The Troubles: London Bombings, Hunger Strikes, & The Graveside Grenade (Ep 3)
56:09 Share

If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, ad-free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk.com.

This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. ShopPay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going cha-ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit Shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. ♪

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durumple. And once again, we are joined by the brilliant Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing. And if you are watching the series on the television, can I just commend you to the book, which contains just so much more. It's an absolute work of art, both William and I think so. One of my all-time favourite non-fiction books. It reads like sort of Truman Capote, risen from the dead,

In the last episode, we ended on Bloody Sunday with the Troubles reaching a climax in 1972 with a whole range of horrors. And we're now in July 1972.

There's been a breakdown of talks, and the IRA has launched a series of bomb attacks on the 21st of July in what became known as Bloody Friday. Patrick, do you want to take the story from here? There's a story that I tell in my book about a guy named Brendan Hughes, who's one of my big characters, who was a commander in the Belfast IRA, a guy who was really revered by the people who followed him as a kind of brilliant tactician.

He was one of the people who helped conceive of this idea of on one day, nearly simultaneously, blowing up a whole series of bombs across Belfast, most of them in commercial areas. And the idea would be, as was the traditional playbook of the IRA, you call in warnings, you're not trying to kill civilians, but obviously the margin for error is not great when you're planting these big bombs in public places.

And they ended up planting something like 18 bombs across Belfast and detonating them all very close, nearly simultaneously. And it was just a situation in which the warnings were not really adequate. You had a scenario where because you have the bombs in all these different places, people would run out of one place for fear of being bombed and into the blast radius of another bomb. And these bombs start detonating. And Brennan Hughes years later talked about

standing there on the streets in Belfast and hearing boom, boom, boom. And knowing even as he heard that kind of percussive sequence that they were too close, that they'd made an error essentially, and that they weren't going to be able to do this in a way that would spare civilian life.

Well, civilians from the time also talked about just not knowing where to run. Wherever they ran, there was carnage and nine people were killed. 130 were seriously injured. And we're talking about really horrific shrapnel injuries, flying glass, being very severely burnt by these fireballs that were launched by these enormous explosions. There was a sense, and you could see it in the commentary immediately afterwards, that this was an IRA operation.

but the casualties were overwhelmingly the civilian population of Belfast, many of them Catholic. There was a sense in the public at large of whose name are you doing this in? You're doing this for us? But in addition, weren't there also reports of hoax calls that were called in? We want to minimize any kind of casualties. So calling in the position of a bomb that wasn't real. And so the security services were stretched paper thin and there was absolutely no way they could do anything about it.

Yeah, you know, I mean, it's funny, just just to jump a little bit far afield for a quick digression. There's a fascinating moment for a lot of these old IRA guys, and it's mostly guys after 9-11 happens, and you get all this discussion of terrorism. And

And for many of them, there was a sense when they looked at Al Qaeda of saying, oh, well, listen, what we do is just different from what they do. You know, we were trying to create terror that was disproportionate to the actual lost lives and sort of use it for political leverage. These guys are just mass murderers. But the distinction becomes vanishingly fine, doesn't it? In a situation like Bloody Friday in which you say, well, the point isn't to kill people here. Right.

But we're doing this in a way where we'll call in warnings. But then, of course, you know, you're relying on the authorities to put the warnings in. As you say, there are lots of hoax calls where you're trying to kind of get the benefit of a bomb without actually setting the bomb in terms of the terror that you generate. What was the response of the authorities to this wave of death? Well, I mean, I think that during this period in 1972 in particular, you see the...

This kind of mutual escalation, essentially between the IRA and the police, but also the British Army. We talked about this in the last episode, but there are these kind of interesting moments in the early phases of the Troubles where you sort of have to wonder what might history have looked like if it all de-escalated now.

instead of escalating. And so you get an escalation on the part of the British army cracking down, life gets more repressive in Catholic areas. If the IRA lost support because of the civilians that had been killed, it then gained support because of the government response. So the government then comes back with opportunities

Operation Motorman, which is an operation where the British Army use tanks and bulldozers to remove these so-called no-go areas in Belfast and Derry. But people get killed here too. You know, two teenagers are shot and killed by the army during the operation in Derry, London Derry. And again, you have this sort of pendulum of support that's swinging to and from the IRA.

Yeah, that's right. And the areas, particularly in the kind of Catholic strongholds in Derry and Belfast, you did have these areas, they called them no-go areas, where you would have these barricades. And there were places where the police and the army couldn't go. These did become a stronghold for the IRA, but then, of course, that became precisely the kind of community that the army was looking to break and to penetrate, and they did so reluctantly.

roughly. And there are stories about the vengeance with which they would do it, right? So there was a sense that the civilian population was protecting these paramilitary elements, and then you end up exerting disproportionate force on that civilian population as a kind of vengeance. So you get this kind of tit for tat, this back and forth. And then what ends up happening is that the IRA develops its own kind of secret unit. There was a group called the Unknowns,

Ah, yes. We want to hear a lot about that, please, Patrick. And particularly Dollars Price, who we've met already. She joins that group, doesn't she? And it's under Gerry Adams. So Gerry Adams, who, you know, as we have said, denies that he was ever in the IRA. But as I laid out in my book and how, you know, as many others have

have indicated over the years, Adams, in fact, did play a role in the IRA, a very important one in those early years. And you end up with this unit of IRA members that is highly secretive, even within the IRA. It's called the unknowns.

And it's sort of the black bag job, you know, the kind of wet work group that reported to Gerry Adams, according to people who were in it, and would go out and engage in some of the more exotic things that the IRA did. One of them was forced disappearances. And then another was at a certain point, they start looking at, well, what if we bomb London? What if we stop bombing Belfast as much and turn our sights on London? Just to clarify one point.

it's a horrible thing, but wet work is called wet work because of the blood that is wet, that it is going to be sort of a splatter job. And that's why these things are called wet work. But the other thing about the unknowns is that you talked about this before, the IRA had set themselves up as almost like a British army regiment, you know, with a hierarchy, but the unknowns are,

was a much more modern guerrilla type of warfare that you didn't know. One cell did not necessarily know who was in charge of the other cell. And so if one lot got picked up, another lot could carry on with impunity. Where was the idea for this coming from, Patrick? Were they looking to the PLO or kind of Algiers or where were they looking for this? Yeah, they were absolutely studying kind of paramilitary resistance movements in other anti-colonial contexts.

there's a sense that there is a kind of pan-national anti-imperial resistance moment happening in the 1970s. And so they drew inspiration from others. But the thing I should say, just to pick up on something Anita mentioned earlier, there's this parallelism that happens, this kind of constant upping of the ante. And so indeed, the British Army also had its own wet work squad. So there was a group that had different names at different times. At times it was called the MRF, but basically where you had

a small plainclothes unit of the British army, which was going out into the community. You had people masquerading as civilians, but in fact they were armed and in some cases operating in these sort of shoot to kill operations where they go out and they have a target in mind and they'll start shooting on the streets. And there's no sense of accountability or chain of command or any of that, any of the sort of transparency that you would expect of an army on the streets of a British city.

Which will later make things like, you know, the Good Friday Agreement, which we are going to talk about in this series, so difficult because if you don't have a paper trail, you don't have culpability, you don't take responsibility and things go unanswered on every side. Can I talk about one place that really fascinated me and it's important because it is the home of a really important figure, Jean McConville, who is so pivotal in this story and embodies so much of what the Troubles meant.

Divis Towers, a bunch of flats, which was quite run down, but became an absolute IRA stronghold after the kind of things like Operation Motor Man and the kind of, you know, extrajudicial killings that went on. Tell us a little bit about what the makeup, what did it look like to be in those flats, to live in those flats? Who lived there?

So Divis Flats was a vast complex that was erected in the late 1960s. It was actually part of a kind of an urban renewal project in which they tore down a lot of these old kind of decrepit blocks in Belfast where you'd had kind of two up, two down sort of small workers' houses and replaced them with what was supposed to be kind of a city in the sky, kind of a high-rise building.

massive, industrial scale place where thousands of people would live. And it was one of those funny things where, you know, they were inspired by Le Corbusier. And there was a sort of 1960s sense of optimism when they erect this thing in the late 60s. But they did it all on the cheap. And it was in a Catholic ghetto. And so what you ended up with was these very big, often Catholic families, pagans,

penned in, in this kind of increasingly dystopian space where there wasn't great ventilation, there was mold in the flats, there was overcrowding. The lifts never worked. The lifts never worked. The walls were paper thin. I mean, there's no privacy and there are no green spaces. There's nowhere for the kids to play. No green spaces. There was a little football pitch and I think something like one swing set for a huge complex with maybe a thousand children. I mean, it was all just

pretty grim. This ends up becoming, as you said, a stronghold for the IRA because it's in Catholic West Belfast. And it is in its way a kind of a fortress.

So it becomes very difficult for the army and the police to penetrate. However, there is one tower, Divis Tower, which is part of this complex, which was only about 20 stories. But at the time, it was the tallest building in Belfast that wasn't a church. And the British army ends up taking over the top two floors.

And that becomes for them a kind of a sniper turret where they can look down on the whole complex. And you have these British Army guys with rifles on the roof looking down at Divis. It gets so bad that they can only get to and from this top, this little area in the sky by helicopter because it's so dangerous for them to come in. They can't get up there. They can't go up the stairwells. Through the building. Yeah. Yeah.

And so it's this sort of almost surreal scenario where they're getting into gunfights with IRA members down below in Divis Flats. And this pressure cooker is where Jean McConville and her large family find themselves. Now tell us about Jean McConville. It is a name that will resonate with Brits of a certain age because we will have known this story that went on for decades. Tell us about Jean, her background, and why she is so important in this story.

So Jean McConville was a mother of 10 children in Belfast. She was Protestant. She was born Protestant in East Belfast near the Harlan and Wolfe shipyard where the Titanic had been built.

She ended up marrying a Catholic man. So they were what in Belfast to this day is referred to as a mixed marriage and that she was a Protestant, he was a Catholic. That was sort of more typical of the 1950s than it would be. I mean, it was never all that common, but there was a period of time where the tension subsided enough that you would see that more often.

But by the late 60s, early 70s, in the period we're talking about, tensions had really risen. And basically, the family was driven out of East Belfast because her husband, Arthur, was Catholic. And they end up in West Belfast, eventually in Divis Flats. And then her husband dies of cancer. And so she's left with these 10 children.

No job, just a pension. And she's isolated in Divis Flats and sort of doubly isolated because she's perceived as a little bit of an interloper. There are a couple of moments for Jean McConville where she refuses to sort of take part in helping hide a weapon, for instance, which was something that people in the community would often do.

The gun relay they used to talk about. So, you know, if somebody who had fired a gun would pass it on to someone in a door and they would then pass it to a neighbor, to a neighbor, to a neighbor who might bury it in the garden. Over the back balconies. Exactly. And it was, I mean, it was kind of an amazing system for the IRA because you could very quickly, you'd have these

sort of housewives in their aprons who would take a gun that had just been used and they could nip into the back bedroom and hand it out the window to a woman in the next flat. And that way a gun could move clear across Divas flats in a short period of time. And having someone break that chain was a big deal because it screwed everything up. It was. And seen as a kind of betrayal. And there is a story that her children tell

about a night when there was one of these shootouts in Divis Flats, and there was a wounded British soldier. And that Gene McConville went out and comforted him, brought him a pillow and just brought him some comfort. And that the next day when they woke up, somebody had painted the words Brit lover across their door. It's like a death sentence in this. Yeah, or at least at a minimum, a kind of a scarlet letter. Heck.

Again, because this is recent history, it's just worth mentioning that things like soldier dolls existed in this period of time where any Catholic woman who seemed to be consorting with anybody from the British Army side or from the enemy, the kind of things that we think back to revolutionary France when they shaved their heads, humiliated them, tarred and feathered them. There is no

patience for anyone who's seen as a collaborator or a tout. Now, let's clarify the meanings of this. A collaborator is somebody who's just maybe going out dancing or putting a pillow under somebody's head. A tout is something very, very different, isn't it, in the parlance of the day? Tout is really, I mean, it's interesting going back beyond the troubles to earlier periods in Irish history, there was a sense that the tout is almost like a kind of folk devil.

The tout is the person who collaborates with the British generally by selling or giving secrets. There's some kind of quid pro quo in which secrets are shared. Somebody becomes an informant. And it really is just the most noxious epithet.

In Ireland, it's the worst thing that you can call someone. I should say, there's both an intense feeling of tribal loyalty and solidarity and kind of suspicion. And there is also an intense sense of occupation and a feeling that you are, you know, you are living under the boot of an imperial occupier.

And you must maintain that kind of solidarity at all costs. And so as a consequence, you really don't want to be thought of as a tout because it's very dangerous. But with Jean McConville, you know, a woman who, according to her children, really all she wanted was a quiet life and wanted to keep her children out of trouble. It was just her with 10 children. She goes from being regarded with suspicion to having graffiti on her wall to then being suspected of being gay.

a tout. Now, just tell us about the events of the 7th of December, 1972. So one night, the family's at home in their flat in Divis, and not all of the children, but most of them. There's a knock on the door, and a group of intruders comes to the door. Even today, the children can't stay with any

confidence how many there were. It may have been eight. It may have been 12. Some of them were wearing masks. Some of them had stockings pulled, kind of women's tights pulled down over their faces. And some were just neighbors. Some were just neighbors. At least one of them had a gun. But yes, this is one of the scariest revelations for the children is that as this group

moves in, this kind of very scary group moves into their flat, some of the adults start to refer to the children by name and they realize that these are our own neighbors. They know exactly who we are.

And they say, we need to speak to your mother. We're going to take her away just for a few hours. We'll bring her back. We just want to talk to her. The children start screaming and clinging to her legs. And the group insists. And they kind of yank Jean out of there. She puts on her coat and they yank her out. And the children never see their mother again. She never does come back in three hours. She completely vanishes.

And she thinks she is going to come back. They let her oldest son think that she's going to be okay because they say, yeah, you can come along with her and then stop him at the car and then she's just bundled in never to be seen again.

Now, one of the names that will come up in the future associated with this night is Dolores Price, one of the main protagonists in this book. Tell us what we know of what she did that night, because she's going to be very important in what becomes an attack on the mainland, if you like, and the old Bailey bombings, which will happen in a year. But on that night, we have to wait a long time to find out that she may have been involved, don't we? Yeah, I mean, nobody knew.

that she'd had any involvement at all for decades. But Dolish Price was a member of the unknowns, that group that I mentioned. And one of the things that the unknowns was involved in during this period was forced disappearances.

This is a concept which is familiar from many other parts of the world, Spain, Argentina, Chile. It is a really grim thing to do. And technically, it's a war crime, the idea that you kill somebody in wartime, but you don't just kill them and sort of leave them out in a way that somebody finds the body in the street. You just vanish them, you bury them in a secret grave.

which means that for their family and their loved ones, there's this terrible... Life sentence of grief. Yeah, life sentence of grief, but also of uncertainty, right? There's a kind of purgatory in which you don't know. There's no closure, yeah. There's no closure. And in a very Catholic culture, you know that they're not buried in consecrated ground. You have no grave that you can go and pray at. So Jean McConville vanishes...

Dolores Price, in her Duties in the Unknowns, and again, we wouldn't know any of this in a kind of public way for decades until decades later. But as a young woman, she and her sister had the responsibility of sometimes driving these people who were going to be disappeared, sort of ferrying them out of Northern Ireland and into the Republic of Ireland and generally turned over to a team of gunmen, a kind of a local unit of people who would be the executioners.

Now, when we last met the Price sisters in the previous episode, they were very much going on peace marches and initially were not into violence. But we saw in the last episode that they, in the course of the writing and as things get worse, that they give up.

on nonviolent resistance and like their parents before them decide to take up the gun and offer themselves to the IRA. What is the sort of work that they're given initially? Initially, it's very, very unglamorous because they've sort of made the case for themselves that

that they should be women on the front lines. They want to kind of do all the jobs that the men do. This is the 60s. This is the 70s. Women don't just go sit at home and make tea. No, they want to be out there. They don't just want to be bandaging wounded volunteers, as they called them. They want to be out there on the front lines themselves. And initially, they have to do these kind of unglamorous things

things, but they're involved in bank robberies. Dressed as nuns. There's one where they really did dress as nuns and rob a bank in Belfast. It's pretty wild. When I found those stories and was able to connect them to the prices, I was really astonished. But I mean, the prices weren't named, but there were press stories at the time about this robbery. And there was a kind of spectacular operation in which one of the IRA members, who was a friend of theirs, was in a hospital because he had to

I think he had to get his appendix out or something. He'd been in prison and then he was moved to the hospital and they kind of busted into the hospital in wigs and with guns and broke him out. On a hospital bed. I mean, on a wheelie. I mean, it is sort of like Keystone Cop kind of stuff. And there is a sort of a glamour to it. And also an innocence to it because, you know, they're robbing banks, but they're not hurting people. They're breaking somebody out of prison. There's a certain sort of...

heroic aspect of it. But in 1973, Delors, really, you can see her trajectory has moved really fast because she comes up with the plan, or partly comes up with the plan, to have bombings in London and the Old Bailey in particular.

What happened? Just talk us through what the campaign was, because the result of that campaign also then further promotes this woman into sort of legendary status in the IRA. Yeah. I mean, the first thing to say, which is really interesting, is I mentioned in the last episode that her father, Albert Price, had been in the IRA for many years. And actually, in the 1940s, Albert was involved in a bombing mission on the English mainland in Coventry.

So there was a kind of family history of this idea that you bring the fight to the English. In 1973, Dolores Price was at a meeting and they...

talked about the idea that there had been all of these bombs, things like Bloody Friday in Northern Ireland, which were really just kind of at this point alienating the population, alienating the very population that they were in principle fighting this war on behalf of. And so she said, we should bring it to the English. And they planned a very audacious operation in which they would have these huge car bombs, which would get brought over on the ferry and

and they would plant them in certain strategic locations in London on a timer and then walk away. It's like a sort of dark version of the Italian job, rather than all those minis going out with Michael Caine at the front. This has got serious explosives. Huge, huge explosives in them, yeah. And these, you know, the IRA got better at bomb making over the decades, but there are many jokes, very dark jokes, about bad IRA bomb makers. So even just driving around...

in these vehicles to get them into place with these huge bombs in them. It was a considerable risk. Huge risk. So not all the bombs went off though, did they, Patrick? Because they did do that thing of ringing in and saying, look, we've put some bombs and this is the vague vicinity of where we put the bomb. So it's not an entire without warning explosion, but some do go off. Yeah. And this is central London. Okay. So outside Scotland Yard, outside the old Bailey, there was a transit strike

So there were loads and loads of cars on the street more than there normally would have been because people weren't taking buses and so forth. And also, I think it's important to remember that this is 1973. There hasn't been real bombing on the British mainland since the Blitz. And so people are just kind of they're not conditioned to the idea in a way that they later would be.

So for instance, when people hear that there's a car bomb, one of the things that happens in the surrounding office buildings is everybody goes over and presses their face up against the glass of their offices to look out, you know. And the police down below are saying, get away from the window because obviously if there's a blast...

you'll get shrapnel. And two of these bombs end up going off. Nobody is killed, but it's something like 130 people are wounded, some of them very badly. There's one man who dies of a heart attack, though it was later established that the heart attack had actually started before the bombing. And the interesting thing is that the plan that the bombers had

was that they had a long lead time on these bombs and that they would all be back in Ireland by the time they detonated. But there had been a tip off. There had been a tout.

And so this tip ends up coming in and word goes to Heathrow Airport that there's a team of IRA bombers trying to leave. And so they start stopping anyone who's Irish. There's an amazing moment where there's a message that goes out along the wires and the message is close England. We need to close all the ports of entry because these bombers are trying to

escape. And so indeed, they're caught. They're caught. It's the two Price sisters who become the most notorious in this gang because they both are sent to a men's prison, which in itself is quite something. And they refuse to go to prison or acquiesce to any of the demands. They say, we are political prisoners. In fact, what they do is they echo the arguments of the suffragettes who say, you know what? We're not going to wear prison uniforms because

Because we're political prisoners. We're not going to adhere to your rules because we're political prisoners. We demand to be sent back to Ireland because we're political prisoners. And they kick up an enormous sting, which at first, it's fair to say, Patrick, doesn't endear them to the British public who already hate them. But it's when they go on hunger strike that things start changing.

Yeah. I mean, I think so there's a few things to unpack there. Is it conscious with the suffragettes? Yeah, I think so. Probably to some extent. There's also a sort of a history of Irish Republican hunger strikers, a very famous case, a guy named Terence McSwiney who died on hunger strike. And so they think of themselves as sort of in that lineage. These two women end up in Brixton prison, the only women in the prison.

And we could look at different sort of explanations for why this happened. But there was a sense that they were incredibly dangerous. Like if you look back at the way they were regarded at the time, there was a sense that these were just these. I mean, I don't even know what the analogy would be today, but it's like. Well, sort of Mata Hari is that they were beautiful, but deadly. I mean, that seemed to be the papers were fixated on both things, weren't they?

I mean, this is part of the reason I think that they became so famous is that you ended up with, there were 10 people involved in this operation and they're all arrested and sent to prison and tried. And in fact, some of the men go on hunger strike as well, but it is these two sisters who are beautiful and kind of impetuous and

and charismatic, and they dressed, they sort of really knew how to, you know, at their trial every day, they had a different outfit and their hair was just so, and the press is following all of this. They're very much of their period. I mean, this is the same period, you know, we have glamorous Palestinian women taking over airliners and looking a million dollars while doing it. Yes, there's an absolutely a kind of terrorist chic thing

But then also this sort of interesting thing, particularly in the English press at the time, where there's a sort of sexualized fetishization of these women and these kind of crazy, surely apocryphal stories.

about they were these two kind of leggy young terrorists in the streets of Belfast, barely out of high school. One of the stories talked about how it didn't even make any anatomical sense, but it was like a Kalashnikov stashed down her bell-bottom trouser leg, just kind of stuff that feels like the product more of a fevered fantasy than anything real. But they were smart, so they knew the attention was on them. And The Hunger Strike, which...

will go on for 167 days. They almost starve themselves at first to the point of death, but then the British government decides they will not let them die. They will not let them be martyrs in prison. And again, very much in the suffragette mode, this horrific system of force feeding is imposed upon them. And that is, I mean, anyone who knows their suffragette history will know this is tubes being forced down the throat of

into the stomach and there's horrible sort of stuff being pumped in. I mean, suffragettes described it as akin to being raped every time it was done, a bodily violation. And it's actually some of the same equipment, isn't it? There's wooden mouthpieces that were last used on the suffragettes. Yes. And if you're backing up and looking at

the broader history of these kinds of tactics. Part of what's so interesting is that the Price sisters regarded this as a situation in which it was a contest of wills, essentially, between them and

Downing Street, it was really a question of who would blink first. And so initially they start to starve themselves. They're absolutely ready to die. They're kind of looking forward to it. There's a crazy interview or interviews with their parents where initially they're kind of close to death and their parents effectively say, we would be proud of our daughters if they die this way. It would fill us with pride.

then the government realizes it would be a huge propaganda coup for the IRA if they die in this way. And so they step in and start force feeding them. But this will end up being the last time that the British government uses that tactic, because eventually, the British government blinks, you have a situation in which this force feeding lasts for, you know, hundreds of days, and the press is covering it.

medical ethicists start to say, is this a kind of torture? Should doctors really be doing this, violating the will of these young women? The Price sisters are these very articulate advocates of their own point of view. They're writing letters. Their word is kind of getting out. There are interviews being given. They're kind of telling the world, don't do this to us. We don't want this. You are kind of violating our personal sense of sovereignty. And

And eventually the British medical establishment kind of rebels and says, we don't want to do this anymore. We'll have no part in this. We'll have no part in it. For me, I mean, what's part of what's so fascinating is I had never heard of the Price sisters when I started work on my book, but I did know all about Bobby Sands and the 10 hunger strikers who died a decade later. And that doesn't happen.

Without the Price sisters, you know, the only way that hunger strikers would later die is that the Price sisters pushed this principle of force feeding to a point where it became repugnant to the British state, which said we will no longer keep people alive when they go on hunger strike.

Well, with the Price sisters winning that particular battle and being transferred to prison in Northern Ireland in Armagh, let's take a break and we'll come back with the name that you've just mentioned, Bobby Sands, because again, a huge, huge chapter in The Troubles. Join us then.

This episode is brought to you by SelectQuote. Life insurance can have a huge impact on our family's future. With SelectQuote, getting covered with the right policy for you is simple and affordable. SelectQuote's licensed insurance agents will tailor your experience to find a life insurance policy for your needs in as little as 15 minutes. And SelectQuote partners with carriers that provide policies for many conditions. SelectQuote. They shop.

I'm Sarah Churchwell, author, journalist, and academic. And I'm David Aldershager, historian and broadcaster. And together, we're the hosts of Goldhanger's latest podcast, Journey Through Time. We're going to be looking at hidden social histories behind famous chapters from the past. Like

What was it like to actually live during Prohibition? Or to have been there on the ground for the Great Fire of London? We'll be uncovering it all. And we'll have characters and stories that have been forgotten, but shouldn't have been. This week, we've got one of my favorites. Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for U.S. President.

all the way back in 1872, 50 years before American women could even vote. She was also the first woman to address Congress and to open a brokerage on Wall Street where she made a fortune. It's an incredible story, but it is also full of contradictions. She was a trailblazing woman in politics, but later in life, she also turned to the

to the pseudoscience of eugenics. So join us on Journey Through Time and hear a clip from the Victoria Woodhull story at the end of this episode. Welcome back. So Patrick, you were talking about Bobby Sands. Tell us, remind us who Bobby Sands was and why his hunger strike was so very powerful. You end up in a situation in which you have many, many people, Republican activists who are...

imprisoned in Northern Ireland, some of them for very long periods of time. They essentially regard themselves as political prisoners, but the state is treating them as criminals. You remember, eventually the Thatcher government comes in. Margaret Thatcher had a famous quote where she said, "Crime is crime is crime." There's no such thing as a political bombing. It's just a bombing.

And you have increasingly organization by Republican activists and IRA members inside this prison. There was a kind of a prison complex, you know, initially known as Long Cash and then the maze where people are organizing. And there's a sequence of protests. You may recall there were the no wash protests.

and then the dirty protest. The dirty protest was smearing excrement on the walls and just absolutely refusing to let anyone in to clean it. An expression of, we have no respect for this place, your law, or why we're here. The so-called blanket protest meant that they would wrap themselves in blankets rather than wear the prison uniform because part of what they were saying is, listen, we don't even respect the premise on which we are locked up here. And

This becomes this kind of escalating battle with prison authorities and with the British state. And eventually it culminates in a hunger strike. And one of the very first hunger strikers is the guy you mentioned earlier, isn't it? Brendan Hughes. There are two...

hunger strikes during this period, there's a first one, which is unsuccessful. And that one is led by Brennan Hughes, the guy who had been, you know, one of the key architects of Bloody Friday, a very close ally of Jerry Adams, a friend of Duller's Price. And I write about this at some length in my book. But what happens in that one is that the hunger strikers, him and a handful of other men, they all start at the same time. And there's a kind of devastating moment where

If you can imagine, there's a sense of esprit de corps among the strikers. They're all declining, but they share this incredible bond. And there was one of these men who eventually is slipping towards a coma. And he says to Brendan Hughes in a moment of weakness, don't let me die. And Brendan Hughes ends up calling off the strike because he doesn't want to see this guy die.

be the first one of them to die. So in that sense, he blinks first on this occasion? He blinks first, so he blinks. And again, nobody's coming in to force feed them because the Price sisters have created a situation in which the British government will no longer do that. You can't force feed. But Bobby Sands doesn't stop. Bobby Sands is 66 days on hunger strike. But in the meantime, also, does he get elected in this time as well while he's in prison and on hunger strike? Tell us what happens there. It's

It's strange to think because we're still just in the early 1980s, but this is kind of the beginning of the end of the troubles. I mean, you still have another two decades of violence before the Good Friday Agreement. But what happens is that there is a second hunger strike after the first botched hunger strike. This one led by Bobby Sands, who was an IRA member, but a kind of sensitive soul, you know, a guy who

sort of artistically inclined. Had read Mahatma Gandhi, hadn't he? He was very- Indeed, and was extremely well liked and a very resolute figure. And he and nine other men end up going on hunger strike. And he will ultimately be the first to die in the name that everybody recalls today, the most famous of the Irish hunger strikers, in some ways the most famous martyr of the Troubles.

But I think it's also really significant that during this period, there is a parliamentary seat that opens up and a decision is made to run Bobby Sands, not just an imprisoned IRA member, but an imprisoned IRA member who's on hunger strike as a candidate. And he wins the seat. And it becomes this kind of spectacular publicity coup for the Republican movement. And I think also the moment in which

there is a recognition that, gosh, you know, we can't really bomb our way

to victory here. It's going to be very hard to fight the British into the sea. And we might end up killing so many of our own people on the way to doing that, that it would be very hard to have any sense of a kind of political mandate in our own core constituency if we do it that way. However, peaceful protest, a hunger strike, running a candidate for political office is

turns out to be massively popular. All kinds of people who might have felt a kind of revulsion to putting bombs in shopping centers can really get behind the notion of an Irish nationalist, Irish Republican candidate running for office. And so what grows out of this hunger strike is

Sinn Fein, the political party that we know today, and the idea that there will be a kind of two-tiered strategy in which the IRA for a long time will continue to use violence, but also on the other side of the ledger, be pursuing a more political solution. And it isn't just Bobby Sands that dies, nine of them.

successively die with horrible frequency. One by one by one. Which just sort of appalls the whole of Northern Ireland and makes the British political class look within what they're doing wrong. It looks terrible abroad. I remember at this period traveling through Iran and the main Iranian revolutionaries had renamed what had been Winston Churchill Avenue in the middle of Tehran, Bobby Sand Street. Isn't that amazing? Wherever you go across the world, people are looking at this regarding the Brits as brutes

And everyone in Britain realizes this is a PR disaster. But it's also opened the door, as Patrick was saying, to sort of a political avenue for Sinn Féin. And one of the first and the most prominent to step through that doorway and onto that avenue is Gerry Adams. Because after Bobby Sands has won this seat while on Hunger Strike, Gerry Adams enters the fray and is elected as president of Sinn Féin.

Now, at that time, it looks as though there's a political approach. There may be a political approach, but the bombing doesn't stop because in this period of time, you've also got the IRA bombing Harrods again in London. 1983. You've got the Brighton bombing of 1984. Mrs. Thatcher in the hotel emerging from the dust. And Norman Tebbit's wife terribly hurt. So it carries on, you know, these attacks, these audacious attacks.

on the mainland, which horrify, you know, again, the British side of it. And you get to this point in 1988. And I'd like to talk about what is now known as the Graveyard Grenade incident, because that, again, if there are turning points, which bring us to the point where when we talk about the Good Friday Agreement, these characters will become very important in their own right. This is one such. Tell us what's happening at the time. We're talking about 1988.

huge funeral procession for three IRA volunteers shot by the British Army in Gibraltar. Again, anyone who's sort of my age and was sort of growing up in the 80s will remember this really well because it was such an enormous case. It was in the news all the time. Brilliant reporting by Ian Jack, I remember at the time. Yeah, a man in a dark anorak hurls a grenade into the middle of the mourners by the graveside for these three IRA volunteers.

And there is carnage. I mean, just take it from there, Patrick. What happens? Yeah, I mean, you have this kind of incredible, almost like something out of Greek tragedy, just this sequence of violent events that, you know, each domino kind of leading...

to the next. But first, this botched operation of some description in Gibraltar, where British paras end up kind of using a shoot to kill rationale, killing these three IRA members who were there before they can do anything. And then those three IRA members are flown back to Belfast,

there's a huge sense of agitation, kind of public agitation that the shoot to kill tactic, shoot somebody before they do anything wrong, just because you suspect that they might. What exactly they were planning and how imminent it was and how precise the intelligence was, all of that has been a matter of fierce dispute in the decades since. Wow, there was a

massive documentary do you remember Death on the Rock I think one of my predecessors at the BBC Jonathan Dimbleby was the person who presented it but it was seismic the allegations that there is a shoot to kill policy that you know we ask questions and investigate later but we shoot first it was

It was a huge televisual journalistic event apart from anything else. Yeah, I mean, it was a little bit funny to me that at that stage, you're sort of well into the 80s at this point, because there had absolutely been a shoot to kill policy of one sort or another, maybe a more informal shoot to kill policy, you know, going back into the early 70s, and that there are other cases in which you do get situations in which people are kind of shooting first and asking questions later. Including chasing Brendan Hughes through the streets of Belfast.

Including chasing Brendan Hughes, shooting at Brendan Hughes in the street. But you get these three bodies flown back to Belfast. Tensions could not be higher. It's a huge Republican funeral at Milltown Cemetery, which is a big Republican cemetery in West Belfast.

Jerry Adams is there by the three graves. People are delivering their orations by the graves. And then suddenly there's a bang and another bang and everybody's panicking. And there are grenades being thrown into the midst of this huge crowd. And it emerges that there is a gunman on the fringes of this funeral who is armed with grenades and a handgun and is shooting into the crowd.

It's fascinating. There is footage of this. It's a wild moment if you think about it, because on the one hand, he's armed. On the other hand, it's one guy. And what happens is you see many of the men in this crowd start to converge on him. And they basically sort of chase him down and beat him up.

but not before he's actually killed several people. He kills three and wounds 60, I think. Is he trying to kill Gerry Adams? Is that his target? Is that why he's attacking the funeral? He talked about it later. I mean, he was a... Ulster Defence Association, UDA. Yeah, he was a loyalist and he...

He would have, I do think that Jerry Adams was one of his intended targets. And indeed, Adams is there. And you can see there's video of it at the time of Adams actually, you know, showing some kind of leadership. And in that moment, grabbing the megaphone, trying to get everybody to be calm, because there's also just the danger of a stampede. But you end up with a second funeral a week later. So you can imagine tensions were very, very high for the first one.

we should introduce an important character at this point Alec Reid yes Father Alec Reid the man telling the prayers there was a priest named Father Alec Reid who

who was just a completely fascinating figure. He was a priest from West Belfast, a beloved local guy, but a kind of sort of a canny operator, somebody who was talking to everybody behind the scenes, someone who was very close with Adams. And Adams, we should say, is someone who says the rosary every night. He's a very church-going Catholic.

An ardent Catholic. Yeah. I mean, I can't say today, perhaps he is. I have less insight into it, but certainly at the time. And when he was when Adams was locked up, he was somebody who was who struck the people he was locked up with as particularly religious.

Adams develops a relationship with this priest. Father Alec Reed, I think, on the one hand, was clearly quite sympathetic to the nationalist position and the Republican cause, but had issues with the tactics employed and wanted to kind of gently steer this movement toward peace. And so he

He starts this very delicate process of speaking with Adams and the IRA leadership, also speaking with John Hume of the more moderate SDLP.

It was always going to be a situation in which the peace process was going to have all these different Republicans, but you also have the SDLP and you've got to think about the unionists, but you're also thinking about the English government in London and the Irish government in Dublin and the church, which was another kind of big institutional player in all of this. So all this bizarrely culminates at this moment. So Alec Reid is actually in the graveyard. Yeah, I mean, you couldn't, I mean, it's one of these amazing little moments in history.

If you scripted it in a movie, it would feel too convenient. But Alec Reed has in his pocket the morning of this second big funeral. When the men who got killed in the graveyard are being buried. Were being buried. He has a kind of preliminary outline of what a peace process might look like.

that has come from Adams to him. So he's got these papers in his pocket. Which Adams has handed to him at the funeral. Yes, and his plan is to deliver these to John Hugh. And you get another massive funeral and a procession through the streets of West Belfast toward the graveyard. And in the midst of all of this, there are two British soldiers who are...

off-duty. This is somewhat controversial. There are theories about what might have been happening with these guys, but so far as we know, these two young guys are off-duty. They're in a car driving around in Belfast. They take a wrong turn and suddenly they find themselves in the midst of this huge, slow-moving,

funeral procession. And they try and get out of there. They try and reverse. Again, there's footage of this. It's really amazing to see. And the people kind of swarm around this vehicle. And the soldiers panic because, you know, for them, they're sort of in bandit country already in West Belfast. And then there's this huge group of people surrounding them. And one of them pulls out a gun, I think to kind of scare the crowd, I guess. And

When people see the gun, they go ballistic and start breaking into the car and physically drag these guys, realizing that they're British soldiers, drag them out of the vehicle. And then they're basically dragged through the streets. Their clothes are torn off them. They end up in a kind of sort of a vacant lot, a kind of a waste yard.

And there's this terrifying moment where they're being beaten up and Father Alec Reed realizes what's happening, hastens to the scene where he realizes that these two young guys could be about to get killed.

And he sort of throws himself down around them and says, please don't kill these men. Don't kill these men. And there's a guy above him, a kind of a gruff guy who instructs him to get away from them. And so Reed has to back off. And both of these men are shot. They're killed. And Reed then...

administers the last rites. Gives him the kiss of life. He tries to resuscitate them. Yeah. And then administers the last rites. And then there's this moment where the whole thing, at least to me, the whole thing kind of stops. And a photographer takes a picture of one of the men lying kind of naked, splayed with his arms crossed.

on either side and Reed, who's been trying to give him mouth to mouth and is sort of hunched over this priest in black. And Reed looks up and he has the man's blood smeared on his lips.

And he's looking kind of almost into the camera. You sort of see his face and just the horror of his face. And that's an image that will be familiar to many people because it became one of the most iconic images of just the sort of apogee of the horror of the Troubles. And all that while that's happening, he has the letter, the peace plan in his pocket, which is also covered in the blood of these two men he's just administered last rites to. I mean, again, as you say, if this was put in a fictional treatment, people would say, are you nuts? This is, nobody's going to believe this.

He will be important a little later on in this series, let me tell you. But he becomes, Alec Reid, a huge figure in actually, look, we don't have to live like this anymore. We need to find a better way.

And he has a great deal of respect from the public. And so he starts getting traction in a way that political leaders in the past have not. He does. Yeah. But I think that there's also, I would argue, to give credit to Jerry Adams, where it is due, that there's a recognition by Adams that

quite early on, maybe even during that hunger strike, that this war is not going to end in a military victory. It's going to end in some kind of political settlement. So you get the birth of what this strategy that became known as

the Armalite and the ballot box. The idea that this was very maddening for some people during this period, but this long period of time in which you had on the one hand Sinn Fein running candidates for political office, saying that it was separate from the IRA and that it was pursuing a kind of political trajectory in which to create a united Ireland,

And on the other hand, a continued bombing campaign, a continued campaign of bombing and political violence by the IRA. But it has planted the seeds of peace. And it will take, I mean, this is 1988 we're talking about, it will take a decade for

for those seeds to grow into something meaningful. Will you come back and we'll carry on talking about this, Patrick. Thank you so very much. And that's it from today. If you've enjoyed listening to us on this, remember, if you're a member of our club, you get to hear the whole mini series in one go, empirepoduk.com. Empirepoduk.com is where you can go. You get early access to that. You also get tickets for live shows and we've got one coming up

touring around the country. So, I mean, if you'd like to come, we'd love to see you. EmpirePodUK.com is where to go. Thank you so much for listening to Empire. Whichever platform you've been listening to us on, just tap the follow button at the top of our page. And that way you stay up to date when we drop the next episode and we continue the story of the troubles. Next time, we're going to be uncovering what really happened to Jean McConville and how it took decades for her family to find out the truth.

But for now, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Durrenful. I'm David Orlishogar. Here's that clip we mentioned earlier on.

You see spiritualism kind of working its way up the social hierarchy, up the ladder of respectability, because people are desperate and they will cling to anything. And remember that we're still in an age of great religiosity. And so if kind of traditional Christian messages are not enough consolation, then you might seek something more direct, like trying to speak to a lost loved one. It's also worth saying that a

Historians have pointed out, I think this is really interesting, that in an age where telegraphy had just been invented, you suddenly have telegraphs which can send invisible messages across

across the ether, apparently. Almost magically. Almost magically. And suddenly people can receive them. It's not really that much of a stretch to then start to imagine people receiving messages clairvoyantly. You start to think about telekinesis. You start to think about the idea of invisible movement of messages, invisible transmission. I'd never thought about that. It's a really interesting idea, isn't it? That's so fascinating. I mean, I think it's a really, really smart idea. And it suggests the ways in which other cultural movements

can help influence those kinds of trends. Why would you suddenly believe in spiritualism? Well, if telegraphs, well, why not? Who says it's not possible, right? If you want to hear the full episode, listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts. ♪