The police faced the unenviable task of having to carry out ordinary duties such as regulating traffic, investigating petty crime or serving court summonses while under lethal threat from the IRA. Despite the plan for Police Primacy, the reality in the mid 1970s, a senior RUC officer concedes, was that ‘In the more difficult places you found the police staying in their stations and going out occasionally to accompany the Army.’
In the early days of the Troubles the police force had aroused the hatred of the nationalist community by driving into their neighbourhoods firing machine guns and appearing to represent the repressive arm of the Protestant establishment. Following the riots of 1969 and the Hunt Report the following year the RUC’s chief constable had declared that the force would be restructured along what he had called non-aggressive, non-retaliatory lines. As a result, in republican areas the RUC had effectively ceded responsibility for policing to the Army. In these areas soldiers had been left to face riots and exercise law and order. Police Primacy required the restoration of the RUC’s anti-riot units and the emergence of a police force with the protection and arms needed to go out on the streets.
Kenneth Newman, a diminutive Englishman who had started his career in the Palestine police, was given the job of implementing Police Primacy in 1976. Most constables’ work kept them in their stations. Yet in order to make the new policy effective the Chief Constable required squads trained in the use of firearms and riot control which needed to be mobile in order to respond effectively to trouble. In some senses Newman needed to militarize the police. The Special Patrol Group (SPG) was the nearest he had to such a thing in 1976. The SPG was founded in the early 1970s replacing the Reserve Force, a skeleton unit of fulltimers, fleshed out by reservists during crises, as the RUC’s mobile anti-terrorist squad. There were SPG squads in Belfast, Londonderry, Armagh, Omagh and Magherafelt. With the advent of Police Primacy came an expansion from about 100 full-time police officers assigned to such duties to about three times this number. Under Newman they were given riot control training and improved firearms. Police appeared on the streets with flak jackets and Ruger rifles. The Chief Constable also started a public relations campaign designed to create a more favourable image of the police, particularly among young people.
Although they expressed admiration for one another in public, it was inevitable that soldiers and police officers would feel a degree of mutual disdain. It was important for the self-esteem of many Army officers to feel that the RUC was in some sense tainted by sectarianism, because this view helped to justify their own presence. One officer says, ‘I don’t know what the RUC would do if the Troubles ended. It is so important to the Protestants’ view of themselves as a community under siege. They are rather like the Boers in South Africa.’
And many police officers regarded the Army as outsiders, often on short tours of duty, who alienated the population with needless shows of force. As one RUC chief inspector puts it, ‘We will never make permanent progress until we have no military support. It is far better for the IRA for the British war machine to be seen bearing down on them.’ The adoption of Police Primacy as official policy would do little to resolve this rivalry.
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The primary effort of the security forces, both police and Army, was directed against the republican groups, the Provisional IRA and the smaller Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), although during sectarian fighting in the mid 1970s loyalist terrorist groups had killed more people. But the loyalists did not attack the security forces and the number of incidents attributed to them declined in the late 1970s. Many Army officers see combating the better-organized republican terrorist groups as the real challenge. As one officer puts it, ‘Among some people there is a kind of admiration of the IRA, of its professionalism. Nobody has any respect for the loyalists.’
By 1977 the level of republican and loyalist terrorist incidents had reduced considerably. In 1972 there had been more than 10,000 shootings – the only year of the Troubles in which more than 100 soldiers had died; in 1977 there was one-tenth the number of shootings. The terrorists realized that allowing their members to roam the streets with arms was a sure route to large numbers of casualties and arrests. Instead, they put more preparation into their attacks and refined their methods. Soldiers posted to Ireland from the mid 1970s no longer expected on their patrols to walk into what one referred to as the ‘Wild West-style gun battles’ which erupted during the early days; now they were faced with sophisticated terrorist operations. Better intelligence was needed to combat this threat.
From 1977 to 1979 rivalry between the police and the Army was to become acute. It was often focused on intelligence matters, the lifeblood of the anti-terrorist effort. The Army’s manual Land Operations Volume III – Counter-Revolutionary Operations (Northern Ireland is defined as a counter-revolutionary conflict) was issued in August 1977 and became the bible for Army operations in Ulster. It states that intelligence is the ‘key to success’. Events had already demonstrated this to the security hierarchy.
The internment policy had proved counter-productive largely because the intelligence had been so poor. The IRA, too, had learned from its early mistakes and was more careful about how and when it engaged the security forces and about leaving evidence which could convict a member. The need for a competent, centrally directed intelligence apparatus to replace the existing web of feuding agencies was clear.
Before the reorganization, anti-terrorist intelligence activities were
