This book has been seven years in the making and focuses on the experiences of members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary GC (RUC) during the Northern Ireland conflict, otherwise known as the Troubles. There are a number of reasons for writing it. Firstly, RUC officers have an important story to tell and one that is worth documenting. Secondly, no serious academic attempt has been made to research the experiences of officers and their families. As such, the broader impact of terrorism on officers is little understood especially its familial effects. Thirdly, there is an academic leaning towards the study of terrorist organisations which has resulted in the serious neglect of the experiences of terrorists’ victims. Lastly, considerable effort has been made by intellectual heavyweights to highlight what they perceive to be the iniquity of state terror without adequately acknowledging the fact that victimhood has been experienced by members of the security forces and their families. This book on the RUC serves to counter-balance scholarly orientations that are critical of the state and its agencies.
Certainly, the concentration on terrorist organisations rather than the agencies that combat them; the increasing interest in the phenomenon of state terror; and the neglect of the experiences of victims of terrorism, has created an imbalance in the academic literature which, it is argued, does a disservice to students’ understanding (as well as that of others). In university seminar discussions, for example, some students are challenged when it comes to discerning morally between the categories of victim and perpetrator whenever a distinction seems somewhat obvious. Given the nature of terrorism studies, fuzziness in students’ understanding ought not to be an intellectual outcome with which a political science department is satisfied. An appropriate illustration of what contributes to students’ puzzlement is academic opposition to the British government’s counter-radicalisation programme, Prevent. Opposition has been played out across university campuses with some members of faculty resisting the programme’s implementation. Indeed, the ‘Together Against Prevent’ campaign has attracted scholarly support which has ignited suspicion amongst students as to the purpose of the government’s programme. This has shifted debate away from the responsibilities of citizenship, which unsurprisingly, includes students along with the rest of us. Given the fact that violent Islamic extremists see fit to target civilians of all ages and type, and that we are all potential victims, one might have expected a more supportive reaction from the educated class. In essence, terrorism studies has fallen under the influence of a left-wing sense of critique that ill-equips students when it comes to making a confident moral differentiation between those choosing to wage terrorism and those committed to combating it.
There are other factors which give rise to a blurry analysis of terrorism, which, in turn, renders students’ understanding hazy. Accordingly, Conor Cruise O’Brien (1977) identifies a few tendencies which terrorist organisations benefit from and two are especially pertinent to consider. One of these is academic neutrality and professional detachment. This is a scholarly condition which manifests itself in a kind of paralysis when it comes to making a moral judgment. The other inclination is that of sentimentalising the terrorist as someone who is ‘dedicated’ or a ‘misguided idealist’. O’Brien (1977, p. 66) suggests that these tendencies result in a critical focus that is morally misdirected: ‘We have noted … a kind of neutrality, and a kind of sentimentality, as among the tendencies in democratic society which encourage the terrorist as he fights against that society.’ These tendencies, O’Brien argues, are often:
accompanied by an attitude of mind which might be identified as unilateral liberalism. This is the kind of liberalism which is sensitive exclusively to threats to liberty seen as emanating from the democratic state itself, and is curiously phlegmatic about threats to liberty from the enemies of that state.
While scholarly self-indulgence can afford to play around with some topics, this approach is not recommended due to the gravity of others. As any victim of a terrorist attack will tell you (if an effort is made to inquire), terrorism is not a topic to be treated lightly. It requires a serious-minded analysis in our social science classrooms with its effects on victims the principal consideration. Yet, as mentioned above, the story of the victim rarely surfaces in terrorism studies. This point has been made by Orla Lynch and Javier Argomaniz (2015, p. 1) who claim that ‘Victims of terrorism … remain a peripheral topic in the broader debates on terrorism and a fundamentally under-researched subject in the academic sphere.’ As a result, students’ understanding of the human costs of terrorism is partial and therefore is a category which figures little in their moral evaluations of the phenomenon. This problem needs to be corrected: students and the rest of us need to be better informed about the effects of terrorism and this can only be achieved by diligent research work on victims. However, in addition to the ethical requirement to pay due respect to victims on the basis of their suffering, Alex Schmid (2012) suggests that victims’ experiences can play a significant—but largely under-appreciated—part in helping to combat terrorism by undermining the process of radicalisation. This book makes a contribution to research on victims of terrorism by considering its effects on members of the RUC and their families.
The Provisional IRA (henceforth IRA), which drove the conflict in Northern Ireland forward, is referred to as a terrorist organisation. The approach reflects the fact that the IRA, as James Dingley (2012, p. xii) correctly argues, was ‘recognized in national and international law as a terrorist organisation, and those members caught were convicted under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.’ The violent actions of the IRA justify the organisation being labelled terrorist. Premeditation rather than impulsiveness was the hallmark of its violence, which on a number of occasions, displayed a nasty sectarianism. Its ‘legitimate’ targets included retirees from the security forces; those who had resigned; civilians who worked for the police or military; and those who supplied them with materials. Politicians, prison officers, members of the judiciary, and civil servants were also targeted. If an individual happened to be in the company of a member of the security forces during a gun or bomb attack (wives, children, friends or neighbours) they were sometimes killed as well. These are the kinds of organisational traits that we associate with terrorism.
Beyond the patterns of actual violence, the IRA pursued its political goals by the threat of violence to the end of intimidating the unionist community into capitulation. Particularly in the early years of the conflict civilians feared being caught up in an explosion and for good reason as many individuals were injured and others killed in such circumstances. The randomness by which an individual could become a victim increased the psychological severity of the threat, which Michael Walzer (1977) warns, is the crucial factor in spreading fear amongst a population group.
The IRA was also involved in the terrorising of its own community as it substituted an unconstrained and often brutal method of ‘law enforcement’ for the RUC’s rule of law approach. The organisation ruled its community in this fashion without a political mandate as it shunned the democratic process until 1981. From the early 1980s to the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), also known as the Belfast Agreement, the party did politics whilst the IRA did violence. As the political wing of the IRA, Sinn Fein’s emergence as the leading nationalist party came after the republican movement had signed up to the GFA . Despite the self-serving attempts by terrorists to rebrand the conflict, Northern Ireland was not a ‘war’ and there were no paramilitary ‘soldiers’. Neither is it helpful to think of the conflict in terms of participating ‘combatants’ as this catch-all term fails to differentiate morally between distinct organisations. The IRA did not adhere to the doctrine of minimum force nor did it abide by a policy that released those whom it had taken capture. This point leads William Matchett (2015, p. 9) to comment that the ‘Provisionals had a 100 percent record in executing, often after torture, all Security Force personnel taken prisoner, exceeding the figure of al-Qaeda in Iraq .’ Neither did the organisation show the slightest concern regarding the ‘return of the bodies of those murdered and disappeared by the IRA in the early 1970s’ (McEvoy and Conway 2004, p. 559). This was a gross violation of the human rights of a grieving mother, father, wife or child. Therefore, in the light of the above points, the term ‘terrorist’ accurately describes the IRA and any writer who wishes their work to be taken seriously ought to label the organisation accordingly. For 30 years members of the security forces, whose role it was to protect the lives of law-abiding citizens, combatted a relatively small and politically unrepresentative group (the majority of nationalist voters gave their allegiance to the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP )) whose use of terrorism as a mechanism for achieving their political goals endangered the lives of multiple categories of person in Northern Ireland.
In 2010 the author made contact with the Northern Ireland Retired Police Officers Association (NIRPOA) seeking the participation of its members in a research project. The research aimed to explore areas of officers’ experiences which had either been ignored or not comprehensively investigated in the academic literature. In order to capture in-depth these experiences qualitative methodologies were prioritised. Accordingly, the first focus groups and individual interviews with members of the NIRPOA took place throughout the province in 2011. During this period of research a focus group was also arranged with members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary George Cross Widows Association and an interview with the Chairman of the Royal Ulster Constabulary George Cross Foundation. This initial period of fieldwork was supplemented by a range of interviews and focus groups with NIRPOA members in 2013, 2014 and 2017. Additionally, over twenty questionnaires were completed by women officers in 2015 and a further twenty-five members of the NIRPOA completed questionnaires in 2017. The questionnaires allowed for open-ended responses. Other organisations connected to the RUC participated in the research. In 2016 the author spent two weeks interviewing members of the Disabled Police Officers Association Northern Ireland (DPOA). In the same year the Wounded Police and Families Association (WPFA) became involved in the project. The WPFA is a smaller organisation than the DPOA but its members have sustained the same conflicted-related physical and psychological injuries . Further, the research has benefited from numerous points of contact with individual RUC officers outside of these organisations dating back to 2010. Research material provided by participants is used on an anonymous basis in order to protect their identities. All interviews and focus groups were audio recorded and quotations used in the book are verbatim accounts. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) also assisted the project and provided important statistical information.
All participants in the research are now retired but will be referred to throughout as ‘officers’. Individuals of all ranks participated in the research including five Assistant Chief Constables. Most participants had long records of service having made policing their career. Some worked in specialist counter-terrorist units, both uniformed and not, but all of them were affected by the Troubles and the threat posed by terrorism. Importantly, so too were officers’ families. A key aim of this book is to account for the impact of terrorism primarily on officers and their wives and children (it is acknowledged that officers’ mothers, fathers and siblings were also affected). Of course, not all officers were affected in the same way. Members of the DPOA and WPFA suffered physically and psychologically in a way that other officers did not and their sacrifice of a normal life has been much greater.
Chapter 2 considers the context within which RUC officers worked. Northern Ireland is a deeply divided society. It consists of two competing communities who fundamentally disagree over the country’s constitutional status and this division has spawned serious political violence (Guelke 2012). Historically, the RUC was supported by one community but less so the other. The nationalist community, which rejected the creation of the state in 1920/1921, withheld its su...