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By Root 784 0

on a coach carrying soldiers from Manchester to a barracks in North Yorkshire, killing nine soldiers, a woman and two children. In October two pubs in Guildford, the Horse and Groom and the Seven Stars, frequented by off-duty soldiers as well as the general public, were bombed, killing five people, two of them women. On 7 November 1974 a bomb exploded in the King’s Arms near the Royal Artillery Training Centre at Woolwich, murdering a soldier and a civilian. In all of these attacks dozens were injured. On 21 November, bombs went off at the Mulberry and Tavern in the Town pubs in Birmingham, killing nineteen and wounding 182 people. In each case, media and public clamour for a quick result led to unsafe detective and forensic work and the conviction of innocent people who went to jail for very long periods before their convictions were quashed. In December 1975 the four men who were responsible for many of these attacks were cornered in a London flat after they had shot at a restaurant they had bombed a few weeks before. After a five-day siege they surrendered, and in 1977 received forty-seven life sentences and an aggregate two thousand years in jail. An Irish-American citizen who had shot dead a policeman unfortunate enough to alight upon the group’s bomb factory was jailed in 1988 for murder after five years of extradition proceedings. Despite these outrages, which led to localised anti-Irish sentiment, especially in Birmingham, the British government developed its contacts with the PIRA. On 10 December 1974 Protestant clergymen from the Irish Council of Churches met PIRA leaders at a hotel in County Clare. A document was prepared which the clergymen took to the home secretary Merlyn Rees, with an offer of a ceasefire from 22 December 1974 to 2 January 1975.

Rees vowed that Britain had no long-term territorial or security interests in Northern Ireland beyond its obligations to a people the majority of whom wanted to remain in the UK. A steady number of republican detainees were released, and prisoners held on the mainland returned to Northern Irish jails. The army was less conspicuous in Catholic neighbourhoods. Managed with the help of clandestine talks between MI5 officers and the IRA, with the only written records stemming from the latter, the ceasefire endured for almost the whole of 1975, although it was punctuated by IRA killings of members of the security forces whenever it deemed its conditions to have been breached. While fewer police and soldiers were killed that year, the ceasefire saw an upsurge in blatant sectarian murders, which a younger generation of IRA figures—including Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes in Long Kesh and Martin McGuinness in jail in the South—viewed as an indirect consequence of the disastrously naive PIRA leadership’s talks with the British who they thought were spinning them along while the loyalists depleted them.

Much innocent blood flowed during the ceasefire. On 13 March 1975, two UVF terrorists planted a gas-cylinder bomb in the entrance to Peter Conway’s bar in Belfast; it exploded prematurely, leaving both men badly injured. On 5 April 1975 loyalists left their own gas-cylinder bomb in the doorway to McLaughlin’s bar in the Catholic New Lodge area, killing two men watching the Grand National on television. A few hours later, the PIRA shot up Protestants watching the same race-meeting in the Shankill Road’s Mountainview tavern, so as to facilitate the throwing of a bomb that murdered five people. Before the night was over, loyalists shot dead a sixty-one-year-old Catholic. On 31 July the Miami Showband were stopped at 1 a.m. as they headed south after a concert in the North by what they took to be UDR soldiers manning a roadblock. They were in fact members of the UVF, although some of them were also part-time soldiers in the UDR. The aim was to plant a bomb in the band’s Volkswagen van timed to go off as they went south, the intention being that people would say ‘Well, you can’t even trust the Miami Showband’ not to be PIRA bombers. One of the ten UVF terrorists told the musicians: