Northern Ireland: Impact of internment still felt by many 50 years on

IT was 50 years ago this month that one of the British state’s stupidest follies was perpetrated on the people of Northern Ireland.

That should read the Catholic Nationalist people of the six counties, because internment was overwhelmingly used against them and not the Unionists.

It is recorded that of the 1981 people who were jailed without trial between 1971 and 1975, just 107 were loyalists.

Carried out under the code name Operation Demetrius, the British Army started arresting people in nationalist areas on August 9, 1971.

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In the first three days in one area of Belfast alone, 10 people were shot dead by soldiers of the Parachute Regiment, the same regiment that would later carry out the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry. Another man died of a heart attack.

That area was Ballymurphy and even now, 50 years on, the families of those who died in the Ballymurphy Massacre have yet to receive justice, despite a coroner’s verdict earlier this year that the 10 people shot by the soldiers, who included a Catholic priest, Father Hugh Mullan, were “entirely innocent”.

In all, some 350 people were interned in the first few days, and horror stories emerged of innocent men and women being beaten up by soldiers and police.

The world’s media rushed to Belfast and Derry and the reputation of the United Kingdom as a rights-based state dived overnight.

HOW DID IT HAPPEN?

AN upsurge in terrorist violence in early 1971 included the first killing of a British soldier in Belfast in 50 years. Having previously opposed internment, Northern Ireland’s Unionist prime minister Brian Faulkner was now the man who drove internment forwards. He mistakenly thought that previous use of internment against the IRA had worked and the rest of his Unionist government at Stormont needed little persuasion to follow suit.

The head of the British Army in Northern Ireland and the Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) both warned Faulkner against internment, but he flew to London to see UK prime minister Ted Heath and cajoled him into allowing internment without trial to proceed under the Special Powers Act.

The families of victims are still fighting for justice

Home secretary Reginald Maudling was later revealed to have had serious misgivings about the move, but he feared a Loyalist backlash if it did not go ahead and he signed off on the policy.

Faulkner told the BBC at the time: “The gunmen have been brought out into direct confrontation with the security authorities. If there are gunmen around, that is the only way to deal with them.”

Heath had warned Faulkner to crack down on Loyalist paramilitaries, but that did not happen at first. When it did, the Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer Force were outraged. The vicious circle of sectarian violence increased dramatically and while less than 100 people had died before August 1971, 150 people were killed by the end of that year.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE INTERNEES?

THEY were put into prisons or makeshift camps before most were transferred to the Long Kesh Detention Centre near Belfast, also known as the H-Blocks or the Maze. All that did was create places where the IRA could recruit and train members.

WHAT WERE THE EFFECTS?

DISASTROUS all round. As it was so one-sided against them, the Catholic Nationalist community turned against the UK and Stormont completely.

Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, who was a Stormont civil servant at the time, said on previous occasions that internment had succeeded “but it soon became clear that far from quelling the uprising, the policy hugely increased recruitment into the IRA”.

Patrick Mercer, the Tory MP who served in the army in Northern Ireland, said: “It stoked the conflict for at least the next 10 years, if not 20.”

WHAT DID INTERNMENT DO FOR POLICING IN NORTHERN IRELAND?

ANY objective view of policing in the early years of the Troubles would have to conclude that the RUC were very heavy handed and had inculcated a “them and us” attitude.

Former Celtic manager Neil Lennon’s uncle was stopped one night and asked for his name.

He truthfully replied “John Lennon”.

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The police officer replied “sure and I’m John Wayne” and he and a colleague hauled innocent John Lennon off to prison.

By the time internment came around, there were many in the RUC who knew what the reaction would be – even greater activity and recruitment by the IRA. Yet they had their orders and carried them out, often brutally.

The Compton Inquiry into Operation Demetrius was a whitewash, though it annoyed Heath for being too critical of the policy.

The European Court of Human Rights decreed that five of the methods used by the British Army amounted to torture, though this was later downgraded to “inhuman and degrading treatment” on appeal by the UK Government.