By 1977 the Army had fourteen battalions, units of about 650 soldiers each, and various supporting elements in Northern Ireland. They were deployed in fixed areas, known to the troops as their ‘patch’ and in Army jargon as Tactical Areas of Responsibility or TAORs. In some areas locally raised troops of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), a reserve unit formed in 1970 and manned largely by part-timers, had taken over responsibility for order from the RUC’s B Special reserve. The idea was that, as part of an Army controlled by disinterested British generals, the UDR would be perceived as fairer than the B Specials who were regarded by many Catholics as the strongest bastion of hardline loyalism. The RUC, successor to the Royal Irish Constabulary – the police force of Ireland prior to partition – was left without the B Specials and with most of its officers disarmed. The force endured several demoralising years when it could carry out few tasks independently of the Army.
Despite these intentions, the UDR too soon became deeply unpopular among Catholics. In the early days of the Troubles many politicians had great hopes for the UDR. It had been set up with a reasonably large Catholic contingent: one in five of the people in its ranks. Most had left by the late 1970s. Many regular Army commanders had little respect for the military capabilities of the UDR, believing it was dangerous to let part-timers into hard republican areas. In 1978 the force was reorganized in an attempt to make it more professional. Several companies were disbanded so that their members could be concentrated more effectively in certain areas. Measures were also taken to boost the number of full-time UDR soldiers. It was apparent that the strains of holding down a job and carrying out dangerous patrols in their spare time were too much for many people. There were only 844 full-timers in 1972 but more than 2500 by the mid 1980s. Some distrust remained between the regular Army and the UDR, however, because of connections between some of the local soldiers and loyalist paramilitary groups.
From 1969 Ulster was divided by Army commanders into battalion patches, the more dangerous of which were occupied by regulars and the remainder by UDR units. Regular and UDR battalions were divided between three brigade headquarters: 39 Brigade in the Belfast area, 8 Brigade in Londonderry and 3 Brigade in Portadown covering the border. The brigade commanders stood between the units conducting operations at a local level and the two senior commanders – both generals – with wider responsibilities.
Each of the brigade commanders reports to the Commander Land Forces (CLF) at Lisburn, who is a major general and the top Army commander in Ulster. Above him is the General Officer Commanding (GOC), who, although an Army officer, is also in charge of the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy detachments in Ulster and for high-level co-ordination with the police and ministers. The barracks at Lisburn, a largely Protestant town near Belfast, extend over a large area and include Victorian buildings occupied by the headquarters of 39 Brigade and a new set of buildings – featureless 1960s municipal architecture at the base of a concrete communications tower, which is home to Headquarters Northern Ireland (HQNI).
The Army complex is named Thiepval barracks, after a First World War battlefield. Thiepval has a deeper meaning to many in Ulster not immediately obvious to an outsider. It was the area where the 36th Ulster Division was decimated by German artillery and machine guns. It is remembered as a place where a blood sacrifice was made by those loyal to the British crown, after republicans took advantage of the war to plot their Easter Rising in Ireland against Westminster’s rule. The loyalist members of the 36th Division are reported to have shouted ‘Fuck the Pope’ as they went over the top of their trenches.
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The Northern Ireland Office (NIO) was Whitehall’s instrument for the direct rule of Ulster. From early 1974 it studied various ways of restoring the status and credibility of the RUC. In 1975 a committee of senior Army, RUC and intelligence officers chaired by John Bourn, an NIO civil servant, produced a document called ‘The Way Ahead’. It was to become the most important security initiative of the late 1970s, leading to a policy known as Police Primacy. Under this plan, the role of the regular Army was to be reduced and overall direction of the security effort given to the RUC in 1976, thus requiring an expansion of locally recruited forces.
Most Army officers believed the RUC was more professional than the UDR, although in 1976 many still considered the police incapable of taking charge of security on the ground, as opposed to in the committee rooms. The RUC had grown in numbers from 3500 in 1970 to 6500 in the mid 1970s.
Like the Army, its forces were organized on a hierarchical system. Police stations were grouped into sixteen ‘divisions’ corresponding roughly to Army battalions. Several divisions were grouped into each of three ‘regions’ – Belfast, South and North – each with an assistant chief constable in charge who had the same degree of authority as the Army’s three brigadiers. The three assistant chief constables reported to the chief constable at RUC Headquarters at Knock in east Belfast.
Army and RUC activities had been integrated from the top down. The chief constable and GOC saw one another at least once a week at meetings of the Security Policy Committee. The deputy chief constable and CLF usually had daily discussions to co-ordinate operations. Lower down there would be similar conferences, for example between a police division commander and his local Army battalion commanding officer. But
