On Monday 9th August, coincidentally 50 years ago today, around 3am, thousands of British soldiers in Saracen armoured cars trundled out of a multitude of Army camps and raced through nationalist areas in the 6 counties, their targets were hundreds of male nationalists, young and old, by 5am almost 350 had been dragged from their beds and brought to specially organised interrogation centres, on the streets as dawn broke residents of the Bogside and Ballymurphy, Ardoyne and Ardboe, Carrickmore and Crossmaglen gathered as word spread that the Stormont Govt supported by Westminster had once gain introduced a weapon used against nationalists in every decade since partition and the founding of the northern statelet, internment without trial was once again used against nationalists!
Older people had seen it all before, in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and 60’s the Unionist junta had used internment to control nationalists and republicans in their apartheid statelet. Old men now in their 70’s had been held in Ballykinlar and other gaols as the new statelet was formed and enforced between 1920-22; in the hungry 30’s internment was used to split a united protestant and catholic working class; during WW2 the Al Rawdah prison ship held republicans; in the Border Campaign of the mid 50’s internment was again used and as the modern conflict began in ’69 it was used once again, but the morning of 9th August ’71 would see the greatest sweep of nationalist areas as PM Brian Faulkner convinced London that his experience of internment in the 50’s which put down that IRA campaign and would work once again in the modern era, how wrong he was?
I was 17 when Internment was introduced in ’71, had unfortunately left school early after ‘O’ Levels in ’69 and just before my home city imploded in flames that August when loyalists, the RUC and ‘B’ Specials, had launched a massive pogrom against the Lower Falls after protests and rioting to take pressure of Derry and the Battle of the Bogside. As young teenagers we were a generation which fuelled the street rioting and became defenders of our own districts, many joined the Fianna, the republican youth movement and then morphed into the IRA, trained how to make proper Molotov cocktails to fling at the newly arrived British soldiers from such exotic places as the working class streets of Toxteth, Easterhouse, Brixton, Moss Side, then shown how to use weapons like stolen RUC Webley revolvers and .303 rifles hidden since the Tan War, how to break them down, clean them, hide them, preparing for the day when we would fire them!
Right throughout 1970 training was taking place in back bedrooms in small working class two up/two down houses down the Falls and in newly built post WW2 estates like Ballymurphy, Turf Lodge and Andytown. On the streets civil rights had given away to civil disobedience and rioting, Ballymurphy at Easter ’70; Short Strand June ’70; the Falls Curfew July ’70; Ardoyne Feb ’71; the Bogside and Creggan continuously and the Falls in August ’71, and to complement the street rioting the IRA had gone on the offensive in early ’71 as the first British soldier, Gunner Curtis, was killed on Irish streets since Capt C Mears in Cork on the day of the Truce in 1921, 50 years earlier, now 50 years later we are looking back at events in ’71 which developed into a crescendo of violence, which would be fuelled to the extreme by the foolish decision to introduce Internment that August 9th, 50 years ago today!
Operation Demetrius, the code name for the most disastrous military decision in the UK’s long and troubled association with Ireland. Within days thousands of nationalists had fled their homes to safety in West Belfast or the Republic for the second time in as many years, whole streets in Ardoyne were burned out by loyalists, massive street riots were taking place all over the 6 counties, 17 civilians were shot dead, 10, including a priest, were murdered by the Paras in Ballymurphy alone, a forerunner to Bloody Sunday by the same paid killers six months later in Derry. The IRA and the British Army engaged in massive gun battles right across the 6 counties, nothing like it had been seen in Europe since the end of WW2, a so called democracy faced with an uprising from a section of its people, on television PM Brian Faulkner announced that internment would work and the IRA were on the run, meanwhile in a press conference in a school in the middle of Ballymurphy and the place surrounded by Paras, a wee man with a cloth cap countered Faulkner by telling the world that, ‘internment had failed, the IRA were intact and taking the fight to the British Army’, his name was Joe Cahill, OC of the Belfast Brigade, afterwards he left the building discreetly and rejoined his men on the streets, internment had failed!
Internment without trial is rarely used in a so called democratic entity but in the 6 counties it has been on the agenda since partition, in 1922 a Special Powers Act was enforced to help establish the statelet and used right up until the 70’s. In total when internment was phased out in '75 almost 2000 had been interned, 1900 republicans and 100 loyalists? That August '71 the British Army and RUC Special Branch had nearly 500 names on a hit list but eventually arrested 340, civil rights leaders, Teachers, writers, musicians, Irish language activists, and maybe 30 IRA men, many older guys from the 40’s/50’s, as Christy Moore would sing, ‘they came for the Jews, then trade union members, next Bible students and homosexuals, then gathered up immigrants and gypsies, and then they came for me’? Sadly people in Nazi Germany didn’t speak but in the 6 counties after 50 years of partition nationalists had enough and they came on the streets in their thousands to let Stormont know that the days of misrule were over.
From the start of the ‘troubles’ in ‘August ’69, that unique Irish euphemism for death and destruction, about 40 people were killed until the introduction of internment, in the four months afterwards until xmas almost 150 were killed, the following 12 months in ’72 over 500 were killed in the worst death toll of the conflict, internment had proved to be the touchstone for a massive escalation in conflict. As just turned 18 year olds we became involved in the armed struggle and took our place on the streets as did many before us, when we should have been playing Minor for the local GAA team or even the County, finishing school and maybe heading to University, although that would have been unlikely for a nationalist youth from West Belfast, starting an apprenticeship, first job, going to the disco and meeting girls, all the normal things that teenagers do, but for us our world was different and the future held gaol and death, that was our young lives as we approached xmas 1971.
Events gradually took over our lives, just before xmas a childhood friend Jimmy McCallum was blown up by a UVF bomb as he worked at a catholic pub on the Springfield, he was 16 and the first to die from amongst our peers, he wouldn’t be the last by a long shot. Jimmy and I and another friend started work in three different city pubs in the summer of ’69, now Jimmy was dead and within a few weeks we would face a new experience in our lives, internment! On New Year’s Eve along with some friends we headed to a disco in Andytown, met a girl and left her home and then walked up the lonely road to our estate, risking being picked up by loyalist killers prowling the area or squaddies in the mood for handing out a kicking. I made it home but was only in bed an hour when an unmerciful bang on the door as soldiers of the Kings Own Scottish Borderers smashed in the door and charged up the stairs screaming, ‘where is the wee fcuker’? My parents and sister were in shock but my Dad had the presence to reply, ‘I’m Patrick McMenamin’ and the hero of Bannockburn ordered him down the stairs but the Intelligence Officer said, ‘not the old man you fool, the young one’! So Dad’s ploy was pre-empted and the next thing I was being hauled off to Palace Barracks, Hollywood, the main interrogation centre and Paras HQ, and it wasn’t to play golf with Rory’s Dad!
The next 48 hours wouldn’t be an experience to savour, Palace Barracks had a reputation for rough interrogation techniques and it didn’t disappoint. Seated facing a white wall with little white dots for hours on end, isolated, you end up seeing little creatures crawling up the wall, sensory deprivation to use a modern term. Then every four hours two burly Branch men would drag you into an interrogation room and in between punches and innuendo they flung question after question, to be honest I always wondered what they thought an 18 year old really knew about events on the street, but it didn’t stop them and they persisted, the only hope for me was to keep my mouth shut and get through it and if not freedom at least make it to the Maidstone or the Kesh and amongst friends, albeit as internees.
Thankfully I made it through the two days and the next thing a delighted Branchman handed me an internment order signed by none other than the PM Brian Faulkner, ‘as a threat to the stability of the state I hereby detain you under HMP’! Jesus as like most 18 year olds I was probably more a danger to myself but c’est la vie, I was taken from Palace Barracks in a jeep with soldiers and cops and driven to Belfast Lough where HMS Maidstone awaited me, a WW2 destroyer which was based in Malta, a future domicile of mine, now it had been turned into a troop carrier holding 700 Marine Commandos and in one section of the ship it became a centre of internment of Irish republicans, whether it was the bow, aft or stern was irrelevant to us, we would be domiciled there for the foreseeable future!
‘Walking the gang plank’ wasn’t the usual frightening experience, as I stepped onto the boat I met friends who had been arrested before me, in total there were 300 of us interned on the Maidstone, an eclectic group which included Gerry Adams and Joe McDonnell et al. It was an experience to behold, stuck in cramped quarters below deck it gave an insight what it must have been like for the thousands of migrants who left these shores for America post Famine times. We could go above deck a few times every day and get a bit of January sunlight, also being republican prisoners it gave us a chance to take in the surroundings and any lapses we could detect in security? As with republicans at all times the top priorities in gaol were to educate ourselves and to escape! The Maidstone would be no different, an escape committee were working diligently and just over two weeks later on the 17th January seven of the boys shimmied down a steel cable rope after squeezing out a porthole, they then swam the couple of hundred metres across Belfast Lough, they were covered in shoe polish and butter to protect from the cold, one wasn’t a great swimmer and almost drowned but the boys helped him make it. On the other side near the shipyard they waited in the cold January air for a workers bus to arrive, imagine the shock the loyalist driver had when seven naked internees hijacked his bus? Back on the Maidstone the remainder of us had to keep walking about the decks to stop the Screws getting a proper headcount which we did for a few hours to make sure the boys had got away. Back on the other side the escapees had convinced the driver it was in his best interests to co-operate and in fact Peter Rodgers had been a bus driver and delivered them to the Markets, the closest republican area just off the city centre, here the boys entered a pub and locals stripped and gave them clothes and other volunteers arrived to drive them to West Belfast before the alarm was raised. A few days later the seven escapees arrived in Dublin and gave a press conference to the delight of nationalists everywhere and embarrassment to both the British and Irish Governments! The great escape became known as the ‘Magnificent Seven’, if it had been during WW2 the Brits would have made a film about it?
As for the escapees, three would be dead within a few years, Jim Bryson was shot dead in Ballymurphy in ’73; as was Tommy ‘Toddler’ Tolan later in ’77; and Thomas ‘Tucker’ Kane was killed in a vehicle accident while on IRA business a few years later; Tommy Gorman was rearrested several times and spent many years in the Cages of Long Kesh while Peter Rodgers served 40 years in Portlaoise after a Garda was killed in a shootout; Martin Taylor and Sean Convery lived the quiet life. After the escape the Prison Governors decided to move us to another internment camp at Magilligan near Derry, where indeed a long term resident of Letterkenny escaped in ’75 walking out of the place dressed as a Teacher of History, how appropriate? So we were all in Magilligan when news came through that Stormont had fallen in March ’72, the first tangible results of the armed struggle. Soon after we were flown by helicopter to Long Kesh, for me it was melancholy to see the hills of Inishowen so close by as we were swept away to the Cages in the Kesh, but our freedom wasn’t long delayed as during negotiations between the British Government and the IRA leadership the ending of internment was on the agenda and a few months later we left the Cages behind us, alas not knowing they would be part of our lives soon again but that’s a story for another day?