A Fighting Spirit. Paul Burns
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team. It meant handling every sort of explosive there was and familiarizing myself with all the many kinds of devices that had been used by the IRA. I was astonished by the ingenuity of their bomb-makers. Most of their explosive materials were home-made out of easily obtainable fertilizer. As for the devices, once you’d got your head around the simple mechanics of a bomb—a circuit with a power source and a switch—you could booby-trap practically anything. I learned how it was possible to take a simple clothes peg and insert two drawing pins inside the clip end to make contact points. You could arm that trigger by placing, say, a book cover between the drawing pins. The moment somebody lifts up the book, the pins touch and the circuit is completed. We learned how to make a simple tilt switch using a test tube, a bung, and a ball bearing or a drop of mercury. Place the ball bearing into the tube and insert the bung. Then insert two wires through the bung. If the test tube is at one angle, the ball bearing or mercury will stay harmlessly at the safe end. But as soon as it tilts, it will roll towards the two wires and complete the circuit. Bang!
A basic car bomb could be made using a Tupperware box, a magnet and an alarm clock. All you needed to do was wire the alarm clock up to act as a timer for a detonator when the alarm rings, then pack the box with home-made explosives and tape the magnet to the inside of the lid so that the whole unit would stick to the underside of a vehicle.
Nowadays the IEDs laid in places like Afghanistan are far more sophisticated, using lasers and other advanced technology. Back then the devices were a lot more Heath Robinson, but that didn’t make them any less devastating, and my time training for the search team brought home to me that, in a dirty conflict like the Troubles in Northern Ireland, you could never assume that anything or anyone was safe. As I was to find out to my cost, however, vigilance isn’t always enough.
When our time in Berlin was over, Scotty and Dylan—good friends I’d made in the battalion—and I made our own way back to the UK, taking a train through East Germany to Frankfurt, then back across Europe, passing through Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, and Belgium. A little holiday. A happy time. And in the brief period of leave I had before our departure for Northern Ireland I went home to Nottingham and started going out with a girl called Claire, whom I’d known since my schooldays. This was a bit of a rarity. Not many of the guys had girlfriends, because our lives were so unsettled and so dominated by the Army—first during training in Aldershot, then on deployment in Berlin.
Life seemed good, and I was looking forward to the future.
By the time the battalion arrived in Northern Ireland in July 1979, the Troubles had been blazing for over a decade. In fact there had been tensions between Protestants and Catholics in the area for almost three centuries, but it was in 1968 that things deteriorated dramatically. It was in that year that members of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, a Catholic body, marched through Londonderry in defiance of a government ban. A number of the protesters were injured by the RUC—the Royal Ulster Constabulary—that day, and this was the catalyst that sparked an increasingly devastating spiral of violence. Protestant and Catholic militants took to the streets of Belfast and Londonderry, leading to the Battle of Bogside—a two-day conflict between the Catholics and the RUC during which almost 1,500 people were injured.
The Northern Ireland government requested the help of the British Army in late 1969, and at first the soldiers were largely welcomed by the Catholic population. That didn’t last. The perception soon arose that the police and the military were more on the side of the Protestants than the Catholics, and the situation in Northern Ireland became more and more volatile—a three-way war between the unionist Catholics who wanted a united Ireland, the loyalist Protestants who wanted the Province to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the police and military, whose role it was to keep the peace but who soon became an integral part of this political struggle. British soldiers became accustomed to angry taunts from both the Catholic and the Protestant communities. They could deal with that. But everyone knew it would only be a matter of time before a member of the security forces was killed in Northern Ireland. That day arrived on 6 February 1971, when Gunner Robert Curtis, of the Royal Artillery, was shot during a riot in Belfast.
Robert Curtis’s death changed everything. When Brian Faulkner became the new Prime Minister of Northern Ireland the following month, he declared war on the IRA. Internment—the practice of holding prisoners without trial—was introduced. The violence escalated. More troops died—and more civilians too—and the sectarianism grew worse. One Catholic girl, treacherous enough to go out with a British soldier, had her hair shaved before being tarred and feathered and tied to a lamp-post. That March three squaddies went home with some girls they’d met in the pub. A Republican death squad was waiting for them.
At the beginning of 1970 the IRA had split into two wings: the official IRA and the new Provisional IRA, or ‘Provos’, who were more aggressive and militant. During 1971 there were more than 1,000 bombings, and while the British forces were obliged to stick to their Rules of Engagement and only fire when they were fired upon, the Provos used whatever tactics they could to gain an advantage.
The Parachute Regiment had been deployed in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. On 30 January 1972 an event occurred that would again deepen the Troubles, be for ever written in the history books of the Paras, and enter the public consciousness on both sides of the sectarian divide. That event came to be known as Bloody Sunday.
What really happened that day is a matter of dispute, and it’s not up to me to argue the rights and wrongs. All I know is that on that day an enormous protest march, 30,000 strong, was planned to pass through the streets of Londonderry—or Derry, as the Catholic majority in that town call it. At that time, Derry was a divided city. There was a ‘line of containment’—an invisible border beyond which the security forces seldom dared to go. On the edge of this was an area known as Aggro Corner, from where young Republicans would hurl petrol bombs at the British forces. The Army had erected barricades along the line of containment, past which the protesters were not allowed to march. Some did, and a riot ensued, during which the Paras were given the order to fire with live rounds. Thirteen marchers—including seven teenagers—were killed that day; another man died a few months later of his injuries.
Bloody Sunday became a defining moment in the Troubles. As I write this, nearly forty years later, it is still written deep in the memory of those who were affected by it. Many millions of pounds were spent on an inquiry which lasted twelve years and concluded in 2010 that the Paras were at fault for firing into the crowd that day. I have mixed feelings about this finding. For the young men in Northern Ireland, the conflict was a new kind of war—a war in which you couldn’t tell who was your friend and who was your enemy. When you join the Army you expect to have an enemy you can at least recognize, in a uniform that you can identify. Northern Ireland was very different from that. It was common for British troops to be shot at by plain-clothes snipers; the sniper would immediately pass the weapon on to an accomplice, who would run off with it and pass it on again. In circumstances like that, it’s no wonder the Paras were jumpy on Bloody Sunday. I’ve no doubt that they reacted in as professional a way as they possibly could. After Bloody Sunday, the training for British troops serving in Northern Ireland became more intense, the procedures more clearly defined. But Derry and Belfast were scary places, and to me it’s a shame that British troops were put in that position in the first place.
I was just a child at the time, not even yet an Army Cadet. But Bloody Sunday affected me too, because from that day on the Parachute Regiment was the bête noire of the IRA. Anything they could do to take one of us out would be cause for celebration.
Our period of leave between Berlin and Northern Ireland was brief—just a couple of weeks. Back home in Nottingham, my mum seemed perfectly resigned to the idea of me going to the Province. I don’t remember any great anxiety, no tears or displays of emotion. She was far more concerned about my plans to buy a motorbike, for which I’d been scrupulously saving. When she heard about that, she did wring her hands and beg me to reconsider, and I agreed, just to stop her from fretting.
Nor do I recall being nervous about my new posting. I’ve no memory of what incidents in Northern Ireland had been particularly newsworthy in the early months of 1979. For a start, I’d been abroad, but I was also just a young lad with my mind on matters other than current affairs. Perhaps