this crowd outside, very angry, and people start rocking the armoured personnel carriers. And then people start throwing stones and petrol bombs and stuff. And the soldiers who are Scots guards, they fire tear gas at the crowds, and then they start calling for reinforcements. And then both wings of the IRA turn. up on mass and start shooting. So it's a very chaotic scene. And they're not kind of shooting

each other. They're fighting side by side. No, they're not shooting each other. No, I wouldn't put it past them. So there's this huge kind of street battle. There's tear gas, there are nail bombs, there are petrol bombs, there are snipers, the people building barricades. Both sides are firing hundreds and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. And at 10 o'clock that evening, the British commander in Northern Ireland, Sir Ian Freeland, he says, I want the whole. falls area sealed off and I want it put under indefinite curfew, basically put it under lockdown. And so you have this scene now, it's 10 o'clock at night and you have helicopters flying

over the area from which there are kind of clouds of smoke emerging. And the helicopters have loud speakers and from the loudspeakers, a kind of clipped British voice is telling people, get off the streets or you will be shot. This area is now under curfew. So it's very like, you know, sort of apocalypse now seen, smoke, tear gas, burning fires and helicopters with this voice coming out with this apocalyptic message. And then for the next two days, thousands of British soldiers, supported by helicopters, supported by armoured cars, move through the falls area. They are for forcibly searching the houses for weapons. They go through house after house.

They arrest more than 300 people. and they actually find hundreds of guns and bombs, loads of ammunition and stuff like that. But this is a terrible reputational blow to the British Army because there are afterwards tons of stories about the soldiers behaving badly and wrecking people's houses. So this is one local activist. Holy statues were smashed on the floor. Family portraits and pictures were smashed. Fit furniture was ripped and overturned. Windows were broken and doors off the hinges. some of the people who'd been beaten were still lying there, bloody and bruised.

Now, the army said afterwards, this is all untrue. This is just Republican propaganda. This is rubbish. British boys behaved impeccably. But I'm not sure about that. No journalists were allowed in the curfew zone at all. And the army's own log sheets show that the troops were instructed beforehand to, quote, be aggressive.

I think these stories, you know, some of them might be exaggerated, but there's clearly an element of truth in it. I mean, soldiers under pressure searching people's houses, are they really going to wipe their feet on the door mat? I don't think so. So presumably the people whose houses are being searched, they're not giving them cups of tea anymore or anything like that. No, no, no.

So you're dead right. When they arrived in 1969, it was fish and chips and cups of tea. But right now, from this point, you know, Catholic housewives will spit in the soldiers' faces, kids throw stones at them. And the provisional IRA have been watching all this with delight. because basically they know that it's turned to the local community against the army, and they're going to get a flood of recruits, which they do. So we're only a couple of weeks into Ted Heath's premiership.

I mean, this has all happened very quickly, and it's taken a very, very dark turn. And a few days after this, our old friend Sir Burke Trend is back, and he discusses this with Heath and Heath's Home Secretary, Reginald Mordling. We shall be talking about Reginald Mordling later on. Great character, exactly. and they agree, listen, if things continue to deteriorate at this rate, we are going to have to suspend the Parliament of Northern Ireland, and we're going to have to send in a British team to run Northern Ireland ourselves. But they do not want to do that.

They absolutely do not want to do that. No, they don't. So that would be the nuclear option to abolish Stormont and introduce direct rule. But he doesn't want to do that. He's only been Prime Minister three weeks. He wants to give the Northern Ireland Prime Minister James Chichester Clark a chance to sort this out. And remember from last time, James Chichester Clark, I mean, this is going to sound very harsh. I hope his descendants don't listen.

I think he was useless. He's from the landed gentry. He's a farmer. He's kind of very slow and plodding and unimaginative. Of course, he's trapped between the nationalists on the one hand and the kind of Paisley-Hardliners on the other. But he doesn't have any of the political skills to deal with it. I said that also at this meeting is Heath's Home Secretary Reginald Mordling. and we should talk about him a little bit.

There is possibly a case that the British might have handled Northern Ireland more sensitivity in the early 70s with a different Home Secretary because Reginald Mordling, who I actually really like, is a truly terrible person to be in charge of the Home Office. So to explain to people who he was, he'd been the runner-up to Ted Heath in the Tory leadership. You should approve of him, Tom, because he had a first in classics from Oxford and he'd been in RAF intelligence during the war. And he's suave, he's witty, he's very liberal-minded for a Tory, he's very clever, he's incredibly affable.

On the other hand, he is luscious, he is incredibly lazy, he is greedy and he is fantastically corrupt. And he's also a massive, massive boozer. So if I tell you his daily intake, you would have brandy for breakfast, gin at mid-morning, and then at lunch he'd have wine and digestif. And then for the rest of the day, he'd just be as the mood took him. I mean, he'd be asleep, actually, for the last of the day. And Reginald Mordling, he's basically one of those people. He's the ultimate sort of 70s British politician, massive glasses.

He's quite overweight. He's flecked with Dandruff and he's stinking of gin. And he absolutely despises Northern Ireland, and he's not afraid to show it. So when he made his first trip to Northern Ireland, which was just before the Falls Curfew, he made it absolutely obvious to everybody that he didn't want to be there and he was incredibly bored. And even the British military commander said afterwards, he seems, and I quote, completely ignorant. And when his play took off, he infamously, as soon as it took off and he knew he was off northern Irish soil, he said very loudly, for God's sake, bring me a large scotch.

What a bloody awful country. So anyway, the story of the next nine months is these men, Heath, mordling, Chichester Clark, basically totally out of their depth, dithering and dallying while the situation gets steadily worse. So a good example of how it's getting worse in a small way. You mentioned the cups of tea. There had been a lot of fraternisation between the army and the locals at the end of 1969. The army had even organised kind of clubs for local kids, trips and stuff for them. They'd organised a New Year's Eve, disdeme, disdeme.

with local girls in dairy. But a year on, things are completely different. Girls who now fraternise with British soldiers are punished for it. There's a soldier in Peter Taylor's book about the army in Northern Ireland, Brits, it's called. Brilliant book. A soldier tells him about finding a girl tied to a lamp post and she had literally been, her head had been shaved and she'd literally been tared and feathered. He said the tar ran down her neck in the front of her breast and her hands were badly affected

where she'd been clawing at her face to get it off and the feathers were stuck to the tar. We had to cut her away from the lamppost and take it to hospital. So this is the sort of context. And then in February 1971, trouble breaks out in an area of North Belfast called the New Lodge area.

And this is a Catholic area. It's very densely populated. And the Army believed that the provisional have been stockpiling guns on the estate and have been launching search missions. There are days of clashes and these escalates on the evening of the 5th of February. into street fighting, the army sent in a unit of Royal Artillery.

They get there, it's chaotic scene, bricks, petrol bombs, bottles, all of this. And then as one soldier described it, it's like the crowd parts, like the sort of parting of the Red Sea. As he describes it, this chap just popped out with the machine gun and opened up. And this chap is Billy Reed of the Provisional IRA. He's got a sterling submachine gun. He shoots four soldiers wounded, and he shoots Gunner Robert Curtis through the heart. And Curtis becomes the first British soldier to die in Northern Ireland. He was from Newcastle.

He was 20 years old. He left a pregnant wife who was also 20. An interview by the press afterwards, his father said, I have no idea what my son died for. And his widow, his wife, said, Our boys should be brought home immediately. We should leave the mobs to fight it out. among themselves.

Now, already at this point, a lot of people in Britain agree with this. So if you look at the polls, in 1969, most people had favoured the decision to introduce troops, but even in early, you know, the early 1970s, so 70, 71, more than half of the electorate think that the troops should be brought home and Northern Ireland should just be abandoned. And this is what the government is kind of contending with all through this story. But Heath's cabinet have absolutely no intention of pulling out. out. So if you look at the Cabinet minutes after this, they've lost their first, you know, British Army casualty. And the Cabinet minutes say, they know, and I quote, many people would

favor abandoning the province to its fate, a course which the government could not contemplate. And the reason they couldn't contemplate is they say international opinion would damn us for it. I mean, Ted Kennedy wouldn't, but a lot of other people would. And the result would be the sectarian bloodbath. And they agree a common line. And they say, this is not. It's not just about communal strife. It's not about rebellion against political injustice. This is the outcome of deliberate terrorism by the IRA. Now, through this story, we have been quite down on British government policy,

and we will probably continue to be, because Heath goes on to make some absolutely cataclysmic mistakes. But I think it is actually worth stopping, just to say for a moment that he's not entirely wrong about this. So the conflict obviously has deep roots, and among the causes, undoubtedly, are British government neglect and incompetence and, of course, the discriminatory nature of the storm on state. But just on the British side, Heath's intentions, I think, are pretty admirable. Heath wants to see a reformed, non-sectarian, Northern Irish state that does not discriminate. everybody's treated equally and nobody gets shot.

And actually he's open to all kinds of different things. He's open to links with Dublin. He's open to rethinking Northern Ireland's constitutional status. He will consider anything. And historians who've written about this almost uniformly say, the Heath government is much more open-minded when it comes to Northern Ireland than any previous British government had ever been. Now, as for the army, the army made terrible mistakes

and we'll be talking about one in particular next time. And the army, of course, have all kinds of prejudices and blind spots and preconceptions and whatnot. Worth saying about the army in Northern Ireland, I mean, the army do not go in to kill people. I mean, they are trained killers, but they've been sent as peacekeepers. And the army, deep down, would love to go home. I mean, no one likes being sent to Northern Ireland. There are, however, people in this series of whom that's not actually true. They do want to kill people.

So we saw some in the first episode, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the people who go out from pubs, and carry out sectarian murders. The provisional IRA. They actively want to increase the tension. They haven't imported guns just to exhibit them on their walls. They've imported guns to use them. They actually do want to kill people. And the reason they want to kill people is not necessarily because they're in averted

comments monsters. It's because they think it is politically right to do so. We will get what we want. And I think that is a big difference between them and Ted Heath. I mean, Ted Heath doesn't want to kill anybody. people do get killed, but I mean, it's not necessarily what he wanted. I mean, he had been at the Nuremberg rally, hadn't he? He'd fought in the Second World War, so he is aware of how deep hatreds can run.

Yeah. But even so, in this, there does seem a failure of imagination on his part to contemplate, I guess that within the United Kingdom, there could be hatred so violent that there are substantial parts of different populations. Yeah. They want to pull the whole house down. That's the problem, isn't it? Because once you reach that stage with people,

there's no negotiations really that can solve it. Well, we're actually, I mean, you're right to make that point about negotiations because you're anticipating what we'll talk about in the next episode. When they do have negotiations, they have negotiations with the IRA. And it turns out that the IRA basically say,

well, actually, we'd prefer to carry on fighting and killing than, you know, we'd rather not do a deal, actually. Yeah. So back to the story, the early months of 1971. If anybody thinks that Gunner Curtis's death will bring an end, they've got a shock coming. Because four days after that, five BBC engineers are killed by a landmine and County Toron, planted by the IRA meant for an army patrol. A week later, a second soldier, John Lorry, he was 22, is killed by the IRA,

and then two RUC men, two policemen in the Ardoin are killed by IRA snipers. And then you have the event that I think shocks people in Britain more than any other. A massive story in March 1971. So it's Wednesday the 10th of March. There were three young men from the Royal Highland Fusiliers and they'd gone out to have a drink. As soldiers were allowed to do in those days, they were allowed to go out in civilian clothes to have a pint. And they went to Mooney's Bar in the city centre. and they were Dougal McCohey, who was 23,

and two brothers, John and Joseph McCake, who were 17 and 18. I mean, the ages of the people in this story, they're so young, a lot of them. I mean, they're basically the age of schoolchildren, some of them. So they're off duty, they're in civilian clothes, and they're in this pub, and a bloke comes up to them, and he says, oh, you British Army soldiers, I'm actually a former soldier. Let me buy you some drinks, and he buys them some drinks, and they get chatt. in their chat for a bit. And then as bloke says,

oh, do you want to come to a party? There's a party, all the rest of it. And they go off. They're due back at their barracks at about 6.30. They don't show up. That's not uncommon because, you know, it wasn't unknown for soldiers to go out, have a few pints, lose track of time,

you know, start talking to some girls or whatever, and then they come back late. They get into trouble, of course, but it's not unusual. But a few hours later, some children were playing in fields at a place called White Bray, which was north of Belfast.

and they saw something in a field, they saw a sort of pile of something in a field, they went over the children, and it was the bodies of these three Highlanders, and they'd been shot, all of them in the back of the head. And more than any other incident, this really cuts through, because they have, of course, been shot by the IRA.

One Belfast paper said, after all the horrors of recent weeks and months, Ulster people have almost lost the capacity for feeling shock, but the ruthless murder of three defenceless young soldiers, has cut to the quick. And in Britain, and there's a memoir by a paratrooper called Harry McCallion, who was a working class Catholic from Scotland. And he was stationed in Britain.

He writes in his memoir of the silence that fell over his kind of barracks when he and his comrades heard about these killings. And he writes, I looked at the faces of the older soldiers around me. I read on them the same thing. Just wait until we get across. For me and for everybody at the table, that was the major turning point. And so the risk is that the British Army is also starting to be radicalised, I suppose.

And that must, I guess, then be a factor in British governmental calculations. So who knows what will happen? Will the British government consider pulling out or will they double down a critical moment, Dominic? And we will find out what the British government decides after the break. This episode is brought to you by Amazon. Tom throughout history, change has often been driven by businesses and institutions that end up having a massive impact on society as a whole. And there's probably no better example than the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford and his managers revolutionized production through their pioneering assembly lines.

And they influenced factories and working practices in countries all over them. 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.com.uk U.K. slash sustainability. Hello, 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 its history, which is the Spanish Civil War. Now, I can tell you, that plans are afoot for us to do the Spanish Civil War at some point, hopefully next year in 2007. 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 Franco's forces. And he draws on that experience in for whom the bell tolls to tell the 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. Hello everyone and welcome back to the rest is history.

It is March 1971. Three young Highland Fusiliers have been murdered and with that the mood on the streets of Belfast and in the army barracks as well, I guess, is darker than it's ever been. So you, before the break, described the horror of the army and the condemnation of the newspapers. But that's not a kind of universal perspective, is it? Because there are obviously elements within Northern Ireland. And I would guess Ireland more generally who think, well, all's fair in love and war. They had it coming.

Yeah. So there's a wonderful book actually about Northern Ireland in the 70s called Watching the Door by an Irish columnist, quite controversial Irish. columnist actually, Kevin Myers, who was born in Leicester, but he was from Irish Catholic parents. At the time, he was working as a journalist for RTE, the Irish TV service. And he remembers in this book that when these three guys were killed, among his Republican contacts, there was a mood of, quote, quiet satisfaction. People would say to him, well, you know, they belong to the British Army. I mean, they were very young, but they were British Army soldiers. So they had what was coming to them. And at one point his driver, who's a Catholic, says to him, the war is coming and it's going to be

serious. The provis have fresh gear coming from America. There will be people dying in this town who have never effing died before. And that sounds very melodramatic, but actually I think at this point a lot of people genuinely thinking there's going to be a civil war. I mean, remember there are a lot of people alive, Tom, who remember the violence of the 1920s. Yeah. You know, it's only 50 years before. So there'll be people who might have been 20 in the 1920s are now 70 and are able to tell their children and grandchildren about it and probably have done for years. There are nationalists who've never felt safe in Northern Ireland. There are unionists who have always believed that the Catholics are a kind of fifth column and the IRA were poised to attack them.

And I think for both of these groups, they say, well, this is it. This is it. The decisive showdown is at hand. And it's for this reason. you have this huge growth in 1971 of vigilante groups. So in Belfast working class Protestant areas, people have been setting up these loyalist defense associations, as they're called. And the biggest is the Ulster Defense Association, the UDA, again, a sort of acronym to conjure with in the 70s, 80s, 90s. This was this alliance of loyalist vigilantes. It was set up in the autumn of 1971. At its peak, it had somewhere between 25 and 40,000 associated members, extraordinary. It had women's units. In the course of the troubles, the UDA was responsible for more than 400 murders,

so almost all of them, Catholic civilians. How does that compare with the IRA's killing rate? Oh, far more. The IRA is by far the biggest killer in the course of the troubles. I mean, it's interesting, actually. The killers that get most attention, I would say, at most newsprint, certainly now are the British Army. But by far numerically the biggest killers are the provisional IRA. Back though to the loyalists. Interesting question. How do people justify this to themselves?

You know, what would make you join a loyalist vigilante group? Well, in his book, Loyalists, Peter Taylor gives the example of one man called Martin Snotten. And there's lots of interviews to this guy online because he's quite a prominent peace campaigner now. Martin Snodden grew up in a Protestant enclave in Catholic West Belfast. So he and his family in the late 60s felt very fearful. They felt embattled, surrounded. And then of course things got worse the more that the sort of temperature dropped. And when he was 16 years old in 1970, he joined the UVF.

And as he saw it, it was the natural thing to do to defend his family. You know, it's the brave thing to do, it's manly and so on. And it's also, I think, crucially rooted in history because his grandfather had been a B special, his father had been in the Ulster Defence Regiment. And when he was asked, he defined his motives as a combination of fear and love, fear for what could happen and what was happening in the area at the time, but also a wider sense of love for my whole tradition and the country that I'd grown up in.

And where that fear and love took him, He joined when he was 16. By the time he was 20, he is serving a life sentence for a bomb attack on a pub that he believed was a front for the IRA. His comrade, his mate, was killed when the bomb went off prematurely, but also killed was an innocent woman who was in the pub at the time. And he said afterwards, although in some sense I felt I could justify it, I sank to depths I never thought I would go to. depths I never knew existed. And of course, he's speaking for thousands of other people. Anyway, back to the narrative in the spring of 1971.

So James Chichester Clark, this slightly useless Prime Minister, is under great pressure to crack down. There are demonstrations outside Stormont, thousands of shipyard workers, people from the Harland and Wolf Yard that had built the Titanic. They down their tools, they march through Belfast, they want a harder line. Ian Paisley,

is on the scene. Tom, do you want to give us, Urien Paisley? We can no longer tolerate your weakness. You must go before the whole land is deluge with the blood of innocent men and women. So, what can Chichita Clark do? Well, the big question is, would he introduce internment? So internment means locking up suspects without trial. And that may sound like a very nuclear option,

but it has a long history in Ireland. The British government used it after the Easter Rising. The Irish Free State, Michael Collins and Co. used it during the Irish Civil War. Both Belfast and Dublin used it in the Second World War and in the border campaign, the IRA border campaign of the late 50s and 60s, and it worked. Basically, they knew who the IRA men were.

They had intelligence that told them. they went and grabbed them and they locked them up without trial and they broke the back of the IRA. And in fact, the Irish government, which is always a bit schizophrenic, I think, at this point about the IRA and republicanism generally, because of course the Irish government is nominally committed to a United Ireland, but it's also committed to smashing the IRA, which it regards as an illegal terror group. So it's sort of torn and it's pulled in two directions. In 1970, the Dublin government publicly threatened to bring back internment, and a year later they scrapped jury trials for IRA suspects. So often they do actually take a pretty hard line.

And some, even in the north, some moderate nationalists say to the British, do you know what, we could kind of live with it if you brought back internment? So Jerry Fitt, who we met, I think last time. The guy who occupied the secretary's house. The houseman was Austin Curry. Jerry Fitt is the bloke used to work as a sort of, he used to work on the ships, I think. Didn't he become an MP? He became an MP. He became an MP.

Mates with Jim Callahan. I thought he was one of them. He was one of the people who occupied the Secretary's House. No, it's Austin Curry and a couple of his friends. Oh, okay. Anyway, Jerry Fitt suggests to the British, she says to them, and I quote, the immediate internment of all provisional IRA men known to the police. But Chichester Clark, the Prime Minister, actually think,

That's quite a bad idea. And the reason for that is that the army and the police have told him, we don't have very good intelligence. So we won't pick up the right people. And it will probably provoke massive protests and make Northern Ireland ungovernable. So Chichita Clark flies off to London on the 16th of March, 1971. And he says to Heath and to Mordling, I don't want you to introduce internment.

I want a military surge, like a general Petraeus, military surge from 2007 in Iraq. Basically, I want you to throw in, I'm going to flood Northern Ireland with troops, throw thousands of reinforcements into the Catholic estates, go through curfews, cordons, lockdowns, all of this. And Heath says to him,

I'm not going to send in loads of extra troops. You can have a thousand more troops, but I mean, I'm not going to hurl in tens of thousands of British soldiers. Chichester Clark is completely, deflated by this. He thinks, well, this is pointless. You know, I've shot my bolt. There's nothing I can do.

He flies back to Belfast, and then two days later, he decides I'm going to resign as Prime Minister. Oh, spend more time with his cowers. Exactly so. And he decides, I don't want to ring Ted Heath because Ted Heath is terrible on the phone. He's so glacial. Hello. Yeah, exactly.

I'm not going to ring Ted Heath. He thinks I'll ring Reginal Mordling. Sorry. He rings Mordling. This is absolutely beyond parody. Mordling, he can't get through because Mordling is giving a lecture at Merchant Taylor's School, a very well-established public school. Mordling's special branch men go to find him to say the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland is on the line. He wants to talk to you urgently.

But they find him not giving the talk, but closeted with the headmaster, and I quote, having a lunch made up entirely of whiskey. So I don't know what that says either about Mordling or indeed about Merchant Taylor's school. Nothing good. Oh, the headmaster. Right, exactly. Are you not running a school? For God's sake, man. That's the real scandal of this story.

Anyway, Mordling eventually is persuaded to summon a car to take him back to London to take this call. But when they're on their way, the car mysteriously breaks down in Watford. So he is unable to take the call from James Chichester Clark. And Mordling's biographer, Louis Bassett. and I think says basically what happened was that Maudling was so drunk after this liquid lunch that his officials decided

they couldn't possibly risk him Yeah, just pull into a light lay by Exactly So James Chiches-A-Clark has to ring Ted Heath Instead which he's been trying to get out of And Heath is incredibly rude to him of course refuses to listen to anything he says Keep saying to him

You can't give me a single example How can you say we're just sitting there and doing nothing? And at the end Chichester Clark almost in sort of desperation said, well, I'm going to resign and are going to blame the British Army. I'm going to say all the British Army's thought they let us down. And Heath goes absolutely berserk. You do quite a good Ted Heath. So do you want to do Ted Heath now?

I consider that absolutely unjustifiable. It bears very little relation to the truth. I think it is doing immense harm to Northern Ireland. And I think it makes the position of any successor of yours absolutely impossible. And then Chichita Clark sort of blusters. He says, well, I don't do anything unhelpful. And Heath says, I don't think there's anything more to discuss. and he just hangs up on him.

And that's the end of that. That's the end of James Chichester Clark in this story. Is he all right? Does he enjoy go back to his farming? I think he goes back to his farm. It's all okay? Well, I mean, it's all okay insofar as it possibly can be, as his country collapses around him. Yeah.

So he's out. Now, finally, the Ulster Unionist aside, well, we've had two Etonians. Let's look beyond the old Etonian class for somebody who's actually quite good at politics. And they get in another bloke. And this bloke is called Brian Faulkner. Oh, yes. He went to school in Dublin with W.B. Yates' son. Correct.

He absolutely did. That's the amazing fact I know about him. And here's an amazing fact. You know, who also went to that school? So he went to St. Columbus in Dublin, which builds itself, I googled it. It bills itself as the most prestigious school in Ireland, the best boarding school in Ireland. Brian Faulkner went there, W.B. Yates sent his son there. Adam Clayton from U-2 went there.

Did he? You too don't often talk about their boarding school backgrounds, did they? And they're playing bloody Sunday. That changes their image a little bit, I think. It's great to out people as the products of prestigious boarding schools, I think, on the show. I think it's one of the things we specialise. So Brian Faulkner, his father had run and founded, in fact, the world's largest shirt makers. So the Belfast Collar Company make more shirts than anybody else.

else on the planet. And he'd gone off to St. Columbus, and then he'd gone into politics. Fulkener is very good at politics. He's cunning. He's kind of no nonsense. He's incredibly ambitious. He is the champion of the kind of Protestant middle classes of small businessmen. If you're a small businessman, you love Brian Fultner. He'd been the Home Affairs Minister during the IRA border campaign. He'd been very hard. He'd taken the credit for beating them. Under Terence O'Neill, he'd been the Minister of Commerce. He'd been getting all this international investment. He thinks a lot of him. He thinks he's the only man who can keep Northern Ireland together. Fultner agrees and thinks I am the only man who can do it. I'm the champion of law and order. I'm the saviour of Northern Ireland and all this. But he has a terrible inheritance. Basically, the security situation is awful. There are bombs going off every day, the thump of explosions, the smell of cordite, the sound of sirens. These are becoming everyday features of life in Belfast. And by the 12th of July, so that's when the Provo's launch a new bombing campaign. There will already be more than 300

explosions, 320 shootings, 600 people hospitalized and the death toll for 1971 will come to 171, which is up sixfold in a year. So what Faulkner does, Faulkner thinks, right, I'm going to offer some concessions to the Catholics. We mentioned Jerry Fitt and you mentioned you asked if he was the same person as Austin Curry, the guy who had occupied had the Pebble Dash Council House. And actually both of these blokes had set up this new party, the SDLP,

which is a kind of moderate nationalist party. And Faulkner decides, I'm going to offer them an olive branch. It's a brilliant olive branch. I'm going to offer them the chairmanship of two storm on committees. Yeah, so enticing. So he's going to offer them this, right?

But then to balance this tremendous offer, he has to do something for the Protestant base. So he decides to take a big gamble. He flies to Britain and he asks Heath, he says, I'd like to introduce interment. I'd like to be able to lock people up without trial. Now, Heath is very well aware of the arguments against this. British Army intelligence have said to him, we'll catch one in five provisional IRA men. We'll probably catch only the lesser people, the small fry, as they put it. The RUC, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, have also told him the IRA have loads of young people now who we don't know and we won't know who they are and we can't pick them up.

Even the British commander in Belfast, the new British commander, Sir Harry Tuzzo, he says to Heath, I think the arguments against it are very strong. If you do this, be clear about this. This is a political decision, not a military one. And on top of all that, the T-Shok, the Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland, Jack Lynch, has said to the British ambassador, I really don't think you should do this. It will drive the Catholics into the arms of the IRA. I am basically begging you not to do it. The problem for Heath, though,

Heath is totally committed to Brian Faulkner. If Heath says no, and if Brian Faulkner says, well, that's it, I'm out, I'm done. Then Britain has no alternative but to introduce direct rule. And nobody in London wants to do that. And Reggie Mordling, you know, who's basically woken up now from his gin-soaked sleep. What's going on?

Yeah. Says to Ted Heath, look, the way to justify this, we say to people, this is the only way to sort of forestall a Protestant backlash against the Catholics. You know, actually, maybe the army are being too pessimistic. Maybe we'll get loads of people and it'll be fine. And so Heath says, okay, let's do it. So basically, people who know nothing about the situation are overruling people who know loads about it. That's pretty much exactly what's happened. Yes. But you can understand why they've

done it because if they're all in with Brian Faulkner, what else are they going to do? Find someone else. You know, I suppose they'd call his bluff. Or they could introduce direct rule right away, which may be arguably they should have done about two years earlier. That is one argument that you could make that basically the opportunity was missed in like 1969. They should have taken it over right away. But anyway, they didn't. So he says to Brian Faulkner, fine, you can introduce internment, it's a purely political decision, not military. So because of that, it must look even-handed. So what I want you to do, it must go along with a ban for six months and all-loyalist, you know, orange order parades and marches and stuff. Fulton is not happy about

this because it will upset his base, but he says, no, you've got to do it. And then the other thing that he says, which is absolutely crucial, says when you look up people without trial, You must, and I quote, include a certain number of Protestants. And Faulkner clearly doesn't like this, but he says, yeah, I hear you. Now, we shall see how that plays out. So on Monday the 9th of August, 1971, it's actually A-level results day, interestingly. At 4 o'clock in the morning, Operation Demetrius, as it is called, begins. And I always think Operation Demetrius sounds like a brilliant name for something.

It sounds like an incredibly daring swashbuckling raid in the Second World War. I can imagine your brother and Al Murray doing an amazing four-part series on it. Surely a multi-part series about Operation Demetrius. Wasn't there an Eric Ambler novel, The Mask of Demetrius? Yes, exactly, set in Constantinople. So it conjures up a kind of a kind of Balkan spy adventure. We shall see whether this lives up to the expectations. So before dawn, thousands of British troops sealing off streets across northern.

Northern Ireland. They're smashing down people's doors, they're breaking into their houses, and they're dragging out hundreds of people who are on these lists. And it's a very dramatic, it's a very cinematic scene, although I can't help thinking that if you were to see this on the big screen, you would assume the people doing the dragging out are the villains. It's very unusual for the people doing the dragging to be the heroes in the story. Well, especially if it's a provisional IRA film club, that's what you would assume. That's, I guess. So, If it's a Ken Loach film, then undoubtedly they're the villains. They're dragging Daniel Day Lewis out and Pete Posse Thwait or something.

Anyway, we'll come to the optics of this in a second. But it's important to say that as a military operation, this is an absolute unmitigated shambles. The army are using RUC intelligence files. But as everybody has told Heath, these files are massively out of date. They don't reflect the split between the official and provisional IRA. they don't reflect the fact that loads of young volunteers have joined the provisionals. Loads of the names are wrong. They don't get most of the key people.

There's a wonderful story in what I can't remember what book this is in, about a British officer who went at 4 o'clock in the morning, he burst into this bloke's house. And he finds this bloke who's clearly in his 80s. And this bloke says to him, when he drags him out of bed, this bloke says to him, I'm delighted to think that I'm still of trouble to the British government, but I have to tell you, I've not been acting.

since the Easter rising. Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? I suppose he would. So some of the people they take are teenagers who are just very nationalistic. At least one teenager is on the list purely because he plays Gaelic Games. Paul Rouse wouldn't approve of that, would he?

Paul Rouse. Paul Rouse would have been dragged out, you see, because of his enthusiasm for Gaelic Games. Yeah. They arrested in total 342 people and took them to internment camps. Now, given what Heath had said to him about, make sure you have a good balance.

So what is the balance, Dominic? So the balance is as follows. Out of 342, the balance is Catholics, 342. Protestants, zero. Why? They just couldn't be bothered in the end to get any Protestants. Well, actually, I'll let Reginald Mordling answer this question. So I'll leap ahead to tell you what Reginald Mordling said in interviews afterwards.

The newspaper said to him, why didn't you arrest loyalists? And he said, well, if any Protestant organizations were behaving like, the RRA, we should have treated them in precisely the same way. But the thing is, they had actually believed. The first killings were done by the UVF. Well, those guys shooting people in pubs. Right, exactly. So of course, this sets off this absolute, you know, furorory. Extraordinary scenes, actually why it's going on in Northern Ireland. So women will be banging dustbin lids when there are British troops approaching. There are people building barricades to stop and getting into the streets, people commandeering milk carts to use the bottles for petrol bombs. There's gigantic

rioting and the days afterwards, hundreds of houses set on fire by sectarian mobs of one kind or another. Seven thousand people were driven from their homes by mob violence. Great clouds of black smoke over Belfast Estates. 17 people shot dead in gun battles with the army. It's a screen of complete apocalyptic breakdown. and everything has gone horrendously wrong. So, as you say, apocalyptic, what does the judge dread of the British Conservative government make of this Reginal Mordling? Has he sobered up to deal with it? Not entirely.

So it's actually been a lovely day in suburban Hertfordshire where he lives. And Reggie has been chilling by his swimming pool with a bottle of gin. So he's been relaxing. And every now and again, he rouses himself from his lounge. to go ring Whitehorn to say, you know, how's it going? And they tell him and he said, oh, sounds splendid, absolutely splendid. And he goes back to the sun lounger. And I mean, it's a reminder, isn't it?

That, of course, ministers cannot keep track minute by minute of what is going on because the technological opportunities to do that are not in existence. And I guess that is something to bear in mind. Tom, this sounds like you're defending Reginald Mordland. I'm defending him. You know, a chap, it's a beautiful summer's day. A chap wants to hang out and drink gin. He doesn't want to be bothered with all this nonsense.

Yeah. I mean, he disgraces himself, actually, because afterwards, when he's interviewed, he tells the Guardian, we did this on army advice with the army who told us to do it. That's so bad. That's poor, yeah. And his biographer, Lewis Baston,

so Louis Baston came on a bonus last year to talk about borderlands, which is his big enthusiasm now. So we was talking about the Silesian border, slightly implausibly. But anyway, he says in his biography, which is called Reggie, he says this was an outright lie from more.

Which it was. Yeah, a total lie. Yeah. Bastian also describes this as, quote, one of the great blunders of recent British political history. It absolutely is. So basically, everyone says introducing internment was a total own goal. Had it worked, would it? I mean, had they got the right people, maybe it would have worked, do you think? Well, it might have been a price worth paying if you'd absolutely got the right people. If you'd literally... You've broken the IRA. Yeah. The IRA has all 1,000 people at this point. Imagine you locked up 500 of them.

Well, you were not going to get all 1,000, but you might get hundreds and hundreds of the senior people, break the back of the organization. You know, maybe that would work. Unfortunately, they absolutely didn't. They didn't get any of the right people. So are shambles. And it completely drives a wedge between moderate nationalist politicians and the authorities. And it completes what the falls curfew had begun. It destroys the relationship forever between the army and the Catholic population.

So, you know, there's no going back now. And, of course, the winners from this are the provisional IRA, because they've got their arms intact. They get loads of new recruits. And on Catholic estates, their reputation is higher than ever. Now, what makes this worse? What makes this far worse is what happens to the people interned. They are interned at a disused airfield at a place called Longcash,

in these sort of low, corrugated iron Nissen huts. Imagine, again, your brother and Al Murray love a nissons. and Hut, sort of World War II relic. The people in these huts are being tortured by the Army and by the IUC. They are being, you get the first reports in Irish newspapers, the people being dragged out of bed, 2 o'clock in the morning, and sort of beaten up and battered against the wall. And the army and Stormont, the government, say this is a lie.

This is IRA propaganda. But it's actually not a lie, it's true. And what does Reginald-Mortland think about this? He thinks it's brilliant. I think this is exactly what you should be doing. Does he? Yes. Because the army in the IUC, it had meetings before internment to talk about what they would do

and they'd agreed to adopt something called the Five Techniques. And the five techniques are making you stand spread eagled for ages, putting a hood over your head, playing white noise at you, giving you a minimum of bread and water. So just enough to keep you alive basically. But you know, you're thirsty and famished or whatever. And you're deprived of sleep. So this is what they'd done in Malaya, wasn't it, to break the insurgency there? In Malaya, in Palestine, in Kenya, in Cyprus.

This was an established British colonial practice. And it's extraordinary, I think to me, that the army thought they could, I mean, people will have their own views, of course, about whether such techniques are permissible. It's a big debate in Iraq, in Afghanistan. Yeah. That people that they thought they could do this in a part of the United Kingdom. Kingdom against United Kingdom citizens is pretty remarkable. Or is it? Because in the government, do they see Northern Ireland really? So there are definitely historians who say this shows the

colonial mindset. They wouldn't do this in Berkshire, but they think it's okay to do it in Ulster. Absolutely you're right. And the amazing thing is they have explicit government approval for it because you asked about marginal modelling. The Defence Secretary of Lord Carrington later told a cabinet committee, he said, Reggie and I explicitly approved the proposed methods of interrogation. So to read the minutes of the cabinet committee, the lives of British soldiers and innocent civilians depended on intelligence. We were dealing with an enemy who had no scruples, and we should not be unduly squeamish over methods of interrogation in these circumstances. So they're completely open about it with their colleagues. Now, of course, they can't keep this

quiet. It was amazing they thought they could. The Sunday Times did a big investigation. The Sunday Times Insight team listed 11 separate cases of torture. The government commissioned a report by three judges. Two of the judges said it's fine, but the third judge, Lord Gardner said, these techniques are secret, illegal, not morally justifiable and alien to the traditions of what I believe still to be the greatest democracy in the world. I see that he no longer believed that Britain was the greatest democracy in the world then if he framed it like that. Yeah, I mean, when a judge says that, there's no going back. You know, you're sunk. Ted Heath immediately when that came out, said, okay, fine, we won't use them again. But there's a brilliant letter actually by Graham Green. Graham Green said to the time, wrote to the

times, if I as a Catholic were living in Ulster today, I confess I would have one savage and irrational ambition to see Mr. Mordling pressed against a wall for hours on end with a hood over his head. It's a funny image because Mordling would of course be absolutely wasted. Hearing nothing but the noise of a wind machine, deprived of sleep when the noise temporarily ceases by the bland voice of a politician telling him his brain will suffer no irreparable damage. So all this, of course, is a gift to Britain's critics. It's a gift to people like Ted Kennedy in America, you know,

great champion of the Irish-American lobby. But it also is a gift to people in Britain on the radical left, who do agree with this thing, this stuff about Vietnam, who do see it as a morality story of brutal imperialists and heroic martyrs. So this is a point, 1971 or so, where you have marches in the streets in London that are kind of conflating loads of causes at once. The omnicors.

Omnicors. So my favourite placard, Gay Liberation Front supports battle for freedom in Ireland. Now, this would appeal to you, I know, with your Beatles enthusiasm, because you will know that the two best-known Beatles were great enthusiasts for the Troops Out movement at this point. So John Lennon would go on Marches. He reached an album in 72 sometime in New York City, which had two songs about Ireland.

That's his worst album by Miles. It has to be said. And of course, Wings, the band The Beatles could have been. Their debut single. Their debut single. Yeah. Give Ireland back to the Irish. Yes.

Give Ireland back to the Irish. Well, so you know that the guitar. In the forest in wings, Henry McCulloch was a Protestant from Londonderry, I guess we should call it. Wow. And his brother, I think, got beaten up in an Irish pub and Kilburn about it. About the song? Yeah. And Henry McCulloch kind of didn't go back to Northern Ireland for years and years because he would say worried about their reaction.

Yeah. Because Paul and Linda had talked him into this song against his will. I think Paul hadn't even discussed it with him. I think, you know, he thought, oh. that's insane. I'm not sure about this. But anyway, actually the thing about British opinion, I mean, this will, I think, surprise Irish listeners

and maybe some American listeners. It's the one thing I think that people often get wrong about this story abroad. People I think abroad, and I remember this when I lived in America, people would ask me about Northern Ireland. And I would say, no one in Britain cares about it at all.

And they would say, oh, no, that's not right. People in Britain have an irrational attachment to the only thing. of part of the island of Ireland. Most people in Britain, I mean, you will know this, Tom, you lived during this period, genuinely could not care less about this subject. And in fact, even doing this podcast, there's part of me that thinks, will we have any downloads because all our British listeners will say, no, too dull.

I'm not going to listen to this. It's depressing, I think. Yeah. But the main feeling, it was background noise of bombs and assassinations. And you just thought, oh, just make it stop. Yeah. It was the case even from the beginning. So September 1969, when the troops had just gone in, and you would think it would have at least the sort of novelty value, people were asked to rank the problems facing the British government and they unearingly ranked Northern Ireland as bottom least important.

But the thing is, the British government, do you think would have agreed with that or not? By this point, is it higher up? Ted Heath spends a lot of time on this. I mean, people are dying, you know? It's a serious thing. It's a low-level civil war. Is it as important to him as getting into the common market? No, nothing is as important.

I mean, to be fair to Ted Heath, Ted Heath has the most bonkers cascade of events and challenges. But it is remarkable. It's never an election issue. It never features in election campaigns. It's almost never mentioned at party political conferences. It rarely comes up on TV. It comes to seem like bad weather in February.

Yeah. It's just what you expect. You don't like it, but you just put up with it. Yeah, I think that's true. But anyway, Ted Heath, I mean, you asked about Ted Heath, Ted Heath cannot now ignore it, because after the disaster of internment, things go from very, very bad to absolutely horrendous.

So it's now mid-August, 1971, there's a dramatic increase in the bloodshed. Four people shot on the 11th, a Protestant shot on the 12th, the Catholic shot on the 13th, the soldier killed by the IRA and the 14th. You know, it's now becoming a daily occurrence that people are dying.

And we'll end with this, I mean, talk about a concatenation of events, with this absolute sort of drumbeat, of horror in the autumn of 1971. So it starts on Wednesday the 29th of September. It's 10.30 at night and we're in the four-step in, which is a Protestant pub, off the Shankill Road. And it is packed with people watching TV in the pub lounge.

And then a bomb goes off. And the bar roof collapses. Almost 30 people are injured and two of them are killed. Alexander Andrews and Ernie Bates. Alexander Andrews was 60. He was so badly disfigured by the bomb that his son had to identify. him by his shoes. And nobody claimed responsibility for this, but there's no doubt whatsoever that it was done

by the provisional IRA. And, you know, this pub is not a military target. This is the first time, really, that you get a bombing that is purely a sectarian attack. So that really is damning their souls then? Completely, completely. Then the 2nd of November, they strike again. This time, the Red Lion on the Ormo Road. 4.30 in the afternoon.

People are in the pub having a drink. two men walk into the pub with a third man with a gun and the two men put down this bomb I mean they literally carry in the bomb and then they say to the people in the pub you've got ten seconds to get out and then they get out themselves the bomb actually went off after six seconds

again the roof fell in dozens of people injured three people killed John Cochran Mary Gemmel and William Jordan who were all Protestants at this point the Ulster volunteer force get their revenge a month afterwards Saturday the fourth of December, 1971.

McGurk's Bar in the city centre. Kind of pub where old men are sitting round over a pint looking at the newspaper and talking about the horse racing. 8.45 that evening, a UVF man, so a loyalist. Walks into the pub entrance and he drops a brown parcel and then he runs back to a waiting car.

The parcel is a bomb which explodes almost immediately. It destroys the entire building. 15 people are killed and this includes McGurk, the landlord's wife and his 14-year-old daughter and a 13-year-old boy. So it's escalating. And then a week after that, the IRA take their revenge. So it's tip for tat.

And this is a terrible story. Saturday lunchtime, the Shankill Road, packed with shoppers. A car pulls up outside the Bar Moral Furniture Showroom, and a man jumps out and he puts a box down on the doorstep and then the car speeds off. A few seconds later, this box. explodes and it again destroys the entire building. 20 people are buried under the rubble. Four people are killed straight away. Two of them were staff in the showroom. The other two people who were killed were Tracy Munn and Colin Nicol. Tracy Munn was two and Colin Nicol was 17 months old and they were sharing a pram when they were killed. It's an absolutely horrendous scene. Loads of people

come running up and one of them is a boy. He's 15. He's called Billy McQuiston. He heard the bomb and he came running up. And he later told the BBC reporter Peter Taylor, he said, women were crying, men were trying to dig out the rubble. Other men were hitting the walls. I just stood there and cried, just totally and utterly numb. It wasn't until I got back home that I realized this isn't a game. There's a war going on here. These people are trying to do us all in because we're Protestants. They're going to kill us. So we're going to have to do something. And so the next day this 15-year-old boy goes to find the loyalist UDA and that evening they signed him up. And that was how it worked.

That was how it went on. So this was the United Kingdom in December, 1971. So we've seen how the atrocities have been escalating. And in 1972, things are going to get even worse because the conflict is going to be reaching its deadly peak. So in our final episode of this series, Bloody Sunday in Derry, Bloody Friday in Belfast, and Stormont, the Parliament of Northern Ireland will be getting mothballed. Club members can hear that episode now. You can sign up at the rest of history.com. There will be lots about this series in our incredible newsletter. You can sign up for that as well if you haven't already. Thank you, Dominic. We will be about.

with our final episode. Until then, goodbye. Bye-bye. 9-11 was the deadliest terrorist attack in US history. But could it have been prevented? I'm Gordon Carrera, National Security Journalist. And I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst, where the hosts of the rest is classified. In our latest series, we are telling the inside story of how the 9-11 terrorists slipped through the CIA's grasp. In the summer of 2000, a man walks up to US immigration at Newark Airport. His passport gets stamped, he's waved through and welcomed to America.

That single stamp was one of the gravest intelligence blunders in modern history. Because one year later, nearly 3,000 people will be dead. That man was Muhammad Atta, the ringleader of 9-11. But here's what they don't tell you. The CIA already knew Al-Qaeda was inside the US. An FBI memo explicitly warned that terrorists were in U.S. US flight schools. So how did he slip through? Why was this red flag ignored? In this series, we dig into the declassified files to uncover how the biggest terrorist attack on America was allowed

to happen. Get the full story by listening to The Rest is Classified and subscribing to the Declassified Club wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody, Dominic again. Now, here is the clip that we promised to you from our show The Book Club, which talks about Ernest Hempherson. Mingway's book for whom the bell tolls and specifically the history of the Spanish Civil War. So 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 Latifundiae, which go back to the Roman period. I found this extraordinary. I had no idea until I started reading

for this. Well, this is true of Spain and Portugal, actually. They would have absolutely gigantic rural estates run by landowners, almost a kind of feudal system. The peasants are enthralled to the landowner and to the church and whatnot. There are parts of Spain that have industrialized, the Basque Country, the North and Catalonia, but those are obviously places with separatist movements. So Spain feels very fractured, and there's lots of labour unrest, there's a big anarchist movement, there is a socialist movement. There's a communist party. In the 20s, there was a coup and a general took power called General Miguel Primo de Rivera, you know, under the king. But that didn't really work out. They brought back democracy at the beginning of the 1930s, but it's incredibly polarized and

unstable between right and left. There are terrible strikes. So, for example, in the north in 1935. There are assassinations. There are kind of paramilitary movements and whatnot. The son of the previous dictator, Prima de Rivera, sets up a little fascist party called the Falange, which actually sort of gives its name really to, it's then co-opted by the rights, by the conservatives who win the Spanish Civil War. I mean, whether they're really fascists or whether they're just basically using the fascist label is an interesting question. Right. So it all comes to head in 1936. There's an election at the beginning of the year, which means that a popular front, which is a kind of left-wing alliance of liberals, socialists, you know, sort of left-wing parties, some of the separatists,

or more nationalist groups from the areas like the Basque Country or Catalonia, they come to power. And there's a lot of social unrest 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 a 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 landowners, 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 and 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, and 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 but they don't really get it and they have help from foreign volunteers and this war becomes incredibly bitter and incredibly bloody.

I mean, this is always the way it was civil wars because people feel it's an existential struggle, the future of their country is at stake. They come to believe, you know, their neighbours, the people in the next town, the landowners or the priests or the anarchists or whoever are going to kill them in their families, so we've got to kill them first.

People, in some places, there are horrendous, horrendous, sadistic massacres and things. I think they found something like, at the end of, maybe the start of the 21st century or something, that Spain had the highest number of mass graves after Cambodia. So if you want to hear the full episode, just go to Apple or Spotify or YouTube and search for The Book Club.

And there it is.