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18 August 2019 Edition

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The British Media and Operation Banner

The point of no return – August • 1969 • Lúnasa – Ni raibh aon dul siar as ansin

August 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of Operation Banner, the deployment of British troops in the Six Counties. According to the British government at the time, it was to be a “limited operation”. Instead, it proved to the starting point to a bloody conflict which lasted for 30 plus years as Britain sought, unsuccessfully, to suppress Republicans who resisted what amounted to martial law.

In the years of the troubles, the British government and its soldiery were trenchantly supported by Britain’s national newspapers. With rare exceptions, such as the Sunday Times’s reports in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, crimes committed by the troops were ignored while their critics were marginalised or demonised. 

A very different picture emerges from an analysis of the editorial content of the London-based British press during August 1969. At that early stage, after months in which civil rights marchers had suffered at the hands of police and street riots were a regular event, several papers not only showed genuine concern for the nationalist population of the north, but also dared to tell the truth.

Here’s Cyril Aynsley, the Daily Express’s northern-based correspondent: “For far too long the Unionist government at Stormont, which has ruled unchallenged since 1921, ignored accusations of gerrymandering, sectarianism, anti-Catholicism and nepotism.” 

And here’s Peter Black, the Daily Mail’s TV critic, writing about “the root causes” of the conflict and identifying Britain as the villain in its treatment of Ireland: “The story is so awful that no Englishman with any sense of history can feel quite easy in Ireland. And the situation in the north right now is as mathematical as product of it as two plus three makes five.”

And here’s Cecil King, writing in The Times, the UK’s so-called “paper of record”. In raging against “the regime at Stormont” he called it “the ignoble creation of Carson, Craigavon, Brookborough and such men, determined to maintain Protestant supremacy in the North quite regardless of any other consideration.” 

King, a Protestant raised in Dublin, wrote: “Orange politics have no counterpart in the United Kingdom. Such supremacy can only be maintained by discrimination against Catholics and the gerrymandering of constituency boundaries. These practices have for 50 years been acquiesced in by successive Westminster governments.”

The year before, King had been deposed as chairman of the company that published the Daily Mirror, then Britain’s largest-selling title laying claim to more than 15 million readers a day. On the eve of troops going in, that paper’s leading article said confidently: “The Catholics know that the British people are overwhelmingly on their side in their political aims.”

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The Guardian, in calling for swifter action on social and political reforms, argued that Stormont’s prime minister, James Chichester-Clark, should understand that “the frightening cause of the riots is a total loss of conviction by a substantial section of the Catholic population that they will get a fair deal from Stormont.” The Sun (the pre-Murdoch publication) said: “Protestants must accept that overdue reforms must go ahead much more quickly than they would like.”

Noticeably, the Daily Telegraph did not join in this chorus of concern about the plight of people suffering from discrimination over housing, jobs and a lack of voting rights. Instead, it showed unwavering support for “the Ulster government”, which it feared would be undermined should London intervene by sending British soldiers to supplant the RUC and its auxiliary force, the B Specials.

No newspaper was eager for Harold Wilson’s Labour government to send British troops on to the streets of Belfast and Derry, viewing such an initiative as very much a last resort. In early August, The Times thought it “sensible… to leave the preservation of order in Northern Ireland to Northern Irishmen” on the grounds that “even a limited intervention would be a move that could have grave consequences both for Ulster and the rest of the United Kingdom.”

Despite the political chasm between the Tory-supporting Telegraph and the left-leaning Guardian, both argued forcefully against using the troops. “What is needed”, said the former, “is a decisive demonstration of the physical superiority of the forces of law and order and of the [Stormont] government’s determination to use that superiority both relentlessly and impartially.”  The latter said calls to involve British troops “should be vigorously resisted. It would inflame the situation further.”

But the Mail, in lamenting “horrifying scenes of riot and bloodshed, fire, destruction and mob fury”, remarked that responsibility for a solution rests “ultimately with Britain”, saying: “We cannot wash our hands of the difficulties in Ulster. We cannot pass by on the other side.”

On 14 August, after the deaths of five people and rioting in Derry following an inflammatory Apprentice Boys’ march, there was a change of mind by The Times. It would be “right to call in the army”, said the paper, adding: “The probability is that troops will be required in strength and for a longish period of time.” The Mirror reluctantly agreed: “Nobody wants the troops to go but if the violence continues what other course is possible?”

These views were informed by a growing belief that nationalists required protection because the RUC was not acting impartially. They were shared by every paper with the exception of the Telegraph, which was much more worried about the possible suspension of “the Northern Ireland constitution and the assumption of direct control from Westminster.” Evidently, “moderate Protestants” wouldn’t like it!

The Telegraph was also full of praise for the RUC “whose skill, courage and restraint in the recent troubles both in Belfast and in Londonderry cannot be too highly praised.” It also claimed that the B Specials, even if “partisan”, had a “by no mean dishonourable history.” Oddly, the Mirror ran a surprisingly soft piece about the Protestant part-timers who were braving the bullets while the Mail’s Belfast-based correspondent called them “a group of tough, dedicated men.”

By chance, 12 August marked the publication of a booklet by two academics, Bowes Egan and Vincent McCormack, about the vicious assault on civil rights marchers at Burntollet Bridge, Co Derry, in January 1969. Their central finding was that the ambush by loyalists had been planned by members of the Orange Order and B Specials, several of whom took part. The reviewer for The Sun noted: “What emerges first from the documentary evidence is that the RUC are not an impartial peace-keeping force, but a passionately Protestant body.”

As Unionist politicians sought to defend the Specials, the press narrative about them changed, with most papers approving of them being disarmed and disbanded after being put under the control of General Sir Ian Freeland, the British commander who headed the military forces. 

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Initially, the Telegraph had suggested that the troops should be “controlled by the Belfast government subject only to the ultimate Whitehall veto.” It was the only paper to float this fantasy. It was not alone, however, in wondering what the future would hold after nationalists had welcomed the arrival of the troops.

Newspapers highlighted Freeland’s belief that the honeymoon period would be short-lived. The Mail argued that “the cheers which greeted the arrival of British troops and the cups of tea and sandwiches which people brought out to them should deceive nobody. Ulster remains a powder keg that a single spark could ignite.” In its view, “every second that British troops remain there holding Catholics and Protestants apart is fraught with intense danger.” 

This was hugely significant. It was the first clear statement of what was to become an enduring media motif: the portrayal of the British army – and Britain itself – as the reluctant piggy in the middle between two warring Irish religious tribes. In what would become a common theme, the Telegraph contended that the “disturbances” between Catholics and Protestants were “the product of naked sectarian hatred of the traditional Irish kind.” The Mail agreed: “At bottom is the bitterness between Protestant and Roman Catholic. Such rock-hewn bigotry is as hard to comprehend as the immovable hatred of Moslem and Hindu. It is so out of key with modern thought.” 

Shorn of the historical context (as recorded in the articles by Aynsley, Black and King quoted above), newspapers increasingly failed to address the reality that Britain’s creation of a statelet based on Protestant supremacy was the reason for sectarianism.  

That theme was also evident in the newspapers’ united hostility to the call by Ireland’s prime minister, Jack Lynch, for UN intervention. He was “impudent” (Telegraph); ”mischievous and wrong-headed” (Guardian); “rash and provocative” (Mirror); “irrelevant and irresponsible” (Mail); “more provocative than constructive” (Sun). “Blue-helmeted Swedes or Indians would be wholly out of place in Derry,” said The Times without caring to explain why. Lynch, said the Express, “wants the entire constitutional position of Ulster reviewed”. Similarly, the Telegraph regarded Lynch’s speech as “inflammatory” because it revived the issue of partition. How dare Lynch speak of the elephant in the room. 

According to the Telegraph, there was also “widespread resentment” about the Irish government’s decision to set up military hospitals in Donegal, Cavan and Louth. “It encourages troublemakers to cross the border,” said the paper. If injured, they “will not have to stay in the Northern Irish government’s jurisdiction.” 

Lynch was not the major press villain in August 1969. That dubious honour belonged to Bernadette Devlin, the 22-year-old civil rights activist who had been elected to the Westminster parliament some five months earlier. On 15 August, several papers ran front page pictures of her smashing a rock behind a barricade in Derry during the three-day fight that later became known as the Battle of Bogside. That image would be republished many times in a process of media demonisation.

“Miss Devlin,” argued a Mail writer “is stirring up hatred” and “proves herself no better than a rabble rouser.” She was, said the Express, stirring up mob rage. She should show greater responsibility, said the Mirror. Towards the end of the month, after Devlin had slipped away from Derry to raise awareness in the United States about the civil rights struggle in Ireland, there was outrage at the success of her mission. 

There were signs also of villains-in-the-making: republicans. The Mirror’s political editor, John Beavan, drew a line between the “high minded and noble” civil rights movement which appealed “to people of all faiths” and “Republican Catholics” who were seeking an end to partition. Newspapers responded to a claim by Chichester-Clark, without evidence, that “subversive Republican elements” were “to the fore in Belfast violence” and to the issuing of a nebulous statement by the Official IRA that it was “committed to some form of action”.

It prompted the Telegraph to urge the retention of the B Specials “to fight the IRA” although a Times reporter, Julian Mounter, said he could not substantiate IRA involvement and, citing an anonymous source, was sceptical about whether it had the will or the capability to mount an operation. Mounter was among the posse of reporters and photographers despatched to the north of Ireland from newspaper offices in Manchester and London. 

It meant that a host of young British journalists found themselves trying to understand a conflict they knew nothing about and, for what transpired to be only a few weeks, they simply reported what they saw. Later, they would become increasingly dependent on “the authorities”, meaning the army and the government, for their information. 

At that stage, no newspaper, no leader writer, no journalist, could have foreseen that the hasty decision to send troops to Ireland would lead to one of the longest continuous deployments of soldiers in British military history. Nor did they realise the implications of those troops being used, first, to shore up Stormont rule and then to maintain British rule. How else can one explain the extraordinary naïvety of this confident statement in a Times editorial? “The troops can be relied on nowadays to show complete impartiality between Catholics and Protestants.” 

As if that wasn’t quite naïve enough, The Times observed two days later: “Londonderry is a small town, easily controlled.” Easily controlled by completely impartial paratroopers shooting dead 14 unarmed residents in January 1972. 

• Roy Greenslade is an Honorary Visiting Professor at City, University of London.

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