Ireland's OWN: History
31 December 2006
1976: British misled Irish on SAS
—by Rory Rapple, Sunday Business Post
Newly-released British state papers from 1976 show that the British government consistently misled Dublin about the extent and duration of SAS involvement in the North.
The British claimed that the SAS was first deployed in 1976, but material just released indicates otherwise. The papers also cast a new light on the SAS’ role in training members of a Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU), which carried out surveillance on loyalist and republican paramilitaries.
1976 was a year marked by political sterility and sectarian atrocity in the North. It proved to be the second-worst year for casualties in the entire troubles, beginning with an unprecedented intensification of sectarian tit-for-tat killings in south Armagh. On January 4, five Catholics were killed by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).This was followed the next day by the murder of ten Protestant workmen by IRA men operating as the ‘‘South Armagh Republican Action Force’’.
In response, the British government - headed by Labour prime minister Harold Wilson - announced that it was sending emergency reinforcements to the county in the form of a Spearhead Battalion and, more controversially, the SAS. This was the first time that a British government had publicly referred to the presence of the SAS in the North, although Republicans had long claimed that the regiment had been active on both sides of the border.
By May, the Garda in the Republic had arrested armed plain clothes SAS members south of the border.
The 1976 state papers also disclose the disarray within the British Labour government on its Northern policy. Wilson began the year pessimistically by writing ‘‘an apocalyptic note for the record’’. Only six copies of the note were initially distributed. In it, he contemplated the courses of action open to the British government if all policies to do with the North failed. He paid particular attention to what might happen if loyalists made a unilateral declaration of independence.
Although he accepted that some link with the British monarch - probably in the form of dominion status - would remain, he was not sure that Queen Elizabeth would be willing ‘‘to accept the headship of such an unruly mob, [given] that they are loyal to no monarch, except a long dead Dutchman’’. Wilson retired as prime minister in April 1976 and was replaced by James Callaghan.
Lines of communication remained open between the British government and the Provisional IRA, which had been nominally on ceasefire since March 1975. Previously unreleased files indicate that the Provisional leaders in 1976 remained eager to end their campaign once they received ‘‘a private indication of [British] intent to withdraw from Ireland’’. They claimed that they would even be happy to ‘‘contemplate a future loyalist government in a six-county Ulster’’, as long as disengagement could be discreetly assured ‘‘in due course’’.
Merlyn Rees, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, noted that the Provisional IRA leaders were getting ‘‘desperate’’ because of their increasing awareness that the urban Catholic population did not support a ‘‘return to all-out violence’’.
Rees believed that the Provos’ confusion was a direct result of problems deliberately caused by the British government.
Although military capability in Derry and Belfast was strong, public opinion was a disincentive to any return to war.
He noted that the main thrust of IRA activity was now in rural areas, such as south Armagh. According to the minutes of a meeting in February between Provisional Sinn Fein president Ruairi O Bradaigh and a contact in the British secret service, the Sinn Fein leader described the type of violence increasingly being carried out by the IRA as ‘‘protective retaliation’’.
In the same month, Rees told the cabinet committee on Northern Ireland that, although ‘‘the number of sectarian murders had risen...they were a smaller threat to the general peace of the province than the IRA bombing campaigns of the past’’. He also indicated that co-operation between the Garda and the RUC was now much closer than ever before because ‘‘the Irish had been shaken by the loyalists’ bomb attacks in the Republic, and fear of further attacks had encouraged them to increase their efforts on the border’’. Troop levels in the North reached 15,500, 2,200 of which were stationed in south Armagh.
The Provisionals’ attempts to step up their bombing campaign in Britain during 1976 were particularly unsuccessful, according to a secret Home Office paper written in April.
Members of the new IRA bombing team were ‘‘inexpert bomb makers’’, unlike the Balcombe Street gang which had been apprehended by the police and the SAS the previous December.
Irish government outrage at continued contact between the British government and the Provisional IRA was expressed at a Dublin meeting between Merlyn Rees, Garret FitzGerald, minister for defence Paddy Cooney and Conor Cruise O’Brien, the minister for posts and telegraphs, on May 20.
Rees ‘‘emphasised that contact was less frequent than generally assumed, but that it would be resumed if thought necessary’’. Irish ministers countered that the IRA ‘‘were in retreat and would suffer a major psychological blow if Her Majesty’s government announced that contact would be ended’’. While Rees ‘‘promised to bear their views in mind’’, the minute taker noted that ‘‘he gave no ground’’.
Throughout 1976, especially following the collapse of the constitutional convention in February, the Irish government was particularly worried about the future of the SDLP once the United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC) - which had 46 of the convention’s 78 seats - decided to reject power-sharing.
Rees told the cabinet that the unionists were ‘‘adamant that they could not share government with the SDLP, [not only] because it had consistently commanded less than 25 per cent of the popular vote, [but] because it was basically republican’’.
Comments made by UDA commander Andy Tyrie to Northern Ireland Office (NIO) officials about Ian Paisley, then a key member of the UUUC, were particularly blunt. Tyrie claimed that Paisley would reject even the most basic political arrangement involving any executive power for the SDLP, preferring a ‘‘100 per cent Protestant government with no minority representation’’.
Tyrie suggested that ‘‘Mr Paisley hated Catholicism, which he thought of as a cancer destroying the fabric of the country. He pitied Catholics and wanted to convert them from their mistaken beliefs.”
He concluded that ‘‘Mr Paisley had no aspirations to premiership [and] would always prefer to lead an opposition, even with a devolved Protestant government’’.
Roy Mason, who replaced Rees as minister of state for Northern Ireland in September, emerges as a militaristic hardliner from papers dealing with his time as minister of state at the Ministry of Defence.
He consistently agitated for authorisation for British soldiers to use M79 grenade launchers to respond to attacks from south of the border.
In a secret letter dated June 21 to foreign secretary Tony Crosland, Mason argued that the use of the M79 ‘‘on the Republic’s territory’’ should be authorised without consulting the Irish government, whose ‘‘internal political position may well prevent [them] from endorsing this move’’.
The eventual response from FCO minister of state Roy Hattersley on July 9 to Mason’s request was measured. The proposal, he suggested, had to be viewed in the light of international law, which stipulated that fire could be returned across a border only when those concerned had to do so for their personal self-defence.
Even in those cases, no more than minimum force could be employed.
Widely used by the US in Vietnam- it would later be employed by the British in the Falklands - the M79, which fired a 40mm high explosive projectile did not qualify as ‘‘an instrument of minimum force’’. Hattersley argued that the use of the grenade launcher could not be concealed from the Irish, even if the British wished to do so. He added that it would only be a matter of time before an innocent Irish citizen would be killed by the weapon, and all inter-governmental co-operation on security matters would be put in jeopardy. He questioned whether the army wanted to take that risk.
Intriguingly, Hattersley advised that the best course of action might be to wait to find out the views of the new British ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, who had already discussed the matter with the General Officer Commanding in the North. Ewart-Biggs was assassinated 12 days later.
Mason also consulted prime minister Callaghan over the recruitment of troops for a plain clothes Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU) which, according to his top secret letter dated September 8, had been operating in Northern Ireland since at least March 1974. Mason wanted Callaghan to drop the ban which had previously prevented ex-SAS members joining the SRU until they had been out of the regiment for at least two years.
The SRU’s role, according to Mason, was ‘‘surveillance of both republican and Protestant extremists’’, an area in which it had amassed ‘‘much exceptionally valuable intelligence’’.
Whether members of the SRU were actually used to infiltrate paramilitary organisations is not explicitly stated, but what is certain from Mason’s note is that the force was always trained by the SAS.
Correspondence on this issue also indicates that the SAS had been in the North for a lengthy period before January 1976. A query was raised on September 24 about the official stance concerning the SAS presence in Northern Ireland following any future withdrawal of the regiment, leaving the SRU intact. JM Stewart, a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence, suggested ‘‘that it might be convenient to be able to claim, as before, that the SAS was not deployed in the province’’.
1976 also saw the emergence of the Peace People, a movement headed by Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, which protested against the level of armed violence in Northern Ireland. Although this development was welcomed by the British government as a sign that the Provisionals could be losing their grip on the Catholic ghettoes throughout the six counties, a resigned and cynical view of the movement prevailed.
In an assessment by the British cabinet’s Joint Intelligence Committee in September 1976, strong doubts were expressed that the momentum behind the peace movement could last for very long. ‘‘Not only is it weak in organisation,” the report stated, ‘‘but there are signs that other political bodies - notably the Official IRA, the trade unions and the church, behind which the southern government lurked - all want to climb on the bandwagon and push each other off.”
In November 1976, the Joint Intelligence Committee noted that the Provos were setting up a distinct ‘‘northern command’’ to ensure greater co-ordination of operations in the North. It was envisaged that the development ‘‘would widen the division between the leadership in the south and that in the North’’. At the same time, it was decided to broaden the SAS’ area of operations to cover the whole of the North.
In a secret letter to Fred Mulley, secretary of state at the Ministry of Defence, Mason commented that ‘‘the squadron [had] built up . . . a degree of mutual confidence with the Special Branch of the RUC, which could be applied to considerable advantage in other rural areas which are currently more troublesome than south Armagh’’.
Although a contemporary position paper on the role of the army in the North admitted ‘‘it [was] not possible to draw any meaningful conclusions about the future course of security policy’’, government policy tended towards ‘‘Ulsterisation’’, a scaling down of the army’s role, in parallel with the expansion of operations by the RUC and UDR.
Dr Rory Rapple is a lecturer in history at University College Dublin.
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