Secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose.

British state collusion with their loyalist death squads has been well documented in several high profile cases from the late eighties such as the murder of the Human Rights lawyer, Mr. Pat Finucane, and the Brian Nelson affair. State collusion, though, has been institutionalized from the start of the conflict when Britain trained, armed and directed their paramilitary gangs for use against the  Catholic minority in the north east of Ireland. The McGurk's Bar Massacre of the 4th December 1971 was to be the first bloody signpost of this collusion on a road that leads directly to Bloody Sunday, the New Lodge Six, the Dublin and Monaghan bombings and beyond. 

The McGurk's Bar Massacre was Britain's declaration of war.

The War Before the McGurk's Bar Massacre

Proof that the Irish Question could not be solved by military and legal means alone came early in the conflict but was not heeded for another generation. Far from quelling what the British portrayed as localized unrest, the introduction of internment on the 9th August 1971 plunged the north of Ireland into an all-enveloping spiral of violence, destruction and death. The story of its failure is told conclusively in the death toll in the months prior to and following its introduction. Ten people (four British soldiers, four civilians and two Republican Volunteers) had died in the four months leading up to internment. One hundred and twenty eight died in its four-month aftermath (sixty nine civilians and fifty nine combatants - thirteen Republican soldiers and forty six British army, RUC, UDR and Loyalist personnel). 

Above: An Elderly Man Beaten by British Troops on New Lodge Road

The Provisional IRA had rightly sensed British strategic weakness and launched such a devastating onslaught that it seemed certain that the Orange statelet, under unionist misrule, would crumple. Britain, though, in the spring of 1970 had installed one Frank Kitson as Commander of the occupying forces in Belfast. Such was his perceived skill in so-called counter-insurgency that, even though he was only a Brigadier and was to become the youngest Commander in the British army, he held its most difficult post for two years until April 1972.  During this critical time he had tirelessly prepared the framework for how the British army was to wage its war in the north of Ireland. Indeed, his book, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping, which was published in 1971, became the blueprint for the British modus operandi in this theatre of war. It had been formulated and honed by British paramilitary forces in places as far-flung as Kenya, Malaya, Aden and Cyprus as the rotten empire began to crumble. Nevertheless, Britain, like its blundering generals in the First World War, had not learned from any of these conflicts. Their methodology each and every time had been unsuccessful, resulting in long-term military failure and territorial loss. History will judge whether the North of Ireland is the same.

The bedrock of this counter-insurgency strategy is "the working of the triumvirate: civil, military and police as a joint and integrated organisation from the highest to the lowest level of policy-making, planning and administration" (from Counter-Revolutionary Operations, volume three of Land Operations, the army's secret training manual, obtained by the Time Out magazine in 1969). Therefore, legislative and judicial powers have to be weighted and local police militia bolstered towards an obdurate support of military strategy. These steps in isolation are not enough, though, if a covert surveillance and intelligence-gathering network is not in place. Kitson's subversion of insurgency theory and psychological warfare went even further with its creation of gangs and counter-gangs to off-set revolution within a particular community. In other conflicts British Special Forces would don local garb or blacken their faces to execute illegal operations in the guise of indigenous gangs. They would also fund and instruct native militia, directing them against shared quarry. Their hand need not have been so well-hidden in the north of Ireland as the dress and skin colour was usually their own. In conjunction with these death squads, the British military had also had been training and arming protestant militants for such a juncture in the war. Loyalists, in the two and a half years prior to the McGurk's Bar Massacre, had only been responsible for ten deaths (or thirteen deaths in the five and a half years prior to the pub bombing). Now was the time for the British to unfetter these paramilitary dogs of war and direct them against ordinary, Irish civilians. Their success, in British military terms, is calculated in the death count of innocents that rose sharply from, and began with, the McGurk's Bar Massacre of the 4th December 1971. A war that lasted for two generations, though, testifies to their abject failure.

The Week Prior to the McGurk's Bar Massacre

On Saturday the 27th November 1971 the north reeled from a major IRA offensive and bomb blitz throughout the city of Belfast and the counties of Derry and Fermanagh. Beginning at 9 a.m., there had been nine explosions over a half hour period and, within thirty hours, a further twenty blasts. Maliciously-started fires raged as custom posts, check points and army patrols were attacked. Two custom officers (Jimmy O'Neill and Ian Hankin) and one Scots Guardsman (Paul Nicholls) were killed. The tempo of bombings, shootings and death was maintained vigorously throughout the week and rose to such a crescendo that another weekend blitz was guaranteed. The British military, therefore, swamped the streets of all major towns across the statelet and dug in in anticipation.

In North Belfast, the prison services had been caught napping once more on the day before the McGurk's Bar Massacre when three high profile Republican prisoners, Martin Meehan, Anthony "Dutch" Doherty and Hugh McCann, simply scaled the wall of Crumlin Road jail and jumped to freedom. As this escape followed on the coattails of the highly embarrassing breakout of nine inmates on the 16th November from the very same jail, it was imperative that these latest escapees were immediately caught. Therefore a ring of steel was thrown around North Belfast so that the potential movements of these men would be hampered until their capture. Press reports speculated that the prisoners were bundled swiftly over the border but the British authorities continued to believe that they had been quick enough to contain them within their cordon area.

The Day and Night of the McGurk's Bar Massacre

On the fateful night of the 4th December the Belfast Telegraph reported:

In a massive clamp-down operation, hundreds of troops today saturated Belfast's city centre... in an effort to prevent a repetition of last Saturday's IRA terror campaign... More than 4000 men in nine regiments are stationed in and around Belfast, and today each regiment was told to keep a lookout for trouble in its own area... All this was in addition to the massive search which has been mounted for the three IRA jail breakers. Road blocks on all roads leading into and out of the city are being manned round the clock.

Above: Cordon and Search on the New Lodge Road

The McGurk's family pub was on North Queen Street, one of North Belfast's main thoroughfares, five minute's walk away from both the commercial hub of the statelet and the jail in question. 

Witnesses (see Joe Graham's account in our Guest Book) recall that there were cordons and searches at every turn and yet it was in this area that a loyalist death squad felt confident to linger and act. The military on this one major road had somehow vanished to allow a carload of men with a 50lb bomb in the backseat into their target zone. 

As we know from the testimony of the one convicted bomber, Robert James Campbell, the gang even waited for over an hour to have clear access at their original target, the Gem bar, which had perceived allegiances to the Official Republican movement. The British war machine planned to stir up internecine strife between the two Republican wings with the no-warning and devastating bomb at this pub. As one wing blamed the other, both would be deflected from their war against the occupation forces and their community support networks rent asunder by recrimination and infighting - the classic formula for divide and conquer that the British military and its agents had perfected over centuries of misrule. As it happened, though, the Gem had men outside it, so, after waiting for an hour and a quarter, with no apparent concern for being accosted by security forces, the loyalists decided that any Catholic pub would suffice. What mattered was that it was a softer target to hit - the loss of innocent civilian life was irrelevant. The McGurk's family pub was their fateful choice.

Afterwards, as the death squad raced towards the nearby Cathedral Quarter where they had arranged to dump their car and get picked up, the bomb they had left behind ripped through the small pub and the innocents within. A couple of minutes later they abandoned their car as all around Belfast sounded to the squeals of the emergency services speeding towards the carnage. At this moment, in an apparent act of cowardice, their pickup fled the area and abandoned his cronies (no loyalist was punished for this treachery, as would be expected,  which leads us to assume that the gang member was attached directly to British Intelligence). Instead they had to phone their controllers and arrange a second team to collect them which meant another half an hour in the immediate vicinity of their atrocity. Yet still, the three men were not stopped, questioned or arrested as they skulked suspiciously in the shadow of St. Anne's Cathedral and the ring of steel closed once more with thousands of troops flooding into the area. Eventually they were picked up and driven the couple of miles back to their drinking dens, through roadblocks and past army posts. Indeed, the British did not even recover the original transport they abandoned a few hundred yards away from McGurk's.

The Aftermath of the McGurk's Massacre

As surely as what happened in the McGurk's family pub was a massacre of innocents, the British authorities' handling of the case in the generations thenceforth has constituted nothing less than an atrocity and an abasement of basic Human Rights.

The original plan was to have their loyalist death squad hit an establishment frequented by Official IRA members to fan the flames of the split with the Provisional movement. This feud would spill onto the streets of their own community and sap the very support that each needed to survive. When McGurk's family pub, the softest of innocent targets, was hit instead, the British machinations for misinformation were firmly in place. The recently formed Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) section in Palace Barracks within minutes had begun to propagate the lie that the bomb was an IRA own-goal in order that the objective of their original plan was realised and the local power-base of the IRA drained. As ordinary people emptied onto North Queen Street to claw at rubble and debris, British officers were debriefing journalists with the lie spun by their Intelligence superiors: bombers were being trained in the bar or the bomb was waiting to be transported to its intended target. The IRA were to blame and the people in the bar were guilty by association if not legally culpable through complicity.

 The impact of this lie was dependent upon its longevity and its life span upon the synchronicity between the administrative powers, the police and the media. The British military, therefore, swung the full weight of each behind their deception. As neighbours dug feverishly for survivors, police and army personnel descended upon the New Lodge community and began an intensive house-to-house search operation. Ignoring the highly accurate testimony of young Joseph McClory, they used the McGurk's Bar Massacre as a thinly-veiled excuse to turn whole streets upside-down in a hunt for intelligence, prison escapees or arms. They even swooped on the family home of Edward Kane in the vain hope that they might upturn some incriminating evidence that they could use to back their spurious claims concerning the victims. Mrs. Kane, a young mother to young children, watched as her home was ransacked and her neighbours were dragged onto the street. She recounts how a local informant, hidden from view behind a screen in an army vehicle, could be heard telling his paymasters whether his neighbours were connected to the Republican movement. She had not been told at this moment in time that her partner, the father of her babies, had been murdered.