699. The Troubles: Return of the IRA (Part 3)

22:09Tom Holland:and immortal souls yeah in that i mean do you mean that metaphorically or are we talking about people who genuinely think that they have risked their immortal souls i think there are quite a lot

22:21Dominic Sandbrook:of people who are very pious catholics we know for a fact that a lot of ira men were pious catholics I mean, they believe in this stuff. You know, they live in a world where they're surrounded by religious iconography. The iconography of the Irish Republican movement is very, very heavily Catholic. I think when you read interviews with people, when they're looking back at their lives, they're looking about what they did. They're obviously, you know, they're steeped in a kind of religious culture. And I think a lot of people did feel, you know, we did terrible things, but we did it in the name of a greater good.

22:51Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. Yeah. And we've been sold out. I mean, this obviously always puzzles people. Why did the continuity IRA or the real IRA or whatever, why didn't they just get around the table and accept the Good Friday Agreement? Well, I think this is why, because they just felt betrayed. Anyway, we're jumping ahead too much. Back to early 1970. So they've been set up, the provisionals, their priority is to get guns, and they have powerful friends to help them do it. So first of all, they have friends in the Republic of Ireland. This is an extraordinary story, actually. I don't think it's terribly well known in Britain.

23:21Dominic Sandbrook:In 1969, the Irish government had put aside£100 ,000 as a sort of relief fund for Catholic families driven from their homes in the north. And basically, at least two Irish government ministers, so Charles Hockey, later the prime minister of Ireland, the boss, the Taoiseach, yeah, and a guy called Neil Blaney, they collaborated with a Belgian businessman who had been in the SS. to use this money. They diverted the money to buy guns in West Germany and they smuggled them to the IRA. This was a huge deal in the Republic of Ireland. There's a huge court case about it. And then the other place is America.

24:02Dominic Sandbrook:Of course, lots of Irish Americans, lots of Irish Americans with very sort of misty-eyed memories of the old country and instinctive suspicion and dislike of Britain. Including Ted Kennedy. Including Ted Kennedy. And you have groups like NORAID, most famously. They raise money from Irish Americans. A lot of that money goes to buy Armalite rifles, which were made in California. And then they are smuggled across the Atlantic, including, amazingly, they would smuggle Armalites across on the QE2. Oh, so like the Lusitania. Yeah, exactly. So by the summer of 1970, the provisionals have a pretty serious arsenal.

24:37Dominic Sandbrook:They've got assault rifles. They've got semi-automatics. They've got about 1 ,000 active members. And that's people who are going to go and fight on the streets. but it's also people running safe houses and things. They make their grand entrance at the end of June 1970. Now, Heath, Ted Heath has an unparalleled record, I think, in modern British history of making well-intentioned but disastrous political miscalculations. So his first one, this is the summer of 1970, are you going to ban the traditional unionist marches, the Orange Order marches and things? And he says, no, I'm not going to do that.

25:15Dominic Sandbrook:because I've just come in as prime minister. I don't want to alienate Protestant opinion in Northern Ireland. But also you said he doesn't know anything about Northern Ireland.

25:23Tom Holland:No, he doesn't. It's true. I mean, to be fair, he's following advice. He did end up living in Salisbury. So I'm going to occasionally rally to his cause.

25:30Dominic Sandbrook:Okay. We're going to stick up for Ted Heath. Yeah. Well, the instinctive thing, I suppose, you think if I don't know much about this, I'm not going to intervene. I'll just be hands off for the time being. One British official in Belfast said, this was the greatest single miscalculation I've ever seen made in the course of my whole life, which is quite a big statement. And actually, he's probably right, because on Saturday, the 27th of June, there are huge Orange Order parades across Belfast. The inevitable fighting and rioting escalates into sort of massive street fighting and gun battles. And the fiercest fighting ends up being a place called the Short Strand, which is a Catholic enclave in East Belfast.

26:10Dominic Sandbrook:and it's around a church, St. Matthew's Church, Catholic Church. And this is where the provisionals first enter the story. There's a small group of them. They're armed with M1 carbines. They're positioned around the church, and there's the scene of them kind of blasting away at Loyalist petrol bombers and the RUC. And about 30 people are injured. Three people are killed, two of them Protestants, one of them Catholic. It's not one of the biggest street battles of the Troubles, but I would argue it's one of the most important because it's the moment that first really establishes the provost's street cred.

26:42Dominic Sandbrook:Everybody says, they're back, you know, these are the people who are going to stand up to the authorities and defend, you know, Catholic areas and stuff. So Ted Heath's made one bad mistake. And just days later, the authorities make an even bigger one, which gives the IRA an even bigger gift. So on the late afternoon of Friday, the 3rd of July, so this is what, not even a week later, British armoured personnel carriers move into the Lower Falls area of Belfast, kind of Catholic working class area. And they're going in to seal off one particular street called Balkan Street, which is this kind of brick terraced narrow street.

27:21Dominic Sandbrook:And they've been tipped off that there is an official IRA, arms cash number 24. So the official IRA, Tom, the Marxists, the Polonek people. And the British go in and they find the guns. But as they come out of the house, there's this crowd outside, very angry, and people start rocking the armoured personnel carriers. And then people start throwing stones and petrol bombs and stuff. And the soldiers, who are Scots guards, they fire tear gas at the crowds, and then they start calling for reinforcements. And then both wings of the IRA turn up en masse and start shooting. So it's a very chaotic scene.

27:55Dominic Sandbrook:And they're not kind of shooting each other. They're fighting side by side. No, they're not shooting each other. No, I wouldn't put it past them. so there's this huge kind of street battle there's tear gas there are nail bombs there are petrol bombs there are snipers the people building barricades both sides are firing hundreds and hundreds of rounds of ammunition and at 10 o 'clock that evening the British commander in Northern Ireland Sir Ian Freeland he says I want the whole Falls area sealed off and I want it put under an indefinite curfew, basically put it under lockdown. And so you have this scene now, it's 10 o 'clock at night, and you have helicopters flying over the area from which there are kind of clouds of smoke emerging.

28:36Dominic Sandbrook:And the helicopters have loudspeakers. And from the loudspeakers, a kind of clipped British voice is telling people, get off the streets or you will be shot. This area is now under curfew. So it's very like, you know, sort of apocalypse now scene, smoke, tear gas, burning fires and helicopters with his voice coming out with this apocalyptic message. And then for the next two days, thousands of British soldiers supported by helicopters, supported by armoured cars, move through the falls area. They are forcibly searching the houses for weapons. They go through house after house, they arrest more than 300 people, and they actually find hundreds of guns and bombs, loads of ammunition and stuff like that.

29:23Dominic Sandbrook:But this is a terrible reputational blow to the British army because there are afterwards tons of stories about the soldiers behaving badly and wrecking people's houses. So this is one local activist. Holy statues were smashed on the floor. Family portraits and pictures were smashed. Fit furniture was ripped and overturned. Windows were broken and doors off the hinges. Some of the people who'd been beaten were still lying there, bloody and bruised. Now, the army said afterwards, this is all untrue. This is just Republican propaganda. This is rubbish. Our British boys behaved impeccably. But I'm not sure about that.

30:00Dominic Sandbrook:No journalists were allowed in the curfew zone at all. And the army's own log sheets show that the troops were instructed beforehand to, quote, be aggressive. I think these stories, some of them might be exaggerated, but there's clearly an element of truth in it. I mean, soldiers under pressure, searching people's houses, are they really going to wipe their feet on the doormat? I don't think so.

30:23Tom Holland:So presumably the people whose houses are being searched, they're not giving them cups of tea anymore or anything like that.

30:29Dominic Sandbrook:No, no, no. So you're dead right. When they arrived in 1969, it was fish and chips and cups of tea. But right now, from this point, Catholic housewives will spit in the soldiers' faces. Kids throw stones at them. And the provisional IRA have been watching all this with delight because basically they know that it's turned the local community against the army and they're going to get a flood of recruits, which they do. So we're only a couple of weeks into Ted Heath's premiership. I mean, this has all happened very quickly and it's taken a very, very dark turn. And a few days after this, our old friend Sir Burke Trend is back and he discusses this with Heath and Heath's Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling.

31:11Dominic Sandbrook:We shall be talking about Reginald Maudling later on. Great character. Exactly. And they agree, listen, if things continue to deteriorate at this rate, we are going to have to suspend the Parliament of Northern Ireland, and we're going to have to send in a British team to run Northern Ireland ourselves. But they do not want to do that. They absolutely do not want to do that. No, they don't. So that would be the nuclear option to abolish Stormont and introduce direct rule but he doesn't want to do that he's only been prime minister three weeks he wants to give the northern ireland prime minister james chichester clark a chance to sort this out and remember from last time james chichester clark i mean this is going to sound very harsh i hope his descendants don't listen i think he was useless he's from the landed gentry he's a farmer he's kind of very slow and plodding and unimaginative um of course he's trapped between the nationalists on the one hand and the kind of paisley hardliners on the other but he doesn't have any of the political skills to deal with it.

32:08Dominic Sandbrook:I said that also at this meeting is Heath's Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, and we should talk about him a little bit. There is possibly a case that the British might have handled Northern Ireland more sensitivity in the early 70s with a different Home Secretary, because Reginald Maudling, who I actually really like, is a truly terrible person to be in charge of the Home Office. So to explain to people who he was, he'd been the runner-up to Ted Heath and the Tory leadership. You should approve of him, Tom, because he had a first in classics from Oxford and he'd been in RAF intelligence during the war.

32:44Dominic Sandbrook:And he's suave, he's witty, he's very liberal-minded for a Tory, he's very clever, he's incredibly affable. On the other hand, he is louche, he is incredibly lazy, he is greedy, and he is fantastically corrupt. And he's also a massive, massive boozer. So if I tell you his daily intake, he would have brandy for breakfast, gin at mid-morning, and then at lunch he'd have wine and digestif. And then for the rest of the day, he'd just be as the mood took him. I mean, he'd be asleep actually for the rest of the day. And Reginald Mordling, he's basically one of those people. He's the ultimate sort of 70s British politician, massive glasses.

33:29Dominic Sandbrook:He's quite overweight. He's flecked with dandruff and he's stinking of gin. And he absolutely despises Northern Ireland, and he's not afraid to show it. So when he made his first trip to Northern Ireland, which was just before the Falls curfew, he made it absolutely obvious to everybody that he didn't want to be there, and he was incredibly bored. And even the British military commander said afterwards, he seems, and I quote, completely ignorant. And when his plane took off, he infamously, as soon as it took off, and he knew he was off Northern Irish soil. He said very loudly, for God's sake, bring me a large Scotch.

34:07Dominic Sandbrook:What a bloody awful country. So anyway, the story of the next nine months is these men, Heath, Maudling, Chichester Clark, basically totally out of their depth, dithering and dallying while the situation gets steadily worse. So good example of how it's getting worse in a small way. You mentioned the cups of tea. There had been a lot of fraternization between the army and the locals at the end of 1969. The army had even organized kind of clubs for local kids, trips and stuff for them. They'd organized a New Year's Eve disco with local girls in Derry. But a year on, things are completely different.

34:44Dominic Sandbrook:Girls who now fraternize with British soldiers are punished for it. There's a soldier in Peter Taylor's book about the army in Northern Ireland, Brits, it's called, brilliant book. A soldier tells him about finding a girl tied to a lamppost and she had literally been, her head had been shaved and she'd literally been tarred and feathered. And he said the tar ran down her neck and the front of her breast and her hands were badly affected where she'd been clawing at her face to get it off and the feathers were stuck to the tar. We had to cut her away from the lamppost and take her to hospital. So this is the sort of context.

35:17Dominic Sandbrook:And then in February 1971, trouble breaks out in an area of North Belfast called the New Lodge area. And this is a Catholic area. It's very densely populated and the army believed that the provisionals had been stockpiling guns on the estate and had been launching search missions there were days of clashes and these escalate on the evening of the 5th of february into street fighting the army sent in a unit of royal artillery they get there it's chaotic scene bricks petrol bombs bottles all of this and then as one soldier described it it's like the crowd parts like the sort of party of the red sea as he describes it this chap just popped out with a machine gun and opened up.

35:57Dominic Sandbrook:And this chap is Billy Reed of the Provisional IRA. He's got a Sterling submachine gun. He shoots four soldiers wounded, and he shoots gunner Robert Curtis through the heart. And Curtis becomes the first British soldier to die in Northern Ireland. He was from Newcastle. He was 20 years old. He left a pregnant wife who was also 20. An interview by the press afterwards, his father said, I have no idea what my son died for. And his widow, his wife said, our boys should be brought home immediately. We should leave the mobs to fight it out among themselves. Now, already at this point, a lot of people in Britain agree with this.

36:38Dominic Sandbrook:So if you look at the polls, in 1969, most people had favoured the decision to introduced troops. But even in the early 1970s, so 70s, 71, more than half of the electorate think that their troops should be brought home and Northern Ireland should just be abandoned. And this is what the government is kind of contending with all through this story. But Heath's cabinet have absolutely no intention of pulling out. So if you look at the cabinet minutes after this, they've lost their first British army casualty. And the cabinet minutes say they know and i quote many people would favor abandoning the province to its fate a course which the government could not contemplate and the reason they couldn't contemplate it is they say international opinion would damn us for it i mean ted kennedy wouldn't but a lot of other people would and the result would be the sectarian bloodbath and they agree a common line and they say this is not it's not just about communal strife it's not about rebellion against political injustice.

37:39Dominic Sandbrook:This is the outcome of deliberate terrorism by the IRA. Now, through this story, we have been quite down on British government policy, and we will probably continue to be, because Heath goes on to make some absolutely cataclysmic mistakes. But I think it is actually worth stopping just to say for a moment that he's not entirely wrong about this. So the conflict obviously has deep roots and among the causes undoubtedly are British government neglect and incompetence and of course the discriminatory nature of the Stormont state. But just on the British side, Heath's intentions I think are pretty admirable.

38:23Dominic Sandbrook:Heath wants to see a reformed non-sectarian Northern Irish state that does not discriminate, everybody's treated equally, and nobody gets shot. And actually, he's open to all kinds of different things. He's open to links with Dublin. He's open to rethinking Northern Ireland's constitutional status. He will consider anything. And historians who've written about this almost uniformly say, the Heath government is much more open-minded when it comes to Northern Ireland than any previous British government had ever been. Now, as for the army, the army made terrible mistakes, and we'll be talking about one in particular next time.

39:00Dominic Sandbrook:And the army, of course, have all kinds of prejudices and blind spots and preconceptions and whatnot. Worth saying about the army in Northern Ireland, I mean, the army do not go in to kill people. I mean, they are trained killers, but they've been sent as peacekeepers. And the army, deep down, would love to go home. I mean, no one likes being sent to Northern Ireland. There are, however, people in this series of whom that's not actually true. They do want to kill people. So we saw some in the first episode, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the people who go out from pubs and carry out sectarian murders.

39:32Dominic Sandbrook:The provisional IRA, they actively want to increase the tension. They haven't imported guns just to exhibit them on their walls. They've imported guns to use them. They actually do want to kill people. And the reason they want to kill people is not necessarily because they're in inverted commas monsters. It's because they think it is politically right to do so. We will get what we want. And I think that is a big difference between them and Ted Heath. I mean, Ted Heath doesn't want to kill anybody. People do get killed, but it's not necessarily what he wanted.

40:02Tom Holland:I mean, he had been at the Nuremberg rally, hadn't he? He'd fought in the Second World War. So he is aware of how deep hatreds can run. Yeah. But even so, in this, there does seem a failure of imagination on his part to contemplate, I guess, that within the United Kingdom, there could be hatreds so violent that there are substantial parts of different populations that want to pull the whole house down. That's the problem, isn't it? Because once you reach that stage with people, there's no negotiations really that can solve it.

40:37Dominic Sandbrook:Well, actually, I mean, you're right to make that point about negotiations because you're anticipating what we'll talk about in the next episode. When they do have negotiations, they have negotiations with the IRA, and it turns out that the IRA basically say, well, actually, we'd prefer to carry on fighting and killing then we'd rather not do a deal, actually. So back to the story, the early months of 1971. If anybody thinks that Gunnar Curtis's death will bring an end, they've got a shock coming. Because four days after that, five BBC engineers are killed by a landmine in County Tyrone, planted by the IRA, meant for an army patrol.

41:11Dominic Sandbrook:A week later, a second soldier, John Laurie, who was 22, is killed by the IRA. And then two RUC men, two policemen in the Ardoin, are killed by IRA snipers. And then you have the event that I think shocks people in Britain more than any other. A massive story in March 1971. So it's Wednesday the 10th of March. There were three young men from the Royal Highland Fusiliers and they'd gone out to have a drink. As soldiers were allowed to do in those days, they were allowed to go out in civilian clothes to have a pint. And they went to Mooney's Bar in the city centre. and they were Dougal McCaughey, who was 23, and two brothers, John and Joseph McCaig, who were 17 and 18.

41:56Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, the ages of the people in this story, they're so young, a lot of them. I mean, they're basically the age of schoolchildren, some of them. So they're off duty. They're in civilian clothes and they're in this pub and a bloke comes up to them and he says, oh, you British Army soldiers. I'm actually a former soldier. Let me buy you some drinks and he buys them some drinks and they get chatting they chat for a bit and then this bloke says oh do you want to come to a party there's a party all the rest of it and they go off they're due back at their barracks at about 6 30 they don't show up that's not uncommon because you know it wasn't unknown for soldiers to go out have a few pints lose track of time you know start talking to some girls or whatever and then they come back late they get into trouble of course but it's not unusual but a few hours later some children were playing in fields at a place called White Bray, which was north of Belfast.

42:48Dominic Sandbrook:And they saw something in a field. They saw a pile of something in a field. They went over the children. And it was the bodies of these three Highlanders. And they'd been shot, all of them in the back of the head. And more than any other incident, this really cuts through because they have, of course, been shot by the IRA. One Belfast paper said, after all the horrors of recent weeks and months, Ulster people have almost lost the capacity for feeling shock, but the ruthless murder of three defenseless young soldiers has cut to the quick. And in Britain, and there's a memoir by a paratrooper called Harry McCallion, who was a working class Catholic from Scotland.

43:29Dominic Sandbrook:And he was stationed in Britain. He writes in his memoir of the silence that fell over his kind of barracks when he and his comrades heard about these killings. And he writes, I looked at the faces of the older soldiers around me. I read on them the same thing. Just wait until we get across. For me and for everybody at the table, that was the major turning point.

43:53Tom Holland:And so the risk is that the British army is also starting to be radicalised, I suppose. And that must, I guess, then be a factor in British governmental calculations. So who knows what will happen. Will the British government consider pulling out or will they double down? A critical moment, Dominic, and we will find out what the British government decides after the break.

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44:48Tom Holland:practices in countries all over the world. Another example of a business driving technological and social change is Amazon, which is increasing the number of its electric vehicles used for deliveries in Europe to over 10 ,000 by the end of this year, 2026.

45:08Dominic Sandbrook:Now, on top of that, over 50 % of Amazon deliveries now come with less packaging or sometimes no added packaging at all. It helps to avoid unnecessary waste and it makes recycling at home that much easier. Find out more at amazon.co.uk slash sustainability. hola camaradas it's dominic here um sorry to interrupt the episode but i just thought you'd like to know that we've been thinking about something that you've been writing to us a lot one of the most requested subjects ever since we started the rest is history which is the spanish civil war now i can tell you exclusively that plans are afoot for us to do the spanish civil war at some point, hopefully next year in 2027.

45:57Dominic Sandbrook:But as a little taster or teaser on our sister show, The Book Club, my co-presenter Tabby and I have just released an episode on perhaps the emblematic novel of the Spanish Civil War, which is Ernest Hemingway's book For Whom the Bell Tolls. So in this episode, we do dig into the history. We talk about the clash between fascism and idealism. We course the way in which it drew in so many foreign intellectuals and artists and writers Hemingway of course among them and many of you will know that Hemingway was in Spain during the war he was a correspondent in Madrid which was under siege by Franco's forces and he draws on that experience in For Whom the Bell Tolls to tell the story of an American volunteer who's part of a guerrilla unit who are fighting Franco's troops so if you keep listening at the end of this episode we will have an exclusive short clip which discusses the history of the Spanish Civil War.

46:59Tom Holland:Hello everyone and welcome back to The Rest is History. It is March 1971. Three young Highland Fusiliers have been murdered and with that the mood on the streets of Belfast and in the army barracks as well i guess is darker than it's ever been so you before the break described the horror of the army and the condemnation of the newspapers um but that's not a kind of universal perspective is it because there are obviously elements within northern ireland and i would guess ireland more generally who think well all's fair in love and war, they had it coming. Yeah.

47:42Dominic Sandbrook:So there's a wonderful book actually about Northern Ireland in the 70s called Watching the Door by an Irish columnist, quite a controversial Irish columnist actually, Kevin Myers, who was born in Leicester, but he was from Irish Catholic parents. At the time he was working as a journalist for RTE, the Irish TV service. And he remembers in this book that when these three guys were killed, among his Republican contacts, there was a mood of quiet satisfaction. People would say to him, well, you know, they belong to the British Army. I mean, they were very young, but they were British Army soldiers.

48:14Dominic Sandbrook:So they had what was coming to them. And at one point, his driver, who's a Catholic, says to him, the war is coming and it's going to be serious. The provis have fresh gear coming from America. There will be people dying in this town who have never effing died before. And that sounds very melodramatic, but actually, I think at this point, a lot of people genuinely thinking there's going to be a civil war. I mean, remember, there are a lot of people alive, Tom, who remember the violence of the 1920s. Yeah. You know, it's only 50 years before. So there'll be people who might have been 20 in the 1920s and now 70 and are able to tell their children and grandchildren about it and probably have done for years.

48:58Dominic Sandbrook:There are nationalists who've never felt safe in Northern Ireland. There are unionists who have always believed that the Catholics are a kind of fifth column and the IRA were poised to attack them. And I think for both of these groups, they say, well, this is it. The decisive showdown is at hand. And it's for this reason that you have this huge growth in 1971 of vigilante groups. So in Belfast working class Protestant areas, people have been setting up these loyalist defense associations, as they're called. And the biggest is the Ulster Defence Association, the UDA, again, a sort of acronym to conjure with in the 70s, 80s, 90s.

49:37Dominic Sandbrook:This was this alliance of loyalist vigilantes. It was set up in the autumn of 1971. At its peak, it had somewhere between 25 ,000 and 40 ,000 associated members. Extraordinary. It had women's units. In the course of the troubles, the UDA was responsible for more than 400 murders. So almost all of them Catholic civilians. How does that compare with the IRA's killing rate? Oh, far more. The IRA is by far the biggest killer in the course of the troubles. I mean, it's interesting, actually. The killers that get most attention, I would say, most newsprint, certainly now are the British Army. But by far, numerically, the biggest killers are the provisional IRA.

50:20Dominic Sandbrook:Back, though, to the loyalists. Interesting question. How do people justify this to themselves? What would make you join a loyalist vigilante group? Well, in his book, Loyalists, Peter Taylor gives the example of one man called Martin Snodden. And there's lots of interviews with this guy online because he's quite a prominent peace campaigner now. Martin Snodden grew up in a Protestant enclave in Catholic West Belfast. So he and his family in the late 60s felt very fearful. They felt embattled, surrounded. And then, of course, things got worse. the more that the sort of temperature dropped. And when he was 16 years old in 1970, he joined the UVF.

51:03Dominic Sandbrook:And as he saw it, it was the natural thing to do to defend his family. You know, it's the brave thing to do. It's manly and so on. And it's also, I think, crucially rooted in history because his grandfather had been a B-special. His father had been in the Ulster Defence Regiment. and when he was asked he defined his motives as a combination of fear and love fear for what could happen and what was happening in the area at the time but also a wider sense of love for my whole tradition and the country that I'd grown up in and where that fear and love took him he joined when he was 16 by the time he was 20 he is serving a life sentence for a bomb attack on a pub that he believed was a front for the IRA.

51:48Dominic Sandbrook:His comrade, his mate, was killed when the bomb went off prematurely, but also killed was an innocent woman who was in the pub at the time. And he said afterwards, although in some sense I felt I could justify it, I sank to depths I never thought I would go to, depths I never knew existed. And of course, he's speaking for thousands of other people anyway back to the narrative in the spring of 1971 so james chichester clark the slightly useless prime minister is under great pressure to crack down there are demonstrations outside stormont thousands of shipyard workers people from the harland and wolf yard that had built the titanic they down their tools they march through belfast they want a harder line ian paisley is on the scene.

52:36Dominic Sandbrook:Tom, do you want to give us your Ian Paisley?

52:38Tom Holland:We can no longer tolerate your weakness. You must go before the whole land is deluged with the blood of innocent men and women. So what can Chichester Clark do?

52:51Dominic Sandbrook:Well, the big question is, would he introduce internment? So internment means locking up suspects without trial and that may sound like a very nuclear option but it has a long history in Ireland the British government used it after the Easter Rising the Irish Free State you know Michael Collins and co used it during the Irish Civil War both Belfast and Dublin used it in the Second World War and in the border campaign the ARA border campaign of the late 50s and 60s and it worked basically they knew who the ira men were they had intelligence that told them they went and grabbed them and they locked them up without trial and they broke the back of the ira and in fact the irish government which is always a bit schizophrenic i think at this point about the ira and republicanism generally because of course the irish government is nominally committed to a united ireland but it's also committed to smashing the ira which it regards as an illegal terror group so it's sort of torn and it's in pulled in two directions in 1970 the dublin government publicly threatened to bring back internment and a year later they scrapped jury trials for ira suspects so often they do actually take a pretty hard line and some even in the north some moderate nationalists say to the british do you know what we could kind of live with it if you brought back interment so jerry fit who we met um i think last time the guy who occupied the um the secretary's house the house man was austin curry jerry fit is the bloke who used to work as a sort of used to work on the in the ships i think didn't he become an mp he became an mp exactly became an mp

54:36Tom Holland:mates with jim callaghan i thought he was he was one of them he was one of the people who occupied

54:41Dominic Sandbrook:the secretary's house no it's austin curry and a couple of his friends oh okay anyway jerry fit suggests to the British, she says to them, and I quote, the immediate interment of all provisional IRA men known to the police. But Chichester Clarke, the Prime Minister, actually thinks that's quite a bad idea. And the reason for that is that the army and the police have told him, we don't have very good intelligence, so we won't pick up the right people, and it will probably provoke massive protests and make Northern Ireland ungovernable. so chichester clark flies off to london on the 16th of march 1971 and he says to heath and to i don't want you to introduce internment i want a military surge like a general petraeus military surge from 2007 in iraq basically i want you to throw in i want to flood northern ireland with troops throw thousands of reinforcements into the catholic estates go through curfews cordons, lockdowns, all of this.

55:44Dominic Sandbrook:And Heath says to him, I'm not going to send in loads of extra troops. You can have a thousand more troops, but I mean, I'm not going to hurl in tens of thousands of British soldiers. Chichester Clarke is completely deflated by this. He thinks, well, this is pointless. I've shot my bolt. There's nothing I can do. He flies back to Belfast. And then two days later, he decides I'm going to resign as prime minister. spend more time with his cows exactly so and he decides I don't want to ring Ted Heath because Ted Heath is terrible on the phone he's so glacial exactly I'm not going to ring Ted Heath he thinks I'll ring Reginald Mordling so he rings Mordling this is absolutely beyond parody Mordling he can't get through because Mordling is giving a lecture at Merchant Taylor's school a very well-established public school.

56:41Dominic Sandbrook:Maudling's special branch men go to find him to say the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland is on the line. He wants to talk to you urgently. But they find him not giving the talk, but closeted with the headmaster, and I quote, having a lunch made up entirely of whiskey. So I don't know what that says either about Maudling or indeed about Merchant Taylor's school. Nothing good. Oh, the headmaster. Right, exactly. are you not running a school for god's sake man that's the real scandal of this story anyway maudling eventually is persuaded to summon a car to take him back to london to take this call but when they're on their way the car mysteriously breaks down in watford so he's unable to take the call from james chichester clark and uh maudling's biographer lewis baston i think says basically what happened was that maudling was so drunk after this liquid lunch that his officials decided they couldn't possibly risk him yeah just pull into a light lay by exactly so james chichester clark has to ring ted heath instead which he's been trying to get out of and heath is incredibly rude to him of course refuses to listen to anything he says keeps saying to him you can't give me a single example how can you say we're just sitting there and doing nothing and at the end chichester clark almost in sort of desperation says well i'm going to resign and i'm going to blame the british army i'm going to say it's all the british army's for they let us down and heath goes absolutely berserk you do quite a good ted heath so do you

58:05Tom Holland:want to do ted heath now i consider that absolutely unjustifiable it has very little relation to the truth i think it is doing immense harm to northern ireland and i think it makes the position of any successor of yours absolutely impossible and then chichester clark sort of blusters he says well i

58:21Dominic Sandbrook:don't do anything unhelpful and he says i don't think there's anything more to discuss and he just hangs up on him and that's the end of that that's the end of james chichester clark in this story is he all right does he enjoy go back to his farming i think he goes back to his farm it's all okay well i think i mean it's all okay insofar as it possibly can be as his country collapses around him yeah so he's out now finally the ulster unionists decide well we've had two etonians let's look beyond the old etonian um class for somebody who's actually quite good at politics and they get in another bloke and this bloke is called brian faulkner oh yes he um

58:59Tom Holland:He went to school in Dublin with WB Yates' son. Correct. He absolutely did.

59:05Dominic Sandbrook:That's the amazing fact I know about him. And here's an amazing fact. You know, he also went to that school. So he went to St. Columbus in Dublin, which bills itself. I googled it. It bills itself as the most prestigious school in Ireland, the best boarding school in Ireland. Brian Faulkner went there. WB Yates sent his son there. Adam Clayton from U2 went there. Did he? You two don't often talk about their boarding school backgrounds, do they? And they're playing Bloody Sunday. That changes their image a little bit, I think. It's great to out people as the products of prestigious boarding schools, I think, on the show.

59:41Dominic Sandbrook:I think it's one of the things we specialize in. So Brian Faulkner, his father had run and founded, in fact, the world's largest shirt makers. So the Belfast Collar Company make more shirts than anybody else on the planet. and he'd gone off to St. Columbus and then he'd gone into politics. Faulkner is very good at politics. He's cunning. He's kind of no-nonsense. He's incredibly ambitious. He is the champion of the kind of Protestant middle classes of small businessmen. If you're a small businessman, you love Brian Faulkner. He'd been the Home Affairs Minister during the IRA border campaign. He'd been very hard.

1:00:19Dominic Sandbrook:He'd taken the credit for beating them. Under Terence O 'Neill, he'd been the Minister of Commerce. He'd been getting all this international investment. he thinks a lot of him he thinks he's the only man who can keep northern ireland together faulkner agrees and thinks i am the only man who can do it i'm the champion of law and order i'm the savior of northern ireland and all this but he has a terrible inheritance basically the security situation is awful there are bombs going off every day the thump of explosions the smell of cordite the sound of sirens these are becoming everyday features of life in belfast and by the 12th of July, so that's when the Provos launch a new bombing campaign, there will already be more than 300 explosions, 320 shootings, 600 people hospitalised, and the death toll for 1971 will come to 171, which is up sixfold in a year.

1:01:13Dominic Sandbrook:So what Faulkner does, Faulkner thinks, right, I'm going to offer some concessions to the Catholics. We mentioned Gerry Fitt, and you mentioned you asked if he was the same person as austin curry the guy who had occupied the pebble dash council house and actually both of these blokes had set up this new party the sdlp which is a kind of moderate nationalist party and faulkner decides i'm going to offer them an olive branch it's a brilliant olive branch i'm going to offer them the chairmanship of two storm on committees yeah so so enticing um so he's going to offer them this right but then to balance this tremendous offer he has to do something for the protestant base so he decides to take a big gamble he flies to britain and he asks he that he says i'd like to introduce interment i'd like to be able to lock people up without trial now heath is very well aware of the arguments against this british army intelligence have said to him we'll catch one in five provisional IRA men.

1:02:14Dominic Sandbrook:We'll probably catch only the lesser people, the small fry, as they put it. The RUC, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, have also told him the IRA have loads of young people now who we don't know, and we won't know who they are, and we can't pick them up. Even the British commander in Belfast, the new British commander, Sir Harry Tuzo, he says to Heath, I think the arguments against it are very strong. If you do this, be clear about this. This is a political decision, not a military one. And on top of all that, the Taoiseach, the Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland, Jack Lynch, has said to the British ambassador, I really don't think you should do this.

1:02:54Dominic Sandbrook:It will drive the Catholics into the arms of the IRA. I am basically begging you not to do it. The problem for Heath, though, Heath is totally committed to Brian Faulkner. If Heath says no, and if Brian Faulkner says, well, that's it, I'm out, I'm done, then Britain has no alternative but to introduce direct rule. And nobody in London wants to do that. And Reggie Maudling, you know, who's basically woken up now from his gin-soaked sleep. What's going on? Yeah, says to Ted Heath, look, the way to justify this, we say to people, this is the only way to sort of forestall a Protestant backlash against the Catholics.

1:03:36Dominic Sandbrook:You know, actually, maybe the army are being too pessimistic. Maybe we'll get loads of people and it'll be fine.

1:03:42Tom Holland:And so Heath says, OK, let's do it. So basically, people who know nothing about the situation are overruling people who know loads about it. That's pretty much exactly what's happened.

1:03:53Dominic Sandbrook:yes but you can understand why they've done it because if if they're all in with brian faulkner what else are they going to do find someone else you know i suppose they'd call his bluff or they could introduce direct rule right away which may be arguably they should have done about two years earlier that is one argument that you could make that basically the opportunity was missed in like 1969 they should have taken it over right away but anyway they didn't so he says to brian fortner fine you can introduce internments it's a purely political decision not military so because of that it must look even-handed so what i want you to do it must go along with a ban for six months and all loyalists you know orange order parades and marches and stuff fortner's not happy about this because it would upset his base but he says no you've got to do it and then the other thing that he says which is absolutely crucial he says when you lock up people without trial you must and i quote include a certain number of protestants and fortner clearly doesn't like this but he says yeah i hear you now we shall see how that plays out so on monday the 9th of august 1971 it's actually a level results day interestingly at four o 'clock in the morning operation demetrius as it is called begins and i always think operation Demetrius sounds like a brilliant name for something.

1:05:17Dominic Sandbrook:It sounds like an incredibly daring swashbuckling raid in the Second World War. I can imagine your brother and Al Murray doing an amazing four-part series on it. Surely a multi-part series about Operation Demetrius. Wasn't there an Eric Ambler novel, The Mask of Demetrius? Yes, exactly. Set in Constantinople. So it conjures up a kind of Balkan spy adventure. We shall see whether this lives up to the expectations. So before dawn, Thousands of British troops are sealing off streets across Northern Ireland. They're smashing down people's doors. They're breaking into their houses, and they're dragging out hundreds of people who are on these lists.

1:05:56Dominic Sandbrook:And it's a very dramatic, it's a very cinematic scene, although I can't help thinking that if you were to see this on the big screen, you would assume the people doing the dragging out are the villains. It's very unusual for the people doing the dragging to be the heroes in the story.

1:06:11Tom Holland:Well, especially if it's a provisional IRA film club. That's what you would assume.

1:06:16Dominic Sandbrook:That's, I guess so. If it's a Ken Loach film, then undoubtedly they're the villains. They're dragging Daniel Day-Lewis out and Pete Possilthwaite or something. Anyway, we'll come to the optics of this in a second. But it's important to say that as a military operation, this is an absolute unmitigated shambles. The army are using RUC intelligence files. But as everybody has told Heath, these files are massively out of date. They don't reflect the split between the official and provisional IRA. They don't reflect the fact that loads of young volunteers have joined the provisionals. Loads of the names are wrong.

1:06:52Dominic Sandbrook:They don't get most of the key people. There's a wonderful story, and I can't remember what book this is in, about a British officer who went at four o 'clock in the morning. He bursts into this bloke's house. He finds this bloke who's clearly in his 80s. and this bloke says to him when he drags him out of bed this bloke says to him i'm delighted to think that i'm still a trouble to the british government but i have to tell you i've not been active since the easter rising well he would say that wouldn't he i suppose he would so some of the people they take are teenagers who are just very nationalistic at least one teenager is on the list purely because he plays gaelic games paul rouse wouldn't approve of that would he paul rouse paul rouse would have been dragged out you see because of his enthusiasm for gaelic games Yeah.

1:07:37Dominic Sandbrook:They arrested in total 342 people and took them to internment camps. Now, given what Heath had said to him about, make sure you have a good balance. So what is the balance, Dominic? So the balance is as follows. Out of 342, the balance is Catholics, 342.

1:07:59Dominic Sandbrook:Protestants, zero. Why? They just couldn't be bothered in the end to get any Protestants. Well, actually, I'll let Reginald Mordling answer this question. So I'll leap ahead to tell you what Reginald Mordling said in interviews afterwards. The newspaper said to him, why didn't you arrest loyalists? And he said, well, if any Protestant organizations were behaving like the IRA, we should have treated them in precisely the same way. But the thing is, they had actually believed. The first killings were done by the UVF. Well, those guys shooting people in pubs. Right, exactly. So, of course, this sets off this absolute, you know, furore.

1:08:33Dominic Sandbrook:Extraordinary scenes, actually, what's going on in Northern Ireland. So women will be banging dustbin lids when there are British troops approaching. There are people building barricades to stop them getting into the streets. People commandeering milk carts to use the bottles for petrol bombs. There's gigantic rioting. And the days afterwards, hundreds of houses set on fire by sectarian mobs of one kind or another. 7 ,000 people were driven from their homes by mob violence. Great clouds of black smoke over Belfast estates. 17 people shot dead in gun battles with the army. It's a scene of complete apocalyptic breakdown.

1:09:13Dominic Sandbrook:Everything has gone horrendously wrong.

1:09:16Tom Holland:So as you say, apocalyptic, what does the judge dread of the British Conservative government make of this reginald maudling has he sobered up to deal with it um not entirely so it's actually been a lovely

1:09:30Dominic Sandbrook:day in suburban hertfordshire where he lives and reggie has been chilling by his swimming pool with a bottle of gin so he's been relaxing and every now and again he rouses himself from his lounger to go and ring whitehorn to see say you know how's it going and they tell him he said oh sounds splendid absolutely splendid and he goes back to the sun lounger and um i mean it's a

1:09:53Tom Holland:reminder, isn't it, that of course, ministers cannot keep track minute by minute of what is going on because the technological opportunities to do that are not in existence. And I guess that is something to bear in mind. Tom, this sounds like you're defending Reginald Mordley. I am defending him. It's a beautiful summer's day. A chap wants to hang out and drink gin. Doesn't want to be bothered with all this nonsense.

1:10:15Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. I mean, he disgraces himself, actually, because afterwards, when he's interviewed, he tells the Guardian, we did this on army advice with the army who told us to do it that's so bad that's poor yeah and his biographer lewis baston so lewis baston came on a bonus last year to talk about borderlands which is his big enthusiasm now so he was talking about the silesian border slightly implausibly but anyway he says in his biography which is called reggie he says this was an outright lie from modeling which it was yeah a total lie yeah baston also describes this as quote one of the great blunders of recent British political history.

1:10:50Dominic Sandbrook:It absolutely is. So basically, everyone says introducing internment was a total own goal.

1:10:56Tom Holland:Had it worked, would it? I mean, had they got the right people, maybe it would have worked, do you think?

1:11:01Dominic Sandbrook:Well, it might have been a price worth paying if you'd absolutely got the right people. If you'd literally - You've broken the IRA. Yeah. The IRA has, what, 1 ,000 people at this point. Imagine you locked up 500 of them. Well, you're not going to get all 1 ,000, but you might get hundreds and hundreds of the senior people, break the back of the organization you know maybe that would work unfortunately absolutely didn't they didn't get any of the of the right people so shambles and it completely drives the wedge between moderate nationalist politicians and the authorities and it completes what the falls curfew had begun it destroys the relationship forever between the army and the catholic population so you know there's no going back now and of course the winners from this are the provision on the IRA because they've got their arms intact, they get loads of new recruits, and on Catholic estates their reputation is higher than ever.

1:11:52Dominic Sandbrook:Now what makes this worse? What makes this far worse is what happens to the people interned. They are interned at a disused airfield at a place called Longkesh in these sort of low corrugated iron Nissan huts. Imagine again your brother and Al Murray love a Nissan hut, sort of World War II relic. The people in these huts are being tortured by the army and by the RUC. They are being, you get the first reports in Irish newspapers of people being dragged out of bed two o 'clock in the morning and sort of beaten up and battered against the wall. And the army and Stormont, the government, say this is a lie.

1:12:33Dominic Sandbrook:This is IRA propaganda. But it's actually not a lie. It's true. And what does Reginald Mordelin think about this? He thinks it's brilliant. He thinks this is exactly what you should be doing. Does he? Yes. because the army in the IUC had had meetings before internment to talk about what they would do, and they'd agreed to adopt something called the five techniques. And the five techniques are making you stand spread-eagled for ages, putting a hood over your head, playing white noise at you, giving you a minimum of bread and water, so just enough to keep you alive, basically, but you're thirsty and famished or whatever, and you're deprived of sleep.

1:13:08Tom Holland:So this is what they'd done in Malaya, wasn't it,

1:13:11Dominic Sandbrook:to break the insurgency there himalaya in palestine in kenya in cyprus this was an established british colonial practice and it's extraordinary i think to me that the army thought they could i mean people will have their own views of course about whether such techniques are permissible it's a big debate in iraq and afghanistan yeah that people that they thought they could do this in a part of the United Kingdom against United Kingdom citizens, it's pretty remarkable.

1:13:44Tom Holland:Or is it? Because in the government, do they see Northern Ireland really?

1:13:49Dominic Sandbrook:So there are definitely historians who say this shows the colonial mindset. They wouldn't do this in Berkshire, but they think it's okay to do it in Ulster. Absolutely, you're right. And the amazing thing is they have explicit government approval for it because you asked about marginal modeling, the defense secretary, Lord Carrington, later told a cabinet committee, he said, Reggie and I explicitly approved the proposed methods of interrogation. So to read the minutes of the cabinet committee, the lives of British soldiers and innocent civilians depended on intelligence. We were dealing with an enemy who had no scruples, and we should not be unduly squeamish above the methods of interrogation in these circumstances.

1:14:32Dominic Sandbrook:So they're completely open about it with their colleagues. Now, of course, they can't keep this quiet. It was amazing they thought they could. The Sunday Times did a big investigation. The Sunday Times Insight team listed 11 separate cases of torture. The government commissioned a report by three judges. Two of the judges said it's fine. But the third judge, Lord Gardner, said these techniques are secret, illegal, not morally justifiable and alien to the traditions of what I believe still to be the greatest democracy in the world.

1:15:02Tom Holland:I see that he no longer believed that Britain was the greatest democracy in the world than if he framed it like that.

1:15:07Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, I mean, when a judge says that, there's no going back. You know, you're sunk. Ted Heath immediately when that came out said, okay, fine, we won't use them again. But there's a brilliant letter actually by Graham Greene. Graham Greene said to the Times, wrote to the Times, if I as a Catholic were living in Ulster today, I confess I would have one savage and irrational ambition to see Mr. Maudling pressed against a wall for hours on end with a hood over his head. It's so funny, because Maudling would, of course, be absolutely wasted. Hearing nothing but the noise of a wind machine, deprived of sleep when the noise temporarily ceases by the bland voice of a politician telling him his brain will suffer no irreparable damage.

1:15:49Dominic Sandbrook:So all this, of course, is a gift to Britain's critics. It's a gift to people like Ted Kennedy in America, you know great champion of the irish american lobby but it also is a gift to people in britain on the radical left who do agree with this thing of the stuff about vietnam who do see it as a morality story of brutal imperialists and heroic martyrs so this is a point 1971 or so where you have marches in the streets in london that are kind of conflating loads of causes at once the Omnicores. Omnicores. So my favourite placard, Gay Liberation Front Supports Battle for Freedom in Ireland. Now, this would appeal to you, I know, with your Beatles enthusiasm, because you will know that the two best-known Beatles were great enthusiasts for the Troops Out movement at this point.

1:16:37Dominic Sandbrook:So John Lennon would go on marches.

1:16:39Tom Holland:He released an album in 72, sometime in New York City, which had two songs about Ireland. That's his worst album by Miles, it has to be said. and of course Wings the band the Beatles could have been their debut single their debut single

1:16:55Dominic Sandbrook:yeah give Ireland back to the Irish yes give Ireland back to the Irish well so you know that

1:17:00Tom Holland:the guitarist in Wings um Henry McCulloch was a Protestant from Londonderry I guess we should call it wow and his his his brother I think got beaten up in an Irish pub in Kilburn about it about the song yeah and henry mcculloch kind of didn't go back to to northern ireland for years and years because he was so worried about their reaction yeah because paul and linda had talked him into this song against his will i think paul hadn't even discussed it with him i think you know

1:17:30Dominic Sandbrook:he thought oh that's insane not sure about this but anyway actually the thing about british opinion i mean this will i think surprise irish listeners and maybe some american listeners it's the one thing I think that people often get wrong about this story abroad. People I think abroad, and I remember this when I lived in America, people would ask me about Northern Ireland. And I would say, well, no one in Britain cares about it at all. And they would say, oh, no, that's not right. People in Britain have an irrational attachment to the ownership of part of the island of Ireland. Most people in Britain, I mean, you will know this, Tom, you lived during this period, genuinely could not care less about this subject.

1:18:11Dominic Sandbrook:And in fact, even doing this podcast, there's part of me that thinks will we have any downloads because all our british listeners will say no too dull i'm not going to listen to this it's depressing i think yeah but the main thing

1:18:22Tom Holland:it was background noise of bombs and assassinations and you just thought oh just make it stop yeah it

1:18:29Dominic Sandbrook:was the case even from the beginning so september 1969 when the troops had just gone in and you would think it would have at least the sort of novelty value people were asked to rank the problems facing the British government and they unerringly ranked Northern Ireland as bottom, least important.

1:18:44Tom Holland:But the thing is, the British government, do you think, would have agreed with that or not? By this point, is it higher up? Ted Heath spends a lot of time on this. I mean, people are dying. It's a serious thing. It's a low-level civil war. Is it as important to him as getting into the common market?

1:19:00Dominic Sandbrook:No, nothing is as important. I mean, to be fair to Ted Heath, Ted Heath has the most bonkers cascade of events and challenges. But it is remarkable. It's never an election issue. It never features in election campaigns. It's almost never mentioned at party political conferences. It rarely comes up on TV.

1:19:20Tom Holland:It comes to seem like bad weather in February. Yeah. It's just what you expect. You don't like it, but you just put up with it.

1:19:28Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, I think that's true. But anyway, Ted Heath, I mean, you asked about Ted Heath. A Ted Heath cannot now ignore it because after the disaster of internment, things go from very, very bad to absolutely horrendous. So it's now mid-August 1971. There's a dramatic increase in the bloodshed. Four people shot on the 11th, a Protestant shot on the 12th, a Catholic shot on the 13th, a soldier killed by the IRN the 14th. You know, it's now becoming a daily occurrence that people are dying. And we'll end with this. I mean, talk about concatenation of events with this absolute sort of drumbeat of horror in the autumn of 1971.

1:20:03Dominic Sandbrook:So it starts on Wednesday, the 29th of September. It's 1030 at night and we're in the Four Step Inn, which is a Protestant pub off the Shankill Road. And it is packed with people watching TV in the pub lounge. And then a bomb goes off and the bar roof collapses. Almost 30 people are injured and two of them are killed, Alexander Andrews and Ernie Bates. Alexander Andrews was 60. He was so badly disfigured by the bomb that his son had to identify him by his shoes. And nobody claimed responsibility for this, but there's no doubt whatsoever that it was done by the provisional IRA. And this pub is not a military target.

1:20:41Dominic Sandbrook:This is the first time, really, that you get a bombing that is purely a sectarian attack. So that really is damning their souls, then? Completely, completely. Then the 2nd of November, they strike again. this time the red lion on the ormo road 4 30 in the afternoon people are in the pub having a drink two men walk into the pub with a third man with a gun and the two men say put down this bomb i mean they literally carry in the bomb and then they say to the people in the pub you've got 10 seconds to get out and then they get out themselves the bomb actually went off after six seconds again the roof fell in dozens of people injured three people killed john cochran mary gemmel and william jordan who were all Protestants.

1:21:23Dominic Sandbrook:At this point, the Ulster Volunteer Force get their revenge a month afterwards. Saturday, the 4th of December, 1971. McGurk's Bar in the city centre. The kind of pub where old men are sitting round over a pint looking at the newspaper and talking about the horse racing. 8.45 that evening, a UVF man, so a loyalist, walks into the pub entrance and he drops a brown parcel and then he runs back to a waiting car. The parcel is a bomb which explodes almost immediately. It destroys the entire building. 15 people are killed. And this includes McGurk, the landlord's wife, and his 14-year-old daughter, and a 13-year-old boy.

1:22:03Dominic Sandbrook:So it's escalating. And then a week after that, the IRA take their revenge. So it's tit for tat. And this is a terrible story. Saturday lunchtime, the Shankill Road, packed with shoppers. a car pulls up outside the Balmoral furniture showroom and a man jumps out and he puts a box down on the doorstep and then the car speeds off a few seconds later this box explodes and it again destroys the entire building 20 people are buried under the rubble four people are killed straight away two of them were staff in the showroom the other two people who were killed were Tracy Munn and Colin Nickell. Tracy Munn was two and Colin Nickell was 17 months old and they were sharing a pram when they were killed.

1:22:49Dominic Sandbrook:It's an absolutely horrendous scene. Loads of people come running up and one of them is a boy. He's 15. He's called Billy McQuiston. He heard the bomb and he came running up and he later told the BBC reporter Peter Taylor, he said, women were crying, men were trying to dig out the rubble. Other men were hitting the walls. I just stood there and cried, just totally and utterly numb. It wasn't until I got back home that I realized this isn't a game. There's a war going on here. These people are trying to do us all in because we're Protestants. They're going to kill us. So we're going to have to do something.

1:23:23Dominic Sandbrook:And so the next day, this 15 year old boy goes to find the loyalist UDA. And that evening they signed him up. And that was how it worked. That was how it went on. So this was the United Kingdom in December 1971.

1:23:39Tom Holland:So we've seen how the atrocities have been escalating. And in 1972, things are going to get even worse because the conflict is going to be reaching its deadly peak. So in our final episode of the series, Bloody Sunday in Derry, Bloody Friday in Belfast, and Stormont, the Parliament of Northern Ireland will be getting mothballed. Club members can hear that episode now. You can sign up at therestishistory.com. There will be lots about this series in our incredible newsletter. You can sign up for that as well if you haven't already. Thank you, Dominic. We will be back with our final episode. Until then, goodbye.

1:24:25Dominic Sandbrook:Bye-bye.

1:24:34Tom Holland:9-11 was the deadliest terrorist attack in US history. But could it have been prevented? I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist. And I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst. We're the hosts of The Rest is Classified. And in our latest series, we are telling the inside story of how the 9-11 terrorists slipped through the CIA's grasp. In the summer of 2000, a man walks up to US immigration at Newark Airport. His passport gets stamped, he's waved through and welcome to America. That single stamp was one of the gravest intelligence blunders in modern history. Because one year later, nearly 3 ,000 people will be dead.

1:25:15Tom Holland:That man was Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of 9-11. But here's what they don't tell you. The CIA already knew Al-Qaeda was inside the US. An FBI memo explicitly warned that terrorists were in US flight schools. So how did he slip through? Why was this red flag ignored? In this series, we dig into the Declassified files to uncover how the biggest terrorist attack on America was allowed to happen. Get the full story by listening to The Rest is Classified and subscribing to The Declassified Club wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody.

1:25:54Dominic Sandbrook:Dominic again. Now, here is the clip that we promised you from our show, The Book Club, which talks about Ernest Hemingway's book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and specifically, the history of the Spanish Civil War. So Spain has not been involved in the First World War at all. It's been a backwater, basically. It's been really politically turbulent. There is a king. It's nominally a parliamentary system. Most of Spain is untouched by the modern world. So it feels like there's these huge estates called the Latifundiae, which go back to the Roman period.

1:26:27Tom Holland:I found this extraordinary. I had no idea until I started reading up for this.

1:26:30Dominic Sandbrook:Well, this is true of Spain and Portugal, actually. They would have absolutely gigantic rural estates run by landowners, almost kind of feudal system. The peasants are enthralled to the landowner and to the church and whatnot. There are parts of Spain that have industrialized the Basque country, the North and Catalonia. But those are obviously places with separatist movements. So Spain feels very fractured. And there's lots of labor unrest. There's a big anarchist movement. There was a socialist movement. There's a communist party. In the 20s, there was a coup and a general took power called General Miguel Primo de Rivera, you know, under the king.

1:27:10Dominic Sandbrook:But that didn't really work out. They brought back democracy at the beginning of the 1930s, but it's incredibly polarised and unstable between right and left. There are terrible strikes. So, for example, in the North in 1935, there are assassinations. There are kind of paramilitary movements and whatnot. The son of the previous dictator, Primo de Rivera, sets up a little fascist party called the Falange, which actually sort of gives its name really to. It's then co-opted by the right, by the conservatives who win the Spanish Civil War. I mean, whether they're really fascists or whether they're just basically using the fascist label is an interesting question.

1:27:49Dominic Sandbrook:Right, so it all comes to a head in 1936. There's an election at the beginning of the year, which means that a popular front, which is a kind of left-wing alliance of liberals, socialists, you know, sort of left-wing parties, some of the separatists or more nationalist groups from the areas like the Basque Country or Catalonia, they come to power. And there's a lot of social unrest because they want to push through radical changes and the right don't like that. and in July 1936, the army launches, right-wing elements within the army launch a coup. The reason the Spanish Civil War happens is the coup doesn't fully work.

1:28:27Dominic Sandbrook:So basically the trade unions, the big cities in Madrid, Barcelona and so on, stay loyal to the elected government. So Spain is divided between the rebels, the coup people in the army and their allies who are often like big landowners, the Catholic Church and so on, who want to defend the status quo. They've got half the country, often kind of rural areas, more conservative and so on. But the big cities and Catalonia and so on, so Madrid, Barcelona, places like that, they stay loyal to the elected government. So on the one hand, you have what are called the nationalists. And these are the forces of the right, the army, the coup plotters and so on.

1:29:08Dominic Sandbrook:Effectively, from day one, they have very, very strong international backing from Mussolini in Italy and then Hitler in Germany. And then on the left, you have the elected government, who are the Republicans, and they get help eventually from the Soviet Union, which is something of a poison chalice. And they do appeal to Britain and France for help, but they don't really get it. And they have help from foreign volunteers. And this war becomes incredibly bitter and incredibly bloody. I mean, this is always the way with civil wars, because people feel it's an existential struggle. The future of their country is at stake.

1:29:47Dominic Sandbrook:They come to believe, you know, their neighbors, the people in the next town, the landowners or the priests or the anarchists or whoever are going to kill them and their families. So we've got to kill them first. people in some places there are horrendous horrendous sadistic massacres and things i think

1:30:04Tom Holland:they found something like at the end of maybe the start of the 21st century or something that spain had the highest number of mass graves after cambodia so if you want to hear the full episode

1:30:14Dominic Sandbrook:just go to apple or spotify or youtube and search for the book club and there it is