It was a brief period of hope in what was otherwise the worst year of the Troubles.
ifty years ago today, June 26, 1972, the IRA announced a ceasefire — a move which led to a secret and historic meeting in London between a delegation of the republican group’s leaders, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, and the British Secretary of State.
The peace efforts ultimately came to nothing, and death and destruction returned to the streets of Northern Ireland — burning with an even greater intensity than before.
By the beginning of 1972, the Troubles had been raging for several years, with almost 500 people already killed. Any prospect of the violence ending seemed a long way off.
Internment had been introduced by the British Government in August 1971 and hundreds of people — mainly from the nationalist community — had been arrested and held in prison without trial. Internment had been proposed by unionist politicians as the solution to the security situation in Northern Ireland, but led to an increase in support for the IRA.
The IRA had split in 1969 and two factions, the Official IRA and Provisional IRA, had been formed, of which the Provisional IRA, known as the Provos, was the larger and more active group.
On January 30, 1972, 13 civil rights demonstrators were shot dead by British soldiers in Derry on what became known as Bloody Sunday.
The killings led to a wave of IRA bomb attacks, including one three weeks later which killed seven people at a Parachute Regiment base in Aldershot in England.
Against this ever-present cycle of violence, the British government took the decision in March 1972 to prorogue the unionist-controlled Stormont parliament in Belfast.
This marked the end of the majority-rule parliament which had been in place since 1921, when Northern Ireland was first established. Instead, Northern Ireland would be governed by direct rule from Westminster.
Unionists were furious at the decision, and thousands took to the streets in protest.
The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), under the leadership of John Hume, led efforts to end the violence.
SDLP representatives met separately with the newly-appointed Northern Ireland Secretary of State William Whitelaw, and the leaders of the Provisional IRA.
This led to an unprecedented meeting between the IRA and British government officials at a house at Ballyarnett on the Derry/Donegal border on June 20, 1972.
The house was owned by Michael McCorkell, Lord Lieutenant of Londonderry, the Queen’s representative in the county, and his wife Aileen who helped run the Red Cross in Derry. The couple were asked to host the meeting because they were trusted by both sides.
As a precondition for the secret meeting, the IRA demanded 23-year-old Gerry Adams be released from prison, where he had been interned, to take part in the discussions.
Adams was joined at the meeting by Dáithí Ó Conaill, a Cork man described as a senior republican strategist. The UK representatives were Philip Woodfield, a prominent civil servant, and Frank Steele, a leading member of the British intelligence service.
In a confidential briefing note written for Whitelaw after the meeting, Woodfield said he was convinced the IRA representatives wanted peace.
“There is no doubt whatever that these two at least [O’Connell and Adams] genuinely want a ceasefire and a permanent end to violence.
“Whatever pressures in Northern Ireland have brought them to this frame of mind, there is also little doubt that now that the prospect of peace is there they have a strong personal incentive to try and get it,” the civil servant wrote.
It was agreed at the meeting that Whitelaw would meet with IRA leaders if a ceasefire was announced and was seen to be “effective” for an agreed 10 days. Two days later, the IRA announced it would begin a ceasefire on June 26.
Malachi O’Doherty, author of The Year of Chaos: Northern Ireland on the Brink of Civil War, 1971-72, said the IRA was under “significant pressure” to end its violent campaign.
“The Catholic community was getting very annoyed with the IRA, because the Catholic community was suffering as a result of IRA actions,” he said.
“The SDLP was arguing that Stormont has fallen and that now is the time to have negotiations and end internment. So the SDLP was going to the IRA and saying: ‘Look, catch yourself on guys, something has been achieved here. We have brought Stormont down, let’s get into talks and get this stopped.’”
O’Doherty believes Whitelaw was also keen to make his mark as an effective secretary of state.
“I think it was important for him to prove to the SDLP that he would try anything [for peace]. The SDLP was the main party of nationalists at that time. Sinn Féin was a negligible political party. Whitelaw needed the SDLP, and the SDLP were saying to him that he had to make an effort to make peace with the IRA.”
Eleven days after the beginning of the ceasefire, a delegation of IRA leaders was flown to London in a British military aircraft for a meeting with Whitelaw and other government representatives.
The six-man IRA delegation included Ó Conaill, Adams, Martin McGuinness and Seán MacStíofáin, the IRA chief of staff.
The British had tried to exclude English-born MacStíofáin from the meeting because, according to the briefing note from the June 20 Ballyarnett meeting, “it would be better not to include people who are well-known persons and faces”.
The IRA refused this request and MacStíofáin led the discussions in London on behalf of the IRA. However, the three-hour meeting was a disaster.
Mac Stíofáin told the government representatives the IRA wanted the withdrawal of British security forces from Northern Ireland and the right for “Irish self-determination”.
Whitelaw said those demands could not be met, because they breached his obligations to act in accordance to the will of the people of Northern Ireland.
Whatever optimism had surrounded the peace talks evaporated and the ceasefire ended on July 9, 1972, with what became known as the Battle of Lenadoon — when 19 people were killed over five days, after the IRA fired on British soldiers who had prevented Catholic families, who had been intimidated from their homes by loyalists in another part of the city, from moving into empty houses in Lenadoon Avenue.
Then on July 21, the IRA carried out one of its largest bombing operations — when, in what became known as Bloody Friday, they planted and exploded 22 car bombs in Belfast in just 75 minutes, killing nine people.
The horrific death toll would continue. Almost 500 people were killed in 1972. The short IRA ceasefire of June and July is often described as a “long opportunity for peace” — but it’s not a belief supported by O’Doherty.
“I don’t believe the IRA was interested in peace at that time, or that Whitelaw’s expectations were high. More people died in those two weeks than in the two weeks before the ceasefire,” he said.
“If the IRA had gone to Whitelaw and he had said, ‘Yes we will work towards a united Ireland’, I think the Provos would have gone with that — but they knew themselves it wasn’t realistic.
“What they were doing was enhancing their legitimacy. Here they were, dealing with Whitelaw, with Philip Woodfield and Frank Steele. These were guys who had previous form in dismantling colonies in places like Kenya.
“So for Seán Mac Stíofáin, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, to be talking to guys like this must have felt to them that they were really going somewhere.”
O’Doherty said the manner in which the ceasefire ended played into the IRA’s hands.
“By ending the ceasefire around the incident at Lenadoon, the IRA could say to the Catholic community we tried, we met the British but they insisted on stopping us bringing our refugees into these empty houses.
“The IRA could never have said to Catholics at the time, ‘Look, we went over to London, we met Willie Whitelaw, we demanded a united Ireland and he said no — so we went back to war’ because there wasn’t sufficient demand for a united Ireland in the Catholic community.
“What they could say after Lenadoon was this proves the state still discriminates against Catholics. The sequence of events, to their minds, equipped the IRA with a renewed mandate to continue with the armed struggle.”
