THE enterprise was in concept, planning and execution a vast exercise in state criminality. The after effects haunt us yet, for when the rule of law is so flagrantly delegitimised by the state in dealing with a minority, it is next to impossible to restore the primacy of law in the eyes of that minority. And if we didn't know it then, we certainly know it now.
It is not mere journalese to say I knew something cataclysmic was happening that bright morning 25 years ago as I walked to the Belfast office of RTE where I was a young journalist. It was just after dawn. I knew nothing of the internment operation, but was groggy with fatigue. In the dark of the previous night, I had seen a fat soldier, Gunner Hatton, tumble and die in wild street fighting in Ardoyne. Now, this August morning, the entire city was sinisterly transformed. Smoke rose in vast clouds from different areas, and there was the rattle of gunfire, like slates falling off roofs, from everywhere.
Thousands of British soldiers had been deployed in a vast arrest operation throughout Northern Ireland. Some 450 men were targeted for detention 342 were actually arrested. Even if those arrested had been IRA men, the operation so clearly one sided in design and lawless in execution, for soldiers had no powers of search or arrest - would have been a political disaster for the Stormont and British governments. But most of the arrested were not IRA men at all. Many were ex republicans, others were civil rights campaigners, others still were actually unwanted men picked up in a sloppy trawl in which the approximate address seemed sufficient grounds for arrest.
The folly was only starting. Some men were seized in a peaceable fashion. Others were beaten. One group of men from east Belfast was put against a wall opposite a line of paratroopers who performed the ritual of a firing squad execution. The arrested men only realised they were not going to die when laughter followed the order, "Fire".
Many men thought there had been a coup d'etat, so bizarre and brutal were the events which enfolded them. Taken from their beds at four in the morning, many barefoot and still in their pyjamas, baffled, disoriented, frog marched at gunpoint into British army vehicles, beaten with rifle butts if they were slow, herded into barracks, then hooded and, still in pyjamas, put on to helicopters, from which many were made to jump as if they were at altitude when they were only a foot off the ground how could they not have difficulty believing this was happening to them?
A dozen men were set aside for the most wicked part of the adventure interrogation in depth, the systematic destruction of their central will by sensory deprivation. Spread eagled against a wall, hooded, starved, exposed to a week long regimen of white noise, denied the use of toilets, and beaten if they resisted the only term which describes this treatment is torture. In those days, nobody had heard of the three vital elements employed interrogation in depth, sensory deprivation and white noise. They entered the English language following August 9th, 1971.
More than the English language changed that day. Nationalist areas rose in insurrection, and Belfast and much of Northern Ireland passed into a war mode. Insanity seized the city. Hundreds of vehicles were hijacked and factories were burnt. Loyalist and IRA gunmen were everywhere. My first dead body of the day was Paddy McAdorey, an IRA man shot in Ardoyne by loyalists or soldiers. It was said he had shot Gunner Hatton only hours before. Ardoyne seemed as if it was going to provide the greatest horrors of all as Protestants fled the area, burning their homes before they left.
I have to say, they seemed to leave voluntarily; but in the madness of those hours, what is voluntary? What power of judgment survives when a government abandons law, when a city lurches into communal violence, and when truth is simply what you most powerfully believe at a given moment?
In such violent chaos, luck is all. In Ardoyne, I watched the house burnings from an upstairs back window, while below me a frightened soldier stood in an alleyway, amazed. In a bedroom in the house opposite, 30 feet away, a man was looking around him, just as I was. Our eyes met, and, as humans do in such accidental encounters, we nodded to one another.
Then he remembered his real purpose, and in a single sweet movement raised a rifle to his shoulder and opened fire. It was a nice snapshot, burning my ear. The next shot would probably have killed me if the soldier had not turned and fired a single shot into the gunman's window.
I fled the house to the street, where three Catholic youngsters were throwing stones through a gap in the houses. Watch out, I told them, there are gunmen about. One laughed. Gunmen, he scoffed. The next second, they were all down, shot. The soldier who had moments before saved my life had fired again at what he thought was a sniper. His shot ricocheted off a wall, and fragments of the one bullet hit the three boys he couldn't even see; one lost the fingers of one hand, another lost the back of his head but survived; the third was 13 year old Leo McGuigan. It crouched beside him, but he was dead to my fingers, and no blood came from the tiny hole in his young cheek. We put his lifeless, lolling body in a car, and Ardoyne proceeded with its holocaust.
Two bullets from the one gun and luck, good and bad, had saved one life and taken another. Luck was taking; and sparing life all over the city that day. Ardoyne was bad. New Barnsley-Ballymurphy was hell - a largely intentional hell. As night fell, an entire Catholic street was overwhelmed by loyalist attackers. The wasteland across which the Catholics were fleeing was turned into a shooting gallery for loyalists and for paratroopers. Six Catholics were killed, including a mother of eight, and a priest, Hugh Mullan, shot as he gave the Last Rites to a wounded man. A couple of days later, a mourner attending one of the eight funerals was shot dead by a loyalist sniper.
At least 16 people were killed in the immediate aftermath of internment. Over the next few days, entire populations fled their homes in Belfast, and thousands crossed the Border to refugee camps established by the Army in the Republic. Commerce stopped, and serious food shortages rapidly developed throughout Northern Ireland, with society there polarising around the issue of internment. Unionists supported it, and nationalists opposed it and opposed it even more bitterly when they heard Brian Faulkner, the Northern Premier, declare flatly, even while Ballymurphy was burying its dead, that no loyalist gunmen had been active.
The perfectly astounding Brigadier Marston Tickell, who could have been recruited from central casting at Pinewood Studios, told journalists that the army had shot 50 terrorists in the first two days' fighting, killing 30. The initial "cache" of IRA captured was well up to expectations, and subsequent operations had virtually defeated what remained of the IRA.
THE very measure which did such wonders for the good brigadier's credibility had been designed to end the IRA campaign once and for all and preserve the Stormont government. That government fell within six months. Internment only served to convulse Northern Ireland, and those convulsions reverberate to this day. But internment was not the measure which divided the North. It was already divided around the very existence of the state. It is worth recalling now the IRA campaign began after the civil rights demands had been met virtually in their entirety. The RUC had been disarmed and the B Specials disbanded. Housing was no longer the gift of local government. Gerrymandering had been ended. It was time to talk, but the IRA wanted war. It, and we, still have that war. August 9th was the spur that the war required.