It was an overcast Sunday morning in January 1983 and two IRA gunmen were waiting outside Belfast’s St Brigid’s church. After attending mass, judge William Doyle was settling into the driver’s seat of his green Mercedes. He was hoping to escape the congregation throng when two Provisional IRA killers, wearing duffel coats with their hoods up, fired at point blank range through the side driver’s window. As the gunmen fled, they passed Doyle’s daughter, Liz, who saw them hand their weapons to a girl walking a dog. In the chaos, the gunmen and the girl disappeared. The judge’s brother Dennis, a doctor who was also at mass, immediately started CPR in a vain attempt to save William before Canon Paul McAlister, who had just celebrated mass, administered the last rites on the street outside his church.
In all this peace process praise there is a kind of amnesia about the Troubles
I arrived about an hour after the judge’s murder; his car was still parked on the kerb surrounded by a thin strand of police tape. The church was shut, the street empty, the congregation gone. You could walk up close and see the smears of blood on the tan leather seat upholstery, spot the Sunday papers judge Doyle had bought on the way to church anticipating a lazy Sunday afternoon reading. The lone RUC policeman guarding the scene in his flak jacket and with his MI carbine stamped his feet, already bored. A light breeze rustled the leaves as small splatters of rain fell to earth like tears on the Mercedes bonnet. It was my first day on the ‘job’ as a Troubles reporter; my first experience of murder, up close.
Doyle, the most senior Catholic judge to die during the Troubles, had probably been set up – possibly even by someone from his own congregation. I hung around for a bit not really sure what to do. And then I realised it was over. Doyle, who was just 57 when he died, was already just another Troubles victim. He was number 2,500 or so of the Troubles murder toll; another 1,000 would lose their lives before the bloody conflict ended. As a judge, his death made more headlines than other killings, but it was still just a marker on a futile murder track. The British State on Irish soil did not weaken with his loss, nor did the IRA become stronger. His killers have never been caught and, even today, a united Ireland is still a long way away.
Over the coming days, the great and the good, and Joe Biden, will be arriving in Belfast for the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. But in all this peace process praise there is a kind of amnesia about the Troubles ‘war process.’ It is as if judge Doyle’s killing, and the thousands of other victims like him, were the result of some kind of unexpressed inevitability in the history of Ireland, a division between two ‘ethno-nationalist’ communities, beyond human agency, where everyone, and no-one, is equally to blame.
The names of the inconvenient dead, like judge Doyle – who believed in a United Ireland – are erased
The war in Ireland was waged by small paramilitary organisations like the Provisional IRA – men with guns – or leaders who gave weapons and orders to the likes of Doyle’s killers. Anyone who opposed them in their own communities was terrorised into silence. Civic society, peace groups, the endless public condemnation, and inter-communal reconciliation gatherings, never stopped a single bullet. Gerry Adams and his close Belfast associates pop up on every page of republican history.
The first IRA ceasefire in August 1994 – long pre-dating the 1998 Good Friday Agreement – only began after certain ‘understandings’: the future release of IRA prisoners and the disbandment of the RUC. This had been agreed after protracted clandestine negotiations starting in the early 1990s between the IRA’s/ Sinn Fein’s leadership, as represented by Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly, and Britain’s intelligence agencies and political leaders. When the IRA Army Council lost faith in their British counterparts they blew up London’s Docklands in February 1996 and broke their ceasefire. The secret IRA-British Government peace talks soon resumed – and, on 10 April 1998, the Good Friday Agreement was announced.
The Agreement was, of course, a historic breakthrough. A cross-community international endorsement of a protracted peace process. A gateway to 25 years of cold but sustainable peace and a triumph of democratic and diplomatic negotiation. The killings largely stopped.
The Agreement itself also proved that those Troubles’ killings were futile and had failed to achieve the supposedly political aims of their gunmen perpetrators. Could the Troubles then have ended sooner?
For a war, the Troubles is extremely well documented. We know the name of every victim, can reasonably guess at most of the killer’s names too, and have an accurate tally of who did most of the murdering. In the Sutton Index of Troubles’ deaths, Irish republicans killed over 2,000 people, loyalists just over a 1,000 and the British forces 363. Around 400 IRA men died in gun battles or as a result of their own explosives.
A lot of the republican killings followed the same pattern as the murder of judge Doyle: gun attacks on officers of the crown, RUC reservists and Ulster Defence Regiment soldiers on their days off when they were at their most vulnerable. Many of these people had second jobs – as bus drivers or butchers or whatever else they did with their lives. Over 500 RUC and UDR personnel were murdered.
Loyalist killers were often less organised in their methods: they shot Catholic civilians at random and never developed the car bomb technologies used by the Provisional IRA in the City of London bombs of the 1990s.
The most remarkable statistic is the deaths inflicted by the British forces: 365 as compared to their losses of over 700 soldiers. If you add in the 500 deaths inflicted on the RUC and UDR, the security force death toll tops 1,200. In most counter-insurgency wars, Western military forces kill more combatants than they lose. Indeed, if the British had adopted the same tactics as, say the French in Algeria in the 1950s, the civilian death toll from the British Army alone could have topped 7,000.
Instead, the British largely constrained their firepower within the rule of civil law. There were exceptions, of course, but, in general, British troops didn’t shoot dead known IRA men in the streets even though they knew they were combatants. Even the SAS could only kill IRA gunmen if they were reasonably near a gun. IRA men were allowed to fight the terrorism charges they faced in court with lawyers whose fees were paid by the British taxpayer. As colonial oppressors go, the British were in their own peculiar class.
None of the Troubles’ dead are coming back, but the moral culpability for those deaths is still an ongoing political contest. Sinn Fein, who may well be in government in Dublin within two years, are promoting the Martin McGuinness Peace Foundation and hailing ‘our peace process’. Meanwhile, Sinn Fein members continue to praise IRA gunman martyrs of the past. History has already been rewritten and the names of the inconvenient dead, like judge Doyle – who believed in a United Ireland – are erased. The true tragedy of the Troubles was its sheer pointlessness. The murders achieved nothing. For the thousands of victims, like Doyle, it’s a tragedy that the peace process could not have happened sooner.
Kevin Toolis is the author of the Troubles classic Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within the IRA’s Soul
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