In mid-August 1969, following the effective collapse of the RUC in the face of inter-community violence, the British army was required by its government "to interface itself between Catholic and Protestant areas" in Northern Ireland. Initially, this was successfully accomplished, but by June 1970 the army's role had fundamentally changed: it was concentrating exclusively on Catholic areas and leaving it to the RUC to police Protestant areas, writes Garret FitzGerald
A British army report on military operations in Northern Ireland after 1969, prepared under the direction of the Chief of the British General Staff and completed in July last year, shows how this came about. For it admits that the army's June 1970 Falls Road curfew and housing search "did not in practice discriminate between those perpetrating violence and the remainder of the community" and "was a significant reverse at the operational level" that "convinced moderate Catholics that the army was pro-loyalist". The result was, in the words of the report, that "the IRA gained significant support".
That increased support was enhanced by the fact that, because of the reorientation of the army exclusively towards the minority community, in 1970 and 1971, in addition to shooting 11 IRA members, it killed 40 Catholic civilians, of whom 28 were innocent bystanders, but it was responsible for only three Protestant deaths. In those two years the army lost 45 of its own members to IRA attacks.
In 1974 this army reorientation culminated in its failure to support the civil authorities when the Northern Ireland Executive was under attack by the Protestant workers' strike. It is arguable that if, instead of resiling from its role in support of the civil power on that occasion, the army had acted promptly to remove the early barricades before the strike got out of hand, the Northern Ireland crisis might have ended 30 years earlier - and without the need for the participation of Sinn Féin in government.
This army report starts with a claim that its campaign in Northern Ireland "was one of the very few ever brought to a successful conclusion by the armed forces of a developed nation against an irregular force". But it ends with a contradictory admission that "the army did not 'win' in any recognisable way". The truth is that, at considerable cost to both itself and the nationalist community, it eventually secured a military stalemate, creating a situation which led to the IRA abandoning its campaign - conditions which were to lead to a belated political settlement.
The report says that internment was introduced "contrary to military advice", with "many of the wrong people being arrested". And it admits that the army "subjected a small number of Catholic civilians to deep interrogation techniques developed in other theatres during the 1950s and 1960s".
It then alleges that "the Government of Ireland . . . was deeply anti-British in the late 1960s and 1970s" - a remarkable verdict on the administrations led by Jack Lynch and Liam Cosgrave - and that the 1973-77 government, in which I was minister for foreign affairs, made "an attempt to bring a case against the British government in the European Court of Human Rights relating to internment and the prosecution of eight SAS soldiers for illegal possession of weapons when they crossed the Border inadvertently due to a map-reading error. Dublin also brought a case against the United Kingdom in 1977 relating to inhuman treatment of arrested persons. The case was rejected by the court".
Every word of this is false and, as all the facts are on the public record, it must have been known to be false by those who wrote it.
1. The case against the eight soldiers was taken in our District Court - not in the European Court of Human Rights.
2. The Irish government had no role whatever in the men being charged. Having checked that their guns had not been used in a recent cross-Border murder case the government moved to release them without charge, but it then discovered that the independent Director of Public Prosecutions had already charged them on his own initiative and was not prepared to withdraw the charges. Nevertheless, the eight men were immediately released; they returned months later to face the charges, in relation to which they were each fined a small sum.
3. The action brought to the Commission (not court) of Human Rights related inter alia to what this report itself describes as "deep interrogation techniques developed in other theatres". Those techniques, which included the hooding of prisoners and sleep deprivation, clearly constituted breaches of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights and were described by the commission in its adjudication as "torture".
4. Following that verdict the Irish government was then required by Council of Europe procedures to bring the matter either to the ministerial committee of the council or to the Court of Human Rights. In order to minimise political fall-out, we chose to send it to the court rather than to the political ministerial committee, and the court, far from rejecting the case, found that the army's techniques had breached the convention because they involved "inhuman and degrading treatment". As the authors of the report must be aware, this led to the abandonment of these forms of interrogation by the British army - a lead unhappily not followed by the United States in Iraq.
The report then goes on to make a political comment to the effect that the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement "can be seen as a useful stepping stone, but, as the only major political development in a decade, scarcely a great leap forward".
Later the report claims that "the operational primacy of the RUC in security operations was formally re-established in 1976". The key word here is, of course, "formally". The reality was that many patrols continued to operate thereafter without even RUC participation.
And although in the negotiations for the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement the British government accepted that this would in future happen only in the most exceptional circumstances, e.g. if the RUC member of a patrol failed to turn up, nevertheless, in defiance of its government's international commitment - and to the evident embarrassment of senior British officials - that part of the agreement was not in fact implemented by the army. Indeed, later on the report itself admits that "the army led operations in certain areas - west Belfast and Armagh - until the early 1990s".
Years later, a former RUC chief constable complained bitterly to me about the way in which, after a change of army leadership in Northern Ireland, the army had reimposed primacy over the RUC.
There is much more of the same that space does not permit me to record. It is disturbing that at a time when relations between Ireland and Britain are so close and friendly a report of such a character could be prepared by currently serving officers "under the direction of the Chief of the General Staff".
PS. Congratulations to Conor Cruise O'Brien on his 90th birthday today!