With Belfast soon subject to a bombing campaign, with almost daily reports of murder, and children dismembered by shrapnel, Brian Faulkner, the Northern Irish prime minister and a bastion of the Unionist establishment, begged Heath for powers of internment. On 5 August, Heath granted them, with the proviso that such internment must not target the Catholic community alone. On 9 August, the army burst into the homes of almost four hundred Catholic families, destroying sacred statues and tearing up family photographs all on the basis of useless intelligence. Many of those ensnared had little or no connection with militant republicanism and, of those that did, one had last been active during the Easter Rising. The IRA leadership was quite untouched, and now had a host of new volunteers.
As if all this were insufficient to crack the last foundations of trust, there was also the nature of internment itself. The notorious five techniques of interrogation were used, which included subjecting the internees to ‘white noise’ and sleep deprivation. Beatings and forced confessions were commonplace. Such techniques seemed only to vindicate the IRA’s central premise that this was indeed a war against imperialism. Internment was a disaster, not least because, in defiance of stated government policy, the vast majority of suspects were Catholic. It scarcely helped that this debacle was presided over by Reginald Maudling, a minister temperamentally and morally unfit for the task in hand.
With internment exposed as a moral and political failure, social cohesion in a state of haemorrhage and the two communities terrified of one another, another option began to drift into political discourse. It needed only a crisis for it to take flesh. Derry (or Londonderry, as the British called it) was the Province’s second city, and for months the army had attempted to ensure order there with the minimum of intervention. However, sniper attacks upon soldiers were a weekly occurrence, and the Protestants had begun calling for a curfew. By August 1972, civil rights marches had been banned. One group, peaceable in intent, decided to call one regardless. Paratroopers were sent in with orders to halt or at least redirect the march. Nervous, resentful and with a tradition of toughness to defend, they were not perhaps the ideal choice.
Even today, no one knows who fired the first shot or why. The paras later claimed that they had only opened fire when they were shot at. However that may be, a peaceful demonstration became a rout, as screaming people fled the soldiers’ bullets. By the end of the day, thirteen Catholics lay dead. No direct IRA involvement was ever proven, and the houses from which the soldiers saw firing were later shown to have held neither snipers nor weapons of any kind. And yet it is scarcely conceivable that trained men would have opened fire with no provocation whatever. The truth may never be known. For the time being at least, ‘Bloody Sunday’ stripped the British government of any moral authority: for those in the Catholic community, the Republic and many in the wider world, it had the burning brand of imperialism. Only two years before, the army had been admired for the tolerance and good humour it had usually displayed. Now what was left of that reputation was gone.
It was the end of the Northern Ireland parliament, and Direct Rule at last took shape. The government proclaimed it was left with ‘no alternative to assuming full and direct responsibility for the administration of Northern Ireland until a political solution for the problems of the Province can be worked out in consultation with all those concerned’. Whatever decision was to be made regarding the future of the Province, it was clear that the Republic must in some way be involved. Given that such a proposal would have been quite unacceptable to the Unionists, there was only one man who had a chance of presenting it: William ‘Willie’ Whitelaw. Genial, loyal and boundlessly benevolent, he could charm the claws from a tiger.
Whitelaw and others forged a national executive at Sunningdale, composed of all parties, including representatives from the South. In later years it would be seen as the precursor to the Anglo-Irish and Good Friday Agreements. Had goodwill prevailed it might perhaps have succeeded, but it was stillborn. Scarcely had the necessary antagonisms been aired when Whitelaw was summoned back to England to deal with the second miners’ strike. If only he had stayed to chair the executive, if only the Unionists had been more tractable, if only the Nationalists had seen the other side’s point of view: but it was not to be. In any case, the more zealous in the Protestant community saw the agreement as nothing more than an attempt to subvert the clear will of the majority. The Province fell victim to a general strike, and worse was to follow. Belfast was taken over by Loyalist paramilitaries, while the army stood by and the RUC colluded. The rule of law had been replaced by the rule of a faction. The options remaining to the government were martial law or capitulation, and they chose the latter. There was a further political price to be paid; the Unionists never forgave Heath for the Sunningdale Agreement, which they regarded as an attempt to subvert what they saw as their ancient rights, and their foes saw as their unjust privileges.
47
The fall of Heath
Amidst what can seem only a forest of white flags, some undoubted victories for Heath’s government may be discerned. The Family Income Supplement was one. An early piece of legislation, it helped countless poor couples to raise families on very little. Other laws to help the disadvantaged were legion. That Heath had turned his political energies in that direction was a source of puzzlement to many of his foes.
But perhaps this humanitarian impulse showed itself most clearly in Heath’s decision to allow the Asians of Uganda to enter Britain as refugees. Expelled by Idi Amin, these people still held British passports granted by Macmillan, and now looked to the mother country for succour. In retrospect, it seems remarkable that there should have been the slightest resistance to such a plea, but concerns about immigration were still alive. The meat porters of Smithfield came to parliament in a crowd of 500 to show their support for Enoch Powell. He had declared that the question of passports was ‘a spoof’, and maintained that ownership of one conferred no right of residence. In the circumstances, it was an ugly and specious argument, and the government crushed it. Heath himself never wavered; the refugees arrived, and the country showed itself at its best. Government help aside, Asian communities were quick to offer shelter, food and housing, as were other groups. It was perhaps Heath’s noblest hour; his grandest was still to come.
Having wooed and won the French, Heath had now to persuade parliament; while it had approved the decision to enter the European Community, it had yet to examine the terms. Ominous growls of future dissent could already be heard. The first difficulty lay in the sheer bulk of the papers involved. The task of reducing the terms to a digestible length fell to, among others, the future chancellor, Geoffrey Howe. Howe had a thoroughly, even oppressively, academic mind, and the arranging or clarifying of minutiae was perhaps his greatest gift. The result was a triumph, with the rolling ribbons of barely comprehensible directives cut down to a simple set of clauses. At one level, this could not but backfire, for with all obfuscation now removed, the full extent of the EEC’s new powers stood open to the naked eye. One clause in particular was prominent. Clause Eleven stated unambiguously that EEC law would prevail over British law and be ‘enforced, allowed and followed accordingly’.
None could ignore this, and Michael Foot, for one, had no intention of doing so. He had been dissatisfied by the whole process of simplification, calling it no more than ‘a lawyer’s conjuring trick’. But Clause Eleven deeply dismayed him. He and Enoch Powell did their best to filibuster, but the Speaker would not budge. He apologized for the fact that the House had not had the opportunity to consider the protocols more fully, but such was the hour. The House was assured that ‘a thousand years of English Parliamentary history [was] not about to be supplanted by the Napoleonic code’. Despite this, there was never any doubt as to the outcome. Although ‘full-hearted consent’ to the terms of entry was notable by its absence, a clear majority of MPs voted through the last of the legislation. And thus, on 17 October 1972, royal assent for entry was granted. On 1 January 1973, Britain entered the EEC.