Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Maybe each wretched anniversary should be twinned with another

Fionnuala O Connor
Fionnuala O Connor Fionnuala O Connor

ALMOST every day is the anniversary of something sad and bad from our not so recent past, though some slip under our radar, oddities rather than horrors.

There it was last Monday in the Éamon Phoenix almost-daily history class. On This Day, July 26 1971: "The hounding of Republicans and their families... brought a wave of protest from all over NI last night... against what were regarded as obvious moves towards internment."

The paper reported that "1800 troops backed up by large numbers of police swooped on houses and other premises in Belfast’s Ardoyne, Falls, Finaghy, Ballymurphy, Whiterock, Markets and Stranmillis areas and in nine towns, including Armagh, Portadown and Lurgan".

Everyone knows this, you say irritably. Think again. The Phoenix class noted that August 9, forever to be tagged Internment Day, did not come out of the blue.

Only those affected - and some who knew it once upon a time? - can now recall the dry run two weeks earlier. Some ignorance is because people are too young to remember and some memories are highly selective.

Some Protestants who lived through the 1974 loyalist strike, perhaps many, did not and do not know that three days into it, no-warning loyalist bombs in Dublin and Monaghan killed 33 people and injured many more.

There are probably Catholics who know about Derry’s Bloody Sunday but have forgotten, if they ever knew, about Bloody Friday, July 21 1972 - when the IRA detonated 20 bombs around Belfast in just over an hour, causing multiple serious casualties and nine deaths.

For ‘do not know’ and ‘if they ever knew’ read ‘do not know or did not allow themselves to know’? Who knows.

Even in the community that this paper plies with the past, there are swathes of the history-light. Memory gets tired.

There was also internment in the '20s, '30s, '40s and '50s, the last of the Border Campaign internees released only in the early sixties.

But it is worth remembering that the most thorough-going and lasting implementation of ‘detainment without trial’ began on August 9 1971. The operation that started at 4am ‘lifted’ 342 - two of them Protestant republican sympathisers, the rest of Catholic origin.

Many had no IRA connections. A third were released within two days, though many other arrests followed. RUC intelligence was poor and out of date and the dry run, never properly explained, had sent many into hiding.

Brian Faulkner’s government - under pressure from his own community for tougher security measures against republicans, and less than a year away from Britain’s dissolution of Stormont - had pleaded with Ted Heath to be allowed to intern.

The Lost Lives chronology dealt with that in calm assertion rather than polemic. 1971, it found, saw a "major escalation of violence, with the death rate rising steeply following the introduction of internment".

So in 1969 the death toll was 18. In 1970 it was twenty-eight. 1971’s toll was 180, thirty-one before Internment Day, 147 after.

Republicans were responsible for 107 deaths, loyalist paramilitaries for 22, soldiers for 45 and the RUC for one.

Of the total 94 were civilians, 44 were soldiers, 11 RUC and five were the Ulster Defence Regiment’s first casualties. During the year 23 republican and three loyalist paramilitaries were killed.

Internment displaced hundreds who fled as bombings and shootings soared, wrecked countless families over the subsequent years, and yes, it recruited for the IRA. It was a gamble that backfired spectacularly.

What it told northern Catholics about the unequal application of state force and its disregard for the law has always eluded many Protestants. But then what Bloody Friday and other IRA attacks did to Protestant minds and hearts as well as to the bodies of their targets still escapes republicans.

The trauma of violence is seen as unavoidable, a hazard of guerrilla warfare.

Maybe each wretched anniversary should be twinned with another, to be taught in every second-level school.