The Rest Is History - 700. The Troubles: Bloody Sunday (Part 4)

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

How did Bloody Sunday erupt on the 30th of January 1972? Why did it follow on the heels of terrible violence? And, what were the consequences of that violent day?  Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the tragic events of Bloody Sunday, and the final attempt at peace in Northern Ireland.  *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

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Learn more at VolvoCars.a.com. 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 1860. 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 and a general. 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. Mr Speaker, I am deeply patriotic. I never want to believe anything bad about our country. I never want to call into question the behaviour of our soldiers and our army, who I believe to be the finest in the world. and I have seen for myself the very difficult and dangerous circumstances in which we ask our soldiers to serve.

But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear. There is no doubt, there is nothing equivocal, there are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong. What happened should never, ever have happened. The families of those who died should not have had to live with the pain and the hurt of that day and with a lifetime of loss. Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly.

The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces, and for that, on behalf of the government, indeed, on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry. So that was former Prime Minister David Cameron speaking to the House of Commons on the 15th of June 2010. And it was his response to the report of the Saville inquiry, which had been set up 12 years earlier by Tony Blair, to investigate the single most controversial moment of the entire troubles. And that moment was the shooting and killing of 13 unarmed Catholic civilians by British paratroopers during a protest march in Derry on the 30th of January, 1972, a day that has gone down in infamy as Bloody Sunday.

And the Saville inquiry was actually the second official British investigation. The first under Lord Chief Justice Whidgery, a splendid name, was conducted just weeks after the event, and that one largely exonerated the paratroopers. But most people didn't agree with that conclusion. Certainly the families of the victims never accepted it. And of course, you too never accepted it. And their song helped to make Bloody Sunday a cause-celebra wherever popular music is listened to by earnest teenagers in bedrooms. So Tony Blair set up the Savile Inquiry as part of the peace process in 1998. And it was incredibly expensive.

It cost almost 200 million pounds. And the Saville inquiry, unlike the Widdery report, it blamed the paratroopers for losing control and for lying about it afterwards, hence Cameron's statement afterwards. So it's obviously a notorious date in modern British and indeed Irish history. And today we'll explore the context for Bloody Sunday. We'll talk about what happened. day in January in 1972, why it mattered and how Northern Ireland spiraled into hell, basically,

in the worst year of the troubles. But first, by way of recap, let's pick up in the autumn of 1971. So in the last episode, we talked about the disaster of internment, which was that August, the new stories about the torture of the people who were interned, and then the sectarian bomb attacks that autumn. So the four steps, the Red Lion pubs, the Mubbs, the Mids, the Mids, the McGurks Bar attack and then the Balmoral Furniture showroom. Now amid all this, in October of that year, 71, relatively new Stormont Prime Minister Brian Faulkner flies to London. And he has come to brief Ted Heath on the desperate security situation.

And Faulkner says to him, look, this is dreadful. If these bombings continue, a breakdown in government might occur in a matter of weeks. And Heath says to him, I mean, this is very bad news. I agree. It's awful. and this cannot go on, the British people, the British public, is losing patience. Now, if you think about their options at this point, if we step back and think about their options, what can the British government plausibly do?

So one option, which would be the sort of the John Lennon option, and of course the option that the provisional IRA would like, the troops out movement, lots of people on the left who think this is Britain's Vietnam, but also lots of ordinary people in Britain who don't, you know, then they didn't give a damn about Northern Ireland. They don't understand why the British Army is there and why people are dying. This option would be to get out. To just say, fine, forget it.

We're going home. We're going to leave you to your own devices. So the Home Secretary, Reginald Mordling, we talked about him last time. Very clever, very corrupt, lazy, off his face on gin all the time. He's slightly of this mind. So there's a story about a group of community relations experts coming to meet him at his office. And they found him slumped in an armchair. And he was completely sort of exhausted and demoralised.

And he said, so what do we do? Arm the Protestants and get out? And obviously, you know, this is an option. It's the degole option, isn't it, with Algeria? Right, exactly. Now, why don't people do that? Well, a difference between Algeria and Northern Ireland. I can remember I actually had it, when I was at university, a tutor of mine,

encouraged me to see similarities between the situation in Algeria and that's a northern island. But on obvious differences, in Algeria, the people who want to stay part of France the pi noir as they're called they are very much a minority but in Northern Ireland a majority of people there if you regard it as a separate entity

a majority of people in that entity want to remain part of the United Kingdom also they've been there since the 17th century haven't they? They've been there a long time there are a million of them it's a very unusual thing for a country to basically dismember itself

to throw away part of its own territory where the majority of the population want to remain part of that country and perhaps more importantly almost everybody looking at the situation agrees that if the British army did withdraw and if Britain did go home as it were

the result would be an absolute sectarian free-for-all there would be massive bloodshed probably effectively we've talked about a low-level civil war there would be a proper civil war and the Republic of Ireland would have to get involved And there'd also be massive blowback in Britain, right? I mean, at the very least, there'd be hundreds of thousands of Protestant refugees, presumably crossing to mainland Britain. Yeah, completely the wood.

Completely the wood. And of course, this is why, the fact that it would be so chaotic, this is why, in the course of the 1970s, in private, the Irish government, are desperate for this not to happen. So in 1975, I mean, we'll maybe talk about this when we come to it in the future series. In 1975, the Irish government's actually getting in touch with Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, and they say, we want you to put pressure on the British, Do not withdraw. It's the last thing what we in Dublin want. We don't want a United Ireland right away. Please stay and hold the line. And there's an element in the Irish government thinking that still secretly has a little bit of that. I think so. I think undoubtedly, undoubtedly that it would be you'd be importing a large number of people who basically hate your

state. And do you really want to do that? So people keep coming back to this idea. This sort of what they see is another kind of semi-nuclear option. Scrap self-government in Northern Ireland and put it under direct rule from London. Heath hesitates to do that still at this point. Why? Because the Ministry of Defence have told him that if you do that, you can't be certain that local public officials

will follow your orders. There might be a complete breakdown of public services. The whole country might fall apart. British military intelligence says the risk of doing this is if the Protestants turn against us, we will be fighting. and I quote, fighting both sides in the middle of a civil war. At this point, the British public would say, well, this is mad, we should all come,

our troops should come home, and then you would get the massive bloodbath anyway. And so after all this, Heath and his ministers decide, what are we going to do? We'll just keep doing what we've been doing. We'll muddle on. We'll muddle through. And crucially, we must keep Brian Faulkner in power, because if he falls, we have no other option. So where does this leave the British army on the ground? We haven't really talked much about them in this series.

initially there are about 7,000 of them. This has now doubled to 15,000. And obviously they're not there, any illusion of them being there as sort of jolly peacemakers having fish and chips and cups of tears long since disappeared. They're in this quagmire, hence the Vietnam comparisons. It's this sort of, I think the weird thing about it for them is it's like a parallel universe, kind of apocalyptic Britain.

So there's in Peter Taylor's book, Brits about the experience of the army. He talks about this young officer who flew into Belfast for the first time in August 1971. And this officer looked down and he said you could see roads that had been blocked and barricaded. You could see fires from bonfires, burning cars and burning houses. And he said, the mad thing is that all this was happening in a city of the United Kingdom with red telephone boxes and red letter boxes.

I mean, that's the thing that kind of messes with the soldier's heads in a way. And of course, it's very dangerous. So every month soldiers are dying 42 of them died in 1971 killed by the IRA 64 of them died in 1972 I mentioned in the last episode Kevin Myers the RTE journalist

his memoir watching the door there's a moment in that a very sort of evocative passage he remembers in the summer of 1972 being on this burned out kind of Belfast estate and watching a teenage IRA gunman open fire on a British patrol

and one of the British soldiers being left bleeding to death in the middle of the street and children laughing and jeering him as he lay there dying. And Myers, I mentioned him last time, Irish Catholic parentage born in Leicester, ended up working for Irish TV. In his memoir he actually says the one thing that's underrated is what he calls the forbearance and good cheer of the British troops. He says they're under the worst provocation

and it's amazing that they behaved as well as they did. Of course, that's not an argument you often hear. and may seem in Congress, given the subject of today's episode. Now, even the soldiers themselves, of course, admit that they're not perfect. So most of these men, especially we're talking about the rank and file, the squatties. They are relatively poorly educated, young men. Lots of them in their late teens, early 20s. When you look at the ages and the casualty list, it's stunning how young they are, actually.

They're often from working-class estates in the cities of Northern England. These are people to whom turning the other cheek does not necessarily come naturally and many of them actually come to hate the people of Northern Ireland the bloke called Jim who Peter Taylor quotes You see these blokes dying in gutters In a war which is not classed as a war It makes you bloody bitter and it fills you with hate

I hated the people in those areas With an intensity that used to make me feel almost physically sick And Jim in his interview he talks about you know, we would go in, we would kick in their doors, who would smash their windows, when we got a chance we would smash in their TV screens. And I think you can see in the context how that would seem, how young men probably would behave like that. Can I just ask about the officers? Because I don't know if you've seen the adaptation of Say Nothing. I've not.

I've read the book, but not seen the TV series. So about two sisters who joined the IRA. Yeah. And Rory Keneer plays a, a bro. British intelligence officer absolutely brilliantly, I have to say. And he has kind of counterinsurgency experience from various British colonial engagements. Yeah. And he is played with a very icy heart. I think it's fair to say. And is that how the British officer class see what's going on? Do they similarly, you're saying, you know, I hate these people, this guy that gets quoted. Do you think the British officer

class feel the same? It's hard to generalise. Not all of them hate the local people, of course, but I think a lot of the British officer class, I mean, if you're in that position, the chances are that you might have served in the colonial engagement earlier in the 60s in Aden or whatever. So I think it's probably fair. There's quite a few of the British officer class view it through a colonial prism, as it were, to use the kind of jargon. I think they don't, they come to see, they come to have contempt or a dislike, a contempt for, dislike of the locals on all sides. So you don't find, you know, it's not like they're falling over themselves to pour syrup over the, the, the, the, the uniest population. I think they, they come to feel like, you know, it's us against the world.

They're in an alien environment. Everybody's against them. They don't understand it. They're sick of it. Their mates are dying. And that's true whether you're the old Etonian officer or whether you're the kid who left school at 16 and went straight into the army, I think. Right. because the officer class will be complicit in what happens on Bloody Sunday,

just as much as the squatties who do the firing. Well, when we come to Bloody Sunday, I mean, the single most best-known British soldier involved in Bloody Sunday is very much an officer-class kind of person, as we shall see. So the Catholic population at this point, the relationship between them and the army is just incredibly toxic. The Catholic population view the army's bullying occupiers, the army view them as their enemies,

And nowhere is this more pronounced than the city where the British Army had first arrived, which is London Derry or Derry. And a reminder for people, you know, the name is the, gives you a clue to its sort of fractured identity. It's about 60-40 Catholic Protestant. It's economically really struggling. The mood in Derry is very fractious and very bitter and has been since the late 60s. In fact, the scars of the fighting in 1969 at this point have still not healed. There are still burned out shops, burned out businesses.

There are huge barricades that block off Catholic estates, so particularly in an area that is called Free Derry. You know, basically there's a big mural. It says, you are now entering free dairy. There are barricades there. The entrances to the estate, the bogside are guarded by vigilantes in masks and balaclavas who are often openly carrying guns. And the British Army do not try and pull these barriers. down. No, they do not. And from this area, from free dairy, gangs of unemployed teenagers who call themselves the dairy young hooligans. That's what it says on the tin, I guess.

That's what it says on the tin, exactly. They go out on kind of raids into the city center, and they will loot shops, and they will try to burn Protestant-owned businesses and things like this. So by the second half of 1971, there was a sense that, you know, legitimate authority in dairy has pretty much broken down. The Protestant business owners, are outraged of this. They estimate their losses from arson at about four million pounds. A lot of money then. They are furious that the RUC, the police and the British Army are not protecting them. And every day there are these sort of scuffles and confrontations at the edge of the bogside, where teenagers will throw stones at British Army patrols, but the patrols won't go in.

And there are some people in the army who find this incredibly frustrating and humiliating. One of these people is a man called Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, who commands the first battalion of the parachute regiment. And Wilford says of these patrols in Derry, they just stood there in the road like Aunt Salas and they never went forward. It was horrifying. In other words, he's embarrassed to be a British officer

when this is happening. And the paras are the most... The hardest of the heart, as they see themselves. And Wilford's view is shared by the new British commander in Northern Ireland, Major General Robert Ford, who arrives in the late summer of 1971. Ford looks at the maps and he sees black lines on the army maps, that mark free dairy

and he says this is an embarrassment we shouldn't have such lines on our maps the local officers have been too soft and actually by being too soft they invite provocation and they put our men's lives at risk and men are dying so pretty much one a month

is being shot by snipers and killed and probably twice that number being wounded and Ford thinks this is getting worse because basically the people in the bogside are becoming emboldened So on the 14th of December, Ford writes to his officers and he says, the situation in Derry is deteriorating. It's insane that we have abandoned part of the second city of Northern Ireland to 40 IRA gunmen and 500 hooligans. And we've done nothing at all about it.

He says the correct military solution, these are his words, would be to cross the line into the no-go area, go in hard and root out the IRA. But, he says, the drug. Drawbacks are so serious that I want to hold off doing that for the time being. Why? Because, and I quote, the risk of casualties is high, and apart from gunmen or bombers, so-called unarmed rioters, possibly teenagers, are certain to be shot in the initial phases. Much will be made of the invasion of dairy and the slaughter of the innocent. So these are very prescient words from Major General Ford. Anyway, over Christmas, there's no improvement. So on the 7th of January, Ford writes another report,

and this becomes incredibly controversial later on. He says things are getting even worse. Our armoured cars, when they pass, they're surrounded by these teenagers and attacked, and the soldiers get out. And when the soldiers get out, snipers on the high-rise Rossville flats shoot at them and sometimes wound or kill them. This is absolutely unacceptable. we have to get tough

and he goes on to say the only way that we can restore law and order in dairy is to and I quote shoot selected ringleaders amongst the dairy young hooligans after clear warnings have been issued you know we have to shoot some of these teenagers

but he says he goes on to say we do not want to have unnecessary casualties we don't want to bring a firestorm of criticism down upon us so we will use a particular kind of ammunition so 0.22 inch ammunition, it's much less likely to kill people and it's much less likely to cause accidental casualties by killing people in the vicinity.

In other words, I think what Ford is basically saying is, I want us to shoot people but not necessarily to kill them. Yeah, salutary violence. Exactly. So that was on the 7th of January, 1972. Now, 11 days later, Brian Fultner, the Prime Minister, announces a ban on all parades in Derry. However, the civil rights group, NICRA, which we talked about a couple of episodes ago.

Sounds very sinister, doesn't it? Sounds like a kind of pro-smoking lobby. Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, this group, they have planned a civil rights march to protest against internment, which of course was introduced in August. And this march is scheduled for Sunday the 30th of January. And this is the day that will go down as bloody Sunday. So they've

They want to do this march Which is technically illegal And we come now to the day Probably no day In recent British history Perhaps all British history Has been chronicled so exhaustively D-Day perhaps

Possibly But when I tell you this The Saffel report Which covers this day comes to 10 volumes 5,036 pages And about 2.5 million words So you haven't listened to we have ways on D-Day

because I think there's a lot more. They've spent more, your brother and Al Murray. Surely Arnhem. Arnhem, yes. It's always Arnhem with them, isn't it? Anyway, are you and I are going to spend two and a half million words and 5,000 pages on Bloody Sunday?

Big spoiler alert for the listeners, we are not. We're going to give a very simplified version. If you want to read the Saville report, it is online and we'll see you in 10 years. So here is what happens. The army and the police authorities in the city agree that if the march goes ahead, which it clearly is going to, the marches

are going to defy the government's instructions. They want to keep it out of the city centre because they want to avoid more attacks on the shops. So we'll close off the city centre, we'll keep the marches within the Catholic areas. If it turns violent, they say we're going to use the army to scoop up as many rioters as possible. But we'll be careful about this. You know, we'll proceed with caution. The army should only go in after specific orders and don't confuse rioters and marchers. You know, we don't want bad publicity. Heaven for fend. Not bad publicity. Basically, if you've got well-meaning people waving placards, leave them alone. If you've got people throwing bricks at you with masks on, they're the people

you arrest. Now, who's going to do the scooping? General Ford thinks that the army and Derry have been too passive, of course. So as the arresting force, he sends to the hardest and most aggressive men that he has. And this is Lieutenant Colonel Wilford's first battalion of the Parra regiment. Now, they're the hardest men. Wilford himself is a really remarkable man actually to be commanding such men. Amazing story. So he came from, I think, Leicestershire.

He was born to a single mother. He was brought up by his grandparents and an anonymous donor paid for him to go to Loughborough Grammar School. At Loughborough Grammar School, he turned out to be an absolutely brilliant classicist and actor. So he was given a place at Rada, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where all the sort of top lovers go.

He turned it down and ended up joining the army. His idea of relaxation is to read Virgil and Marcus Aurelius in the original, in Latin. It's a very first world war in the trenches. Very much, although less First World War, after he left the army, I was reading obituous of him today, and this blew my mind.

After he left the army, with perhaps a slightly check of reputation, he grew a ponytail and became a Belgian antiques dealer. It's an unexpected development. It's a massively unexpected development. Anyway, in 1972, this bloke commands one of the most feared battalions in the British army. They are ultra-professional, ultra-aggressive. He always has his men kind of blacking up with their faces and wearing camouflage. He says, you know, we're fighters and killers.

We're not messing around here. What kind of camouflage are you wearing in Derry? You kind of dress up in, it looked like concrete or something. Dress as a tower block. A ballard. I don't know. I think you're just wearing it in case you suddenly sent to Malaya at a moment's notice. Well, anyway, he asked himself what would Marcus Aurelius do?

Marcus Aurelius would be wearing green combat fatigues, no? No, he wouldn't. He'd be dressing up as bollards. Fooling the rioters. Pouting. So even before Bloody Sunday, the Paris, these paras had a reputation, shall we say. So a few days beforehand, the then young journalist Simon Hoggart called them in print, they are the troops most hated by Catholics and troubled areas.

And he said other British officers regard them as little better than thugs in uniform. And actually other officers thought it was a great mistake to send in the Paris. And in Peter Taylor's book Brits, he quotes officers who said, at the time it is mad to be using them to police a non-violent civil rights march. But of course, Ford wants to use the power as precisely because he thinks it will be violent. The atmosphere in Derry is very tense. Just three days before the march, the IRA had ambushed an RUC patrol car and they'd killed two policemen. And Ford's officers on the ground say to him,

look, this march may start peacefully. but the dairy young hooligans backed up by the gunmen, this is a quote, the derry young hooligans backed up by the gunmen will undoubtedly take control at an early stage. And what they're particularly worried about, this may actually remind people a very unlikely parallel, which is the German invasion of Belgium in 1914. What they're really worried about is snipers, you know, people shooting from roofs and from sort of behind barricades and things.

The Paris operational orders explicitly wore, warn them. You should expect IRA terrorist activity. Almost certainly, snipers, petrol bombers and nail bombers will support the rioters. And snipers are their biggest fear. Snipers had killed 24 soldiers in the course of 1971. So when you, if you're a para and you wake up first thing in the morning, probably the threat of the sniper is the first thing you think of. But the parrars have the reputation they do because they are gung-ho, because they're not frightened. So one of them later remembers his commanding officer's words the night before. Let's teach them a lesson.

We want some kills tomorrow. Anyway, so we get to the day itself. When you dig into the Savile inquiry, you know, unless you've got like 10 years to spend reading this stuff, it's daunting the amount of detail, minute by minute detail. But actually, the big picture of it is pretty straightforward. Lunchtime the marches assemble. And they set off just before 3 o'clock in the afternoon. There were about 12,000 of them.

And the atmosphere, contrary to expectation at first, is pretty relaxed, pretty upbeat. Actually, there were people at the time said it was almost like a carnival atmosphere. People were quite jolly. They set off. By half past three, they're approaching the city centre. It is, of course, blocked off, sealed off by an army barricade on William Street. So at that point, most of the marches turned right going towards the bogside. They're going to stop when they get to free dairy corner.

as it's called, the entrance to hear speeches, people denouncing internment. Now back at William Street by the barricade, blocking off the city centre, there are some scuffles between rioters and the paras. Teenagers basically throwing stones at the British Army. And this is where the first shots are fired. The paratroopers fire five rounds, and they wound a teenage boy and a 59-year-old man. But they don't kill anybody.

But that is what they've basically in order to do. to wound to wound hooligans and rioters. And a few minutes later, there is a sniper shot. So he's an official IRA man. He fires a single shot. He misses the soldiers and he hits a drain pipe. So this is not long before 4 o'clock. A 355, Lieutenant Colonel Wilford asks permission from the commanding officer in Derry.

He says, I wonder, can we send in the Paris to pick up yobbos? That's his phrase. and 12 minutes pass and then he gets the confirmation from the overall dairy commander as follows yes fine send in a para subunit

to do scoop up op through barrier 14 not to conduct running battle down Rossville Street now this last sentence is totally ignored because a few minutes later

a convoy of armoured personnel carriers come screaming down the road down Rossville Street into the box side and paratroopers jump out and they immediately start grabbing people from the crowd, hitting them with kind of rifle butts, firing rubber bullets at this stage at them, and so on and so forth. And it's a scene, you've seen it so many times in this story in this series, the story of the troubles, chaos, hundreds of people screaming, people running away in panic, some people taking refuge

behind rubble barricades, throwing stones and things, but most people just running away. And the paras claimed later that it was at this point that they came under fire from snipers on top of the high-rise flats overlooking the scene. This, I think, the self-halt inquiry established beyond any possible doubt is just not true. There were no witnesses that saw snipers. There were no guns found. There were no bullets found afterwards. There was nothing. What effectively happens in the next few minutes is that the paratroopers completely lose control.

I mean, it's not an unfamiliar story with people policing crowds. You know, it's a terrible story, but it's not unknown. Well, I suppose, I mean, the Vietnam comparison that Ted Kennedy made, is that kind of mili or something? Yeah. It's soldiers, frazzled on the edge, commit atrocities. Yeah. I mean, this is the funny thing about it.

It costs 200 million pounds to do this inquiry. But I remember reading, you know, I was researching my book on the early 70s at that point when the report came. And I thought, you know, this is exactly as I thought it always would be. This would be the outcome. Because psychologically, from everything we know about how people behave in these situations, this makes complete sense. They sort of panic. They're over pumped up, as it were.

They're very hard men. They're trained killers. They're also very young men. They lose control. They start shooting. They fire more than 100 rounds into the crowd. They hit 26 people and they kill 13 people. and most of the people they kill are very young.

Six of them of the 13 were 17 years old. Most of the people they kill were running away, running to safety. Some of them were trying to help the injured, but we know that a lot of them were shot in the back. And the most famous image of the day is a Catholic priest called Edward Daly, and you can see the photos online. It's one of the ones that comes up immediately if you Google Bloody Sunday. It's a priest, and he's waving a blood-stained handkerchief as a white flag.

and they're trying to carry this guy to safety, 17-year-old Jackie Duddy. And Duddy dies just moments later. The priest, Edward Daly, was holding his hand and giving him the last rights as he died. And as you said, why this all happened is quite a straightforward. I think question to answer. If you send trained killers, renowned for their aggression, to police a march. And if you tell them, you're going to be attacked by snipers, you're making it quite likely that they will lose control.

So this is, I mean, General Ford had actually said it himself. That's why I read the quotation out. He'd said it in December. The risk of casualties is high. So-called unarmed rioters possibly teenagers are certain to be shot. Much will be made of the invasion of dairy and the slaughter of the innocent. Now, did the Paris feel guilty after this had happened? The short answer is no.

One of them says in the Brits that I mentioned, he says, we saw it as a job well done. I mean, this is possibly a heretical question. Yeah. Bearing in mind the military situation, was it a job well done? In other words, did it serve as a salutary atrocity

which made people think twice? No, absolutely not. If you're going to take such a cold-blooded view of it, which I mean, it's not a fair question to ask, right? Yeah, it's the rich of the third, you know, they did it and they right to do it kind of thing. Absolutely not, because, I mean, the evidence is in what happens in the next 11 months in Northern Ireland, and indeed in the next 20-odd years, which is things got a lot worse, and it complete, as we'll see, it completely destroys the reputation of the British Army and corrods beyond measure the relationship between them and much of the local population. So absolutely not. If you were taking the most Machiavellian kind of possibly or Klausovitzian interpretation, then no, absolutely not at all.

And what happens to free dairy? Still there. Do they not go in and bulldoze it? No, not at this point. No. That happens much later, think of Operation Moteman, but not at this point. No. Just on the Paris, actually, the job well done thing.

I guess to the end of their lives, a lot of the powers, I mean, they maintained and presumably still maintain that they did the right thing. They were shooting in self-defense. And actually, a really interesting person who's written about this, a very unexpected person is the extremely right-wing journalist. Douglas Murray. So Douglas Murray went, you know, assistant editor of the spectator or associate editor of spectator. He went to the Saville Inquiry and wrote a book about it. And he is incredibly scathing about the paratroopers. He calls them unrelenting liars. He says, you know,

they lied and lied and lied about coming under attack, about what they did, about not shooting people in the back, all of this kind of thing. They perjured themselves in the Saval Inquiry. I wonder if that's quite right. I think it's quite possible, in fact, psychologically very plausible, that they made up excuses and then came to believe them. I mean, isn't that such a common thing that people do? Also, I suppose, you know, your subconscious could tell you that you're hearing things that prompt you to do something that you want to do anyway. In the heat of the moment, in the chaos, people screaming, running away, sounds of gunshots, sounds of, you know, battle, you might come to, believe, you know, you might think, you might assume you're under fire because you've been

told it's possible, and then you start shooting, and then you lose control over yourself. Wilford is furious, isn't he, that Blair sets up the inquiry. Yes. Even if he's got a ponytail by that point. Yeah, from his Belgian antique shop, he's absolutely outraged. As indeed were, not everybody. So if you go, look into this, you can find plenty of people in the army who say it's terrible that our brave boys were subject.

to this relentless investigation. You know, they're in a terrible situation, terrible pressure, leave them alone. Equally, you can find people in the army who say they were out of control. I knew they were out of control. Well, because it's a terrible state on the reputation of the British Army.

So, I mean, as Cameron says, you know, it's unjustified and unjustifiable. Right. Cameron said that, but that's not what British politicians said at the time. So at the time, the government line was that the Paris had fired and self-defense and they were tremendous fellows. So Reginald Maudling the next day gave a speech in the Commons. He didn't say a single word about the 13 victims.

He said the paratroopers were defending themselves from people attacking them with firearms and with bombs, which just was not true. And actually, Bernadette Devlin, remember her? Yeah, they're the MP. She physically attacked Maudling on the floor of the House of Commons. Extraordinary things. She basically came down and basically just laid into him because she was. was so upset that he was, you know, these people had been killed and then she saw it, he was

smearing the victims. But actually, Mordling's constituency agent wrote to him afterwards and said, while it is never pleasant when people are shot dead, I must say I'm glad that at long last the troops have started to get tough. And you see that a lot in the British press in the next few days, the Daily Mail. Our troops are doing an impossible job, impossibly well. Even the guardian. The Guardian. The army has an intolerably difficult time in Ireland at times it is bound to act firmly, even severely. Robustly, one might say. Robustly, exactly. And of course, a lot of unionists, well, certainly loyalists said the more hardline unionists in Northern Ireland are not terribly sad about it. So Time magazine interviewed a labourer in a Belfast pub who said, you know, after 13 people

had been shot dead, he said, I wish it had been 1,300 of the bastards. But, of course it's terrible for Britain's image in Ireland and in America. In Ireland, there was a national day of morning, there was huge demonstrations, this massive crowd assembled outside the British embassy in Dublin, the police tried to hold them back, the crowd started throwing petrol bombs, and finally they burned down the Chancery Building. You know, it's kind of pretty big deal in a capital where basically nothing ever happens. And the big winners from all this, I mean, you're asking, you know, what are the, if you're being sort of completely ruthless about it, what are the implications? Well, the big winners from this are not the British, they're not the unionists, they are the

provisional IRA. So it's not a turning point, but it accelerates a process that's already underway, the breakdown and the legitimacy of the government, the collapse of the relationship between the British and the Catholics, and Republican paramilitary recruitment. Because basically, imagine that you're, let us say you're a middle class Catholic, you know, who's not terribly sectarian, and, you know, you're of a moderate disposition. You look at this story, and this story seems to say to you, everything that people say about the British is true. They're murderers, and then they lie about it. And you could think about the impact of people of Irish descent in Britain. So you could think of a man who is the son of Irish ancestors.

Irish forebears, had a very successful career, never said or sung anything political, really, and forms a new band and releases Give Ireland Back to the Irish. Because it's Paul McCartney. I was hoping it was Dennis Healy, but it wasn't. It was Paul McCartney. Paul McCartney, that is when he releases that single in the wake of Bloody Sunday. So to quote one young man, another young man, Events that day probably led more young nationalists to join the provisionals than any other single action by the British.

From that day on, money, guns and recruits flooded into the IRA. And the name of that young man was Jerry Adams. And we will be hearing more about him 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 the world.

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Hello everyone and welcome back to The Rest is History. It is now February 1972 and Northern Ireland is reeling from the shocking events of Bloody Sunday, which happened on the 30th of January 1972. And I guess, Dominant, I mean, the massive, massive question is where does the province go from here? Yeah, so it's pretty clear,

I think, that Stormont Parliament is doomed. I think it's probably been doomed for a couple of years, certainly from the introduction of British troops. I think it was always on borrowed time. But what happens next is far from settled. The classic idea that Irish Republicans have that the British are desperate to cling on,

to Northern Ireland is a fallacy. Actually, as we've discussed, a lot of the public are sick of it and a lot of the politicians would love to pull out. So in February 72, Heath and his cabinet have a big chat about it. And it's remarkable. All options are on the table. They talk about redrawing the border, let the Catholic areas join the Republic. We could have a referendum on ending partition. Maybe there's a solution where Northern Ireland remains technically part of the United Kingdom, but has some sort of constitutional association with Ireland. I mean, that is kind of the solution that ultimately they get to, isn't it? Yes, that is where they get to.

And actually a point worth making, I think, the place where they get to, the British would have taken that at any point after about 1970. It's absolutely, I mean, I know we joke about being a patriotic podcast, so some people will say, oh, they're very biased or whatever. But frankly, when you look at the history of it, it's not British obstinacy that stops the peace process happening in the 1970s. It's that of other parties. The British would absolutely have taken something like the Good Friday Agreement in 1972,

and they would have done all the way through, I think. And in fact, Ted Heath's Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas Hume, is on the right of the Tory party at this meeting, basically says our interests would best be served by getting rid. Tell the unionists they should join a United Ireland. You know, the fact that somebody like that is taking that position, would have come as a shock, I think, to a lot of Britain's critics because there's an assumption that people in Britain, I don't know, they're sort of a misty-eyed attachment

to the possession in Northern Ireland, which is just not true at all. Well, that's the thing, isn't it, that both the loyalist and the nationalist paramilitaries, they have a stake in committing violence. The British Army, despite running amok on Bloody Sunday, don't feel strongly committed enough to an ideological position to do anything comparable to that.

They'd much rather just pull out. They would. No question they would. Basically, I think if you're in the army, you're told you're being posted to Northern Ireland, you don't think, brilliant, you know, let's get stuck in, you think, oh, no, really? Anyway, in Northern Ireland itself, the pace of events now is quickening.

So the rate of killing increases in February 1972, the IRA alone killed 17 civilians. And then on the 23rd of February you have news from England. The official IRA have detonated a car bomb at the paratroopers' headquarters in Aldershot by the officers' mess. The troops were away, so the car bomb killed seven people. These people were, respectively, five dinner ladies, a Catholic chaplain and the gardener at the barracks. And is this the first attack on British soil? Well, it's English soil, isn't it?

because it tends to be England that gets attacked. Yes. Because that seems the obvious tactic. And it's surprising that they don't do it earlier, really. Well, don't forget they had attacked British soil in the 30s at Coventry in 1939. But it's, you know, I suppose they've got limited resources and they want to win the war on the streets of Belfast initially. It's not really until 1974, 75 that they move in earnest to attacking Britain. But yeah, it is the first sign of something that will.

recur very ominously. So that was the official IRA. Two weeks later, an attack by the provisional IRA this time in Belfast. And this, the target this time, I mean, this is a truly awful story. The target is the Abercorn restaurant in Belfast City Centre. So it was Catholic owned. But the reason they attacked it was probably because the upstairs bar of the Abercorn was very popular with soldiers on their evenings off. And the bombers were probably two teenage girls, because people saw two teenage girls leaving a handbag. But the result is a horrendous scene. So it was a Saturday afternoon.

The restaurant was packed with shoppers, mainly women, having coffee. Two women in their early 20s were killed. They were both Catholics. 140 people were injured. I mean, some horrible stories. A woman who had been out shopping for her wedding dress, lost an arm and an eye. A paramedic afterwards said the ambulances were awashed with blood.

It was the most distressing scene I've ever witnessed. And now here's the horrible twist. They call in all the doctors, you know, it's an emergency. So many people injured. One of the doctors who came in was an anesthetist called Dr. Fred Boreen. And he worked through the night on the wounded. And when he'd finished, he was taken aside and told, one of the two women killed was your daughter, Janet.

I mean, just unbelievable. So you've got a sense now that things are really becoming unglued. And actually, I was listening to some BBC radio. radio reports. They went to Voxpops on the streets of Belfast and the results are absolutely blood curdling because people on both sides basically say, yeah, maybe the British should get out because then we can just crack on and have the civil war. So it's a Catholic man.

He says, once they go, we'll have a proper civil war. The army of the Republic will probably intervene and help us, which is deluded, I think. Mr. Lynch won't let us down, he says, they barely have an army, exactly. Then there's an elderly, I mean, this is the one that always sticks in my mind. an elderly Protestant housewife, she says, yes, the British won't stay

because the British is soft. You know, they're, you can't rely on the British. They're still thinking that after Bloody Sunday. But I think there were a lot of people

who thought, remember that guy who said, why couldn't you shop 1,300 rather than 13? Yeah, I suppose. And this old woman says, when the British leave, she says,

we will have to fight with our bare hands. Shocking. And I think what is interesting about this, the reason I wanted to bring it up was the common view is so often that this

is a conflict that is imposed on a great mass of peace-loving people by just a tiny minority of monsters. And of course, there are a lot of people who want peace. And most people in Northern Ireland never set off a bomb, never pick up a gun. It would be a gross calumny to accuse them of all being suffused with sectarian hatred. But the paramilitaries are successful because they fill a political need, because they do have support. And does it? And does it? And does it? And does, that mean that people who are proactively for accommodation with the other side are targets? They're not targets, but they are, they find life, sometimes they find life very difficult. We will meet one such person at the very end of this episode, a very sad story.

Yes, I mean, actually, is not Terrence O'Neill, a good example of that? Yes, I suppose. You know, his premiership destroyed because he basically was regarded by, you know, his base, as an appeaser. Kevin Myers in his memoir says you know, politicians always spoke about a tiny minority of terrorists but he's very caustic.

He said, you know, for every active terrorist, there was probably a support group of at least 50 non-terrorists. Now, of course, that's not everybody, but, you know, this is a politically very polarized society in which a lot of people are prepared to make excuses for their own side. And that's not, I don't mean, this is nothing

uniquely Northern Irish about this. This is so often the case. So Heath is watching all this in horror. Then he gets the final straw, which is on 20th of March, the first really major IRA car bomb, because previously they'd been bombs in parcels and things. This was in Lower Donny Gould Street in the city centre, and midday. The street was full of shoppers and also schoolchildren going home for lunch. The IRA, as was often their way, they telephoned a warning, but they did so so late that it was impossible to act efficiently upon it. And they gave the wrong street name anyway in the warning.

Bonn went off, it killed seven people, including two policemen who were examining the car and three bin men who were working in the road. A horrific scene. I mean, when you read reports of it, you know, I have to sort of, I don't want to kind of give all the quotations because they're so horrible. The carnage, the school children injured, glass everywhere, body parts everywhere, it's awful. So two days after this, Fultner is summoned to London and he finds Heath completely grim faced and kind of curt and he says, okay, enough now. This cannot go on. This is the end. You've

got two options. Number one, you continue as Prime Minister in Northern Ireland, but we will run law and order for you. You lose responsibility for law and order. We're going to get rid of internment. We're going to have a new vote on the Irish border. And you have to invite moderate nationalists into your coalition government. That's option one. And option two, if you don't take that we're going to shut you down shut down the northern Irish parliament we will rule you directly from Westminster and Fultner cannot

I mean it's amazing that he didn't see this coming he cannot believe it he's completely taken aback they have a nine hour argument about it he says to Heath I thought you were my friend I feel betrayed by you he's also very offended he says to Heath at one point you're treating the parliament to Northern Ireland like a glorified county council and Heath with his legendary tact and charge

arm says, well, you are. Yeah, exactly. So Fultner goes back to Belfast. When he gets to Belfast, of course there's been another bomb. A bomb by the railway station destroys much of the railway station and injured 17 people in the Europa Hotel next door. So the next morning, Faulkner rings Heath and he says, I'm out, I'm done. You know, I'm not going to do what you tell me.

And so the following day, the 24th of March, Heath goes on TV across the United Kingdom. Heath, by the way, I mean, one thing we haven't really captured, Heath is absolutely shattered because you talked about the concatenation of events, I think last time. Heath has just been battling to get European entry through the House of Commons, and he's just been humiliated by the 1972 minor strike. I mean, Heath has basically had like an hour's sleep in the last six months. Well, I wonder he's rude.

Yeah. Well, he's very rude. I mean, to be fair, he'd be rude anyway. So he looks on TV, he looks grey and straight. He says, obviously Stormwater hasn't worked with shutting it down. I am sending my lieutenant, Willie Whitelaw, more of whom later, to Belfast, as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. He's basically going to be the Imperial Pro-Consul in Northern Ireland. And Heath tries to end on a jolly note.

This is a chance at last to bring the bombings and killings to an end. But nobody in Northern Ireland sees it that way. Do you think Heath sees it that way? No, I don't think Heath. Of course, Heath doesn't see it that way. he's not an idiot. He's just saying it because you can't end on a downbeat note and say, we're all doomed, everything's awful, nothing's going to get better.

So basically everybody in Northern Ireland condemns it. The IRA said the war goes on now. Brilliant. The gloves are off. We're fighting the British. Faulkner gives a press conference and says this is a victory for those who shout, lie, denigrate and destroy it, shows that violence can pay. I mean, he's not wrong about that.

No, I mean, I guess he isn't wrong. Absolutely he's not wrong. The shipyard workers at Harland and Wolf, descendants of the men who've built the Titanic. They walk out, they march through Belfast, chanting against Heath, the IRA and the Catholic Church. Goodness, what a Trinity there. And, yeah, Ted Heath is kind of odd in that company, isn't he?

He's the odd one now. He's a very Anglican-looking man. He's not a Catholic. Although he does like Europe. So he hangs around with a load of European Catholics. And there's a huge demonstration outside Stormont, 100,000 people with Ulster flags and Orange Orders. of flags and all this kind of thing.

So he's Lieutenant Willie Whitelaw flies into Belfast. We met him in the Thatcher episode. We did. Everyone needs a Willie. Everyone needs a Willie. He's your classic. He's another of your absolute classic. 70s British politicians who looks like, you know, the most shambling, woolly person you've

ever met and yet was a tank commander in Normandy. He has massive red cheeks and kind of little red veins running up to his oyster eyes, doesn't he? Oysterized. You've got to say oysterized by law when you talk about Willie White Law. And actually, he inspires great loyalty. I think he does a pretty good job of this,

actually. The top civil servants in Northern Ireland, Kenneth Bloomfield said it was one of the great pleasures of my life to enjoy the company and the confidence of that large, emotional, sometimes irascible, apparently is spontaneous but infinitely cunning man. Imagine someone's saying that about you. That's brilliant.

And White Law, to be fair to him, he assembles the team, and he says, I mean, the same thing to say, really, However awful things are outside, however many bombs go off, when we're together in private, we're going to enjoy ourselves. That's the mordling spirit. That is very much the wretching mortling spirit. I mean, the country is descending into the abyss, but we've got an absolutely terrific drinks cabinet.

However, you know, the challenges that he faces are awful. So obviously the Catholics are completely alienated, but so now are a lot of the Protestants who have swung very much towards the more hardline extreme. Now, a person who sadly, for fans of your accents, has not featured much in last couple of episodes, is the Reverend Ian Paisley. And people may wonder why. And actually, this is quite a sort of a fallow period in Paisley's rhetorical career. Well, he's become an MP, hasn't he? He's become an MP, so he's gone off to London, so he's not even there. The flesh pots of Westminster.

Exactly. But also, he's sort of all over the place politically at this point. He's been left behind a bit. He'd sort of slightly willed this sort of a crisis into being by his incredibly inflammatory rhetoric. But now that it has arrived, he doesn't really know where he stands. So, for example, Paisley was very much against internment.

Paisley was also unusually for a hardline in favour of direct rule from Westminster and scrapping Stormonts. I suppose because he thought Stormont was full of appeasers, probably, or something. So this leaves a vacancy for a man. who's largely forgotten now, but is a really extraordinary bloke, a bloke called William Craig. So William Craig had been O'Neill's

Home Affairs Minister, and he's been moving steadily to the right. Craig sees this, you know, he basically sees the vacancy on the right of Ulster Unionist politics, and he thinks, I will be the hardliners hardliner. And he founded his own party in February

1972 called Ulster Vanguard. And it looks like something, I have to say, if There are Ulster Vanguard listeners, I hope they're not going to be hideously offended. When I say, it looks like the sort of fascist party you would imagine in a TV series set an alternative universe 1970s Britain. Or what's his name in Reggie Perrin? Oh, the bloke who wants to set up his own private army. Jeffrey Palmer.

Jeffrey Palmer. I think it's more sinister than Jeffrey Palmer, frankly. They have a very fascistic logo, which you can see online, which is a kind of blue V. That's never a good sign. At rallies, he has an honour guard that surrounds him. They wear uniforms with an orange sash. And they also do a kind of Nazi salute. Now, you know what it is?

It's a national theatre reimagining of a Shakespeare Roman play. Daring and edgy that no one's ever thought of before. That is exactly. Starring Maxine Peake. Christopher Eccleston. Yeah. It's basically, it's a national theatre. play produced in 2012, imagining what will happen when David Cameron introduces fascism in Britain.

That's what it is. Or in alliance with the fossil fuels industry. So, Christopher Regleston is so involved in this. Yeah, he totally is. He's Coriolanus. Okay, but this bloke, Craig, he is so aggressive. He gives a speech to 60,000 people in Belfast, loyalists. He says, we must build up dossiers on the men.

and women who are a menace to this country. Because one day, ladies and gentlemen, if the politicians fail us, it may be our job to liquidate the enemy. I don't feel you should be talking about liquidating the enemy. Well, those are the kind of comments of people who like The Odyssey from people on X. It's about you. Yeah, I know. Let's just Elon Musk.

I know. We are at war. We must round up these people who like Christopher Nolan films and shoot them. I'll just give you a flavour of the comments I got. But there's actually more to come from Muskstroke William Craig. So at one point he's invited to address the Monday Club, the hard right conservative club at the House of Commons. He goes to the House of Commons. Drink has been taken and he throws caution to the wind and he says to his audience of Tory MPs,

if a British government stands in our way and don't forget there is a conservative government at this point, he says, I have 80,000 men ready to take up arms against them. We are prepared to come out and shoot and kill. I am prepared to kill. And those behind me have my full support. When we say force, we mean force. And what does the Monday Club? What's their reaction to this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they hear here, and then they start talking about Rhodesia, surely. I mean, that's basically the vibe, isn't it? Now, you may say, does this man really have 80,000 people behind him? I don't think he has 80,000, but I do think he has thousands. So his movement was very closely allied to the UDA, the Ulster Defense Association, the vigilance, anti-alliance that we talked about last time. So they at this point are at their absolute peak.

They had not been prescribed by the government, unlike other paramilitary groups. So they will march openly through the streets. You can see, you can Google photos of them. They will sort of wander through the streets and their dark glasses and military fatigues. They're very popular on the Protestant estates. And I think a reason for this and something underappreciated, I think I mentioned this in the first episode, I think massively underappreciating the story's the economic context. This is a point where on a lot of these estates, unemployment among young men, it's at least 20% in some estates it's 40 or 50%.

Basically, there are a lot of 20-year-old men who left school five years earlier or four years earlier or whatever and have nothing to do. So it's a slightly Vimar vibe. Possibly, yeah. It's also, I mean, the one thing we haven't really talked about, I think also underappreciated, why do people join all these groups? It's fun. It's fun.

Right. They like dressing up. They like being given a gun. They're like hanging around with their mates. Violent Boy Scouts. Completely. And the UDA, I mean, the UDA don't have the ideological aspirations of the IRA. They are basically vigilantes stroke gangsters.

So there's no spiritual crisis for them? I don't think so. They run protection rackets. They will hijack lorries with TVs in or cigarettes or alcohol or something. I mean, that's, again, a difference with Paisley, isn't it? Because Paisley is a man of God, even if that is a god of wrath. So he does have to consider what the Bible tells him and the future of his soul and everything. But these guys, they're not.

No, Ian Paisley never hijacked a lorry carrying bottles of, you know, what's a bushmills? Is that a thing? That's like a Northern Irish thing, isn't it? Anyway. Yeah, and journalists would go out to the UDA training camps to inspect them, and they always scoffed at them. So Peter Taylor watched them training outside Belfast, and he reported as follows, a series of overweight loyalists panted for breath as they monkey climbed a rope suspended above the ground and went through the motions of less than agile hand-to-hand combat.

Just jump on people, crush them. And Kevin Myers said they were, he doesn't take them seriously at all in his memoir. And he says they were the only terrorist group in the world who designed their own regimental blazer, complete with gold badge. Anyway, there's been too much laughter because there's nothing funny about loyalists. violence in the summer of 72. This is the bloodiest year, the troubles. It's the peak of sectarian killings. These loyalist paramilitary

people probably killed about 120 people that year. And these people were not other paramilitaries. They are Catholic civilians just walking down the street, dragged out of pubs, sometimes attacked in their own homes. And to put that into context, the British Army killed just under 90 people

in 1972. The official IRA killed 20 people. and the provisional IRA killed almost 230 people. Now, talking of the provisional IRA, they are cocker hoop with the demise of Stormont. I mean, they were only founded at the turn of 1970, and we're in the middle of 1972. The Northern Irish Parliament, which they hated, is gone, and the nationalist population has been well and truly radicalised.

As they see it, they are well on the way to achieving their goals. I mean, one IRA man said as follows, everyone felt we were very close to victory. Most people on the ground felt it was only a matter of time before the British were finally going to admit defeat. And so that explains why at this point, spring summer 1972, they do something which some listeners may be surprised by. They are very happy to talk to the British about ending this whole thing because, as they see it, they are in the position of basically dictating the terms of the British. surrender. So on the 13th of June, they held a press conference in Derry. If the British will agree to peace talks, would declare a ceasefire. And Willie Whitelaw says, you know, publicly he says no,

but obviously privately he's thinking, well, it'd be mad not to talk to them. Six days later, he quietly met two of their ceasefire conditions. So first of all, he awarded IRA prisoners special category status, which means they will not be treated as common criminals. They will be treated as political prisoners. So, for example, they can wear their own clothes, which becomes a huge deal in the hunger strikes in 1981. And the other condition, he agrees to release a bearded young man who has been interned on a prison ship, HMS Maidstone, and this young man has been accused of being a commander of a Belfast IRA battalion. This young man is the 23-year-old Jerry Adams, who, as you know, Tom, maintains that he was never a member of the IRA. So he's been

wrongly interned. In his own mind, wrongly interred, and indeed wrongly. Well, I mean, his entire presence in the next few minutes of this episode is bewildering. A terrible... It's bewildering.

Mistaken identity. It's a terrible case of mistaken identity. What's that barman doing there? He's inexplicably being invited to all these meetings when he has nothing to contribute. So the day after Adams was released, two British officials

drive to a country house outside dairy. One of them is white Senior Civil Servant, Philip Woodfield, and the other is a senior MI6 officer called Frank Steele. And waiting for them are an IRA man since the 1950s called David O'Connell and, baffling me, Jerry Adams. So you're kind of intern, work placement. Yeah. Who knows?

Who knows why he's there? So for three hours, they have this meeting and they agree a deal. They'll have a temporary IRA ceasefire, steal, the MI6 man. And O'Connell basically set up a telephone hotline so they can talk to each other. And the IRA will meet with White Law himself. And Woodfield reports to White Law. He says, the mood at this meeting, this again may surprise listeners. He says the mood was very informal and very relaxed.

The two Irishmen were respectable and respectful throughout. They made no bombastic defence of their past. And they made no attacks on the British government, the British army. or any other communities or bodies in Northern Ireland. Their response to every argument put to them was reasonable and moderate. And he says to White Law, I think they genuinely want a ceasefire and a permanent end to violence. Now, sort of more hardline listers may say, gosh, this bloke's gone completely native.

But the MI6 man, Steele, went even further. He said of David O'Connell. He was a very quiet, self-contained and self-disciplined man. I know it's an unfashionable thing to say, but I liked him. and he has a remarkable exchange with Jerry Adams whom Steele finds very personal and intelligent and Steele said to Adams you don't want to spend the rest of your life on the run from us British

what do you want to do with your life and Adam said to him I want to go to university and get a degree and Steele said but we're not stopping you all you've got to do is renounce violence and you can go to university and get a degree and Adams actually stopped and thought for a minute or two

and then said to Steele no I've got to help to get rid of you British first. How do you do that if you're just a barman? So, I mean, he would say through political means, through membership of Sinn Féin, but not the IRA, wouldn't he? Would he not? Yeah, I guess he would. So two days later, they announced a ceasefire to begin on Monday, the 26th of June, and then on the 7th of July, a really extraordinary moment. Top secret, an IRA delegation is flown to London for secret talks with Willie Whitelaw. Four of them are long-standing IRA men, but two of them are much

younger. One of them is Martin McGuinness, who is the second in command of the Derry IRA and was present at Bloody Sunday. And the other, yet again, mistaken identity. No one knows where is there, Jerry Adams. And Martin McGuinness? Yeah, Martin McGuinness, exactly. Big fan of cricket and PG Woodhouse. Was Martin McGinnis a fan of cricket? He loved it. Yeah, he loved it. And he liked PG Woodhouse. Yeah. Wow. My brother was Jerry Adams' publicity agent. Of course he was. I'd forgotten that. And Martin Guinness was a very charming man. I mean, it got on very well with Ian Paisley as well. Of course, the Chuckle Brothers.

Just to clear this up for listeners, your brother was Jerry Adams' agent in his capacity as a publisher. Yes, yes, his book had come out. Your brother was not a member of Sinn Féin. I mean, that's a hell of a twist. Although, Jerry Adams would always send him a Christmas card and there would be, you know, happy Christmas. And there'd be a kind of a Christmas tree wrapped up in

barbed wire. Oh my God. It stuck out in his Wilcher cottage. And also, Jerry Adams and Christmas cards, the best ever moment in the history of social media. Oh, yes. It's when Jerry Adams said, I was trying to reinvent himself on social media as a vunkular grandfather and said he was having trouble with his Christmas lights. Can no one give me a lighter? Yeah.

Somebody replied and said, surely you must know somebody you can fit a timer. But of course he wouldn't because he wasn't a member of that organisation. He had terrible problem with wind and he was a great way. He was better out than it. Ah, terrible. I knew he was a bad man. So they're flown, they're going to go to London. It's a farcical journey. Their car breaks down. All six of the delegates have to cram into one car. They're picked up by an MI6 minivan. The minivan gets stuck behind a farmer and some cows, a very Irish scene. And finally, they get to London. They're driven to Chelsea to a place called Cheney Walk. It's the home of White Law's junior minister, Paul Channon. It's a really hot day. Whitelaw is waiting for them. He offers them drinks. They refills. They refere fuse. There's some suspicion that they might have thought White was going to poison them. I think that's obviously ludicrous. He wasn't going to poison them. I think it's much more that they are, because there's so many of them, they can't really relax because they're all watching each other.

And of course, there is a precedent for IRA men going to London, which we've done on the rest is history, the Anglo-Irish treaty negotiations. And then all the talk was, you know, selling out and people becoming, you know, Michael Collins falling for the blandishments, the British. So they are determined not to do this and they're very stiff and serious. And the tone is set by the IRA chief of staff, a man who calls himself Sean McSiefen. And he is an absolutely extraordinary figure. I mean, he's basically a massive fraud, right? I mean, he is a massive fraud.

So his real name, as it were, is John Stevenson. and he was from East London. His father was not Irish, but an English legal clerk. His mother was Bethel Green born and bred. She did have Irish blood, but Ulster Protestant blood. But he's like the kind of guy who's incredibly English, but insists on supporting Ireland in rugby matches. Exactly.

He goes to a leading public school and wears an Ireland rugby shirt. That's exactly the kind of man this is, Although from Beth of more Bethnal Green kind of vintage. So he was in the RAF. For some reason, I don't know, he got radicalized. He learned Irish. He changed his name, galicized it, became ultra-Catholic, and basically became more Irish than the Irish.

And what would drive him mad is that the other IRA men used to call him the Englishman. Which he was. He was. Exactly. But because he was more Irish than the Irish, so he was ultra-Catholic, he didn't drink, he didn't smoke, He was passionately anti-abortion. He had no sense of humour.

His hard work, basically. So he's quite de Valera. Yeah, a little bit. I mean, we talked before, when we were talking about the late furor of Nazi Germany, what a terrible person he'd be to have at your wedding.

This bloke would be awful as a wedding guest because, of course, like Hitler, doesn't drink, doesn't smoke. And is only going to talk to you with the sort of, apparently he would adopt a fake Irish accent. Kevin Myers in his memoir is very simplistic about his fake.

Like that S&P. Yeah, the SMP woman who has the fake Scottish accent. Who changes her accent depending on where she is. So he does the talking anyway at this meeting, presumably in his accent. He reads a list of demands. He says, we need you to release all that prisoners, total British withdrawal you've got till 1975, and have an all-Ireland referendum on ending partition. So if he doesn't say you've got to get out nigh.

No, he does not. So the all-Ireland referendum on ending partition, of course an all-Ireland referendum would mean the end of Northern Ireland. The British position is and always has been, and indeed from the 1990s, the Irish position, is that this is for the people of Northern Ireland as a distinct unit to decide, but that's not the IRA's position.

I mean, the North Ireland referendum, would it definitely? I guess the emotional case for it would be so strong, wouldn't it? But the practical code, it would be head and heart. The emotional case would be very strong. If you're living in like, I don't know, Waterford, in 1972 and somebody says, would you now feel her life would be materially improved

by the addition of Northern Ireland, with all of its issues, to your national unit? What would you think? I mean, I think the national case would be so strong. Yes, I think you wouldn't be able to resist the promptings of your heart, but your head might say, I'm not sure.

Yeah, this is not ideal. Anyway, the IRA clearly have misread this situation because there is no way the British are going to give into this. And it became obvious, I think, to White Law and to Frank Steele, who was there. The IRA basically thought they'd won and the British were negotiating their surrender. And that was a complete and utter misreading of the situation. So it breaks up the meeting.

They go back to Belfast. And Steele is with them. The MI6 man is with them the whole time. And he says to them on the flight back, I'm so disappointed. And he says to them, I hope you're not going to go back to your bloody stupid campaign of violence. I said, if they really want to,

to a United Ireland. They were wasting their time shooting at British soldiers and bombing Northern Ireland into an industrial and social slum. They should be trying to persuade the Protestants that they would have some sort of satisfactory life, jobs, housing and so on, in some sort of linkage with the South. And still remembered later he said, no, they said to me, we've got to get rid of you British first. And the way to get rid of you, as has been proved all over your empire, is violence. You will get fed up and go away. And you could see. why that might not be a wholly unreasonable perspective. That we've been saying throughout that people in mainland Britain are weary and bored of it, they're not interested, they wish it would all go away. People in the IRA are not stupid. I mean, they're keeping track of British public opinion. They must know this. I mean, that is why in due course they're going to start bombing the mainland.

But actually, they don't withdraw. No, they don't. But actually, one of the reasons I think is that precisely because the RA do start bombing the British mainland, actually. So I think once the IRA do that, there is no way the British would ever withdraw. Because you cannot surrender to the men of violence. No, but, I mean, you can't, I mean, to blow,

if you blow up British pubs in Birmingham, Guildford and so on, if you blow up a coach on the M62, if you blow, you know, bombs in London, if you have bombs in Piccadilly, all of that stuff, once you do that, then that will harden the British public against, to you. I think the IRA completely misread the British Republic in that regard. There was no way they were ever going to withdraw once the

IRA attacked Britain itself. The tragic irony of all this is that if they'd done a deal then in 1972, they'd have probably got what they got in the late 1990s. A lot of lives would have been saved. But of course, the reason they don't do the deal is because they think they'll get a

better outcome by fighting. I think there's that. Plus, I think at the time, the Conflict is not very old. And this is probably, again, an heretical thing to say, but I think there are quite a lot of people who enjoy the conflict, actually, on both sides, loyalist and Republican. One IRA man said, maybe you can't bomb a million Protestants into United Ireland, but you could have good fun trying. And I think there are a lot of people, as horrendous as it will sound for some listeners, who actually found it very exciting. Yeah, the safe houses, the smuggling of guns, the operations, all of that.

And there are people in the British Army who find it exciting as well, aren't there? Though, you know, kind of undercover British officers. What's his name? Robert Nyrak. Yeah, Robert Nyrak. So a couple of days later, the ceasefire ends, street battles again. A huge new surge of violence. So nine days after the end of the ceasefire, the IRA, the UDA and the British Army between them killed 42 people.

And by the end of 1972, to give you the stats, there'd been 2,000 bombings, 2,000 armed robberies, more than 10,000 shootings, 5,000 people badly wounded, 479 people killed. And to be honest, there's only so many of these atrocities we can really inflict on an audience. So Heath makes one more attempt to find a peaceful solution. There's a massive loyalist strike in 1974. There's, of course, the hunger strikes under Margaret Thatcher in 1981. We'll come back to that another time.

But I'll leave you with just a story that I think says so much about what happened to Northern Ireland in not an entirely joyful way. So on the afternoon of the 21st of July, that is two weeks. after the failure of these talks. The provisional set off 22 bombs in the centre of Belfast, and they gave a series of hoax warnings that confused the authorities that meant that they couldn't evacuate the scene. These bombs go off over the course of just over an hour.

They killed nine people, and they seriously injured 130 people. And some of the bodies that were blown up, they were scattered so far that on the TV news that night, the pictures showed policemen literally scooping up body parts into back. And this went down as Bloody Friday. And it actually did tremendous damage to the IRA, lost them a lot of moderate nationalist support, and lost them support in America.

And one of the victims, I mean, this is an awful story. One of the victims was a messenger boy who was 14 years old called Stephen Parker. And he had spotted a car bomb in Cave Hill Road, and he was trying to warn people when it went off and he was killed. And his father, the Reverend Joseph Parker, was a Church of Ireland chaplain at a sailor's mission in Belfast. And he went along, he was asked to identify his son's body, and it was so badly injured that he could only identify his son's body

by a box of trick matches that his son had shown him the night before in his pocket and his boy scout's belt, of which his son was very proud. And afterwards, the Reverend Parker set up a peace group in his son's memory. It was called Witness for Peace. and he held services outside City Hall in Belfast and also at the GPO in Dublin, and he would plant a white cross for every victim of the troubles. So quite moving story. But here's the twist.

People didn't like it. They didn't like him campaigning for peace. His own church did not like it. His own bishop said, can you please stop talking about peace? It alienates our parishioners. And can you confine your peace activities? to your day off. And so in 1975, the Reverend Parker and his wife left Northern Ireland

for good and they emigrated to Vancouver in Canada. And in the meantime, the killing went on. And Dominic, as you said, we will be returning to this story in due course. Still a long way to go before we reached the Good Friday Agreement. And there will as ever be more about this on this theme in our brilliant newsletter, which if you're not already signed up, you can get by signing up at the rest is history.com. Next week, we will be heading right back in time to ancient Rome, to the Roman Republic, and two of its most famous names, Marius and Sulla. And if you feel there haven't been enough civil war on the podcast recently, there will be Rome's first civil war as Marius and Sulla start tearing chunks out of each other. So all of that to come. And if you want to hear

all four episodes of that right away on Monday, again, you can sign up for them at the rest ishistri.com. But for now, Dominic, thank you for taking us through this grim story. And thank you everyone for listening. Bye bye. Bye-bye. Two and five Canadians will hear the words you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar-raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family

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