Operation Demetrius was a
British Army operation in Northern Ireland on 9–10 August 1971,
during the Troubles. It involved the mass arrest and internment
(imprisonment without trial) of 342 people suspected of being
involved with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which was waging an
armed campaign for a united Ireland against the British state. That
campaign took off in January 1970, with arson and bomb attacks
directed against shops, offices and industrial premises. In July 1971
the IRA intensified their activities to coincide with the Orange
Order marching season. The Provisional wing of the IRA was
responsible for a majority of the 298 explosions, 320 shooting
incidents and 600 conflict-related injuries inflicted from January to
July 1971. Their targets included normal judicial processes:
witnesses were murdered, jury members intimidated and policemen
killed.
The IRA campaign provoked an Ulster
loyalist backlash and fragmented the governing Unionist Party. These
developments led British ministers to fear that Northern Ireland was
sliding towards civil war. Brian Faulkner, Prime Minister in the
devolved Northern Ireland Government, concluded that he had to do
something tough to shore up his flagging authority, and saw
internment as his best available option. British ministers assented
because they feared that if Faulkner fell his successor would be so
hardline that they would have no option but to introduce direct rule.
They were adamant that Faulkner should carry the political
responsibility if internment failed.
Senior British Army commanders argued
that internment was unnecessary on military grounds, that it would
raise sectarian tensions and strengthen the IRA. They eventually
agreed to it with reluctance, and extracted the concession that
Faulkner would also ban planned loyalist parades.
Soldiers launched dawn raids throughout
Northern Ireland on 9 August 1971, sparking four days of violence in
which 20 civilians, two IRA members and two British soldiers were
killed. All of those arrested were Irish nationalists, the majority
of them Catholic. Because of the withdrawal of the police from
nationalist areas in 1969, the rushed implementation of Operation
Demetrius and flawed intelligence systems, many were interned who had
no links with the current IRA.
The introduction of internment, the way
the arrests were carried out, and the abuse of those arrested, led to
mass protests and a sharp increase in violence. Amid the violence,
about 7,000 people fled or were forced out of their homes. The
interrogation techniques used on some of the internees were described
by the European Commission of Human Rights in 1976 as torture. The
superior court, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), ruled on
appeal in 1978 that while the techniques were "inhuman and
degrading", they did not, in this instance, constitute
torture. It was later revealed that the British government had
withheld information from the ECtHR and that the policy had been
authorized by British government ministers. In light of new evidence
in December 2014, the Irish government asked the ECtHR to revise its
1978 judgment. The ECtHR declined the request in 2018.
Under direct rule, British ministers
modified the policy of internment in December 1972. The power to
detain people without trial was transferred from ministers to an
independent tribunal and a separate appeal mechanism was created. The
new arrangements were rebranded 'detention without trial'.
Internment was abolished in December 1975. In total 1,981 people had
been interned; 1,874 were nationalist, 107 loyalist. The first
loyalist internees were detained in February 1973.
Background and planning
Internment had been used a number of
times during Northern Ireland's (and the Republic of Ireland's)
history, but had not previously been used during the Troubles, which
began in the late 1960s. Ulster loyalist paramilitaries, such as the
Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), had been engaged in a low-level violent
campaign since 1966. After the August 1969 riots, the British Army
was deployed on the streets to bolster the Royal Ulster Constabulary
(RUC). Up until this point, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) had been
largely inactive. However, as the violence worsened, the IRA was
divided over how to deal with it. It split into two factions, the
Provisional IRA and Official IRA. In 1970–71, the Provisionals
began a campaign of violence against the British Army and the RUC.
The Officials' policy was more defensive. During 1970–71, there
were numerous clashes between state forces and the two wings of the
IRA, between the IRAs and loyalists, and occasionally between the
IRAs. Most loyalist attacks were directed against Catholic civilians,
but they also clashed with state forces and the IRA on a number of
occasions.
The idea of re-introducing internment
for Irish republican militants came from the Unionist government of
Northern Ireland, headed by Prime Minister Brian Faulkner. It was
agreed to re-introduce internment at a meeting between Faulkner and
UK Prime Minister Edward Heath on 5 August 1971. The goal of
internment was to target the IRA and reduce the levels of their
violence, but it was also hoped that the tougher measures against the
IRA would prevent a loyalist backlash and the collapse of Faulkner's
government. The British cabinet recommended "balancing action",
such as the arrest of loyalist militants, the calling in of weapons
held by (generally unionist) rifle clubs in Northern Ireland and an
indefinite ban on parades (most of which were held by
unionist/loyalist groups). However, Faulkner argued that a ban on
parades was unworkable, that the rifle clubs posed no security risk
and that there was no evidence of loyalist terrorism. It was
eventually agreed that there would be a six-month ban on parades but
no interning of loyalists, and that internment would go ahead on 9
August.
On the initial list of those to be
arrested, which was drawn up by RUC Special Branch and MI5, there
were 450 names, but only 350 of these were found. Key figures on the
list, and many who never appeared on them, had got wind of the swoop
before it began. The list included leaders of the non-violent
Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association such as Ivan Barr and
Michael Farrell.
Ulster loyalist paramilitaries were
also carrying out acts of violence, mainly directed against Catholics
and Irish nationalists. However, security officials advised ministers
that they did not represent an immediate and serious threat to the
security of the state or the criminal justice system, and no
loyalists were interned. Tim Pat Coogan has commented:
What they did not include was a
single loyalist. Although the UVF had begun the killing and bombing,
this organization was left untouched, as were other violent loyalist
satellite organizations such as Tara, the Shankill Defence
Association and the Ulster Protestant Volunteers. Faulkner was urged
by the British to include a few Protestants in the trawl but, apart
from two republicans, he refused.
Faulkner himself later wrote, 'The
idea of arresting anyone as an exercise in political cosmetics was
repugnant to me'.
Internment was planned and implemented
from the highest levels of the British government. Specially trained
personnel were sent to Northern Ireland to familiarize the local
forces in what became known as the 'five techniques', methods
of interrogation described by opponents as "a euphemism for
torture". The available evidence suggests that some members
of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, trained in civilian policing
methods, were unwilling to use such methods. In an internal
memorandum dated 22 December 1971, one Brigadier Lewis reported to
his superiors in London on the state of intelligence-gathering in
Northern Ireland, saying that he was 'very concerned about lack of
interrogation in depth' by the RUC and that 'some Special
Branch out-station heads are not attempting to screw down arrested
men and extract intelligence from them'. However, he wrote, his
colleagues 'were due to do a quick visit by helicopter to these
out-stations... to read the riot act'.
Legal basis
The internments were initially carried
out under Regulations 11 and 12 of 1956 and Regulation 10 of 1957
(the Special Powers Regulations), made under the authority of the
Special Powers Act. The Detention of Terrorists Order of 7 November
1972, made under the authority of the Temporary Provisions Act, was
used after direct rule was instituted.
Internees arrested without trial
pursuant to Operation Demetrius could not complain to the European
Commission of Human Rights about breaches of Article 5 of the
European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) because on 27 June 1957,
the UK lodged a notice with the Council of Europe declaring that
there was a "public emergency within the meaning of Article
15(1) of the Convention".
Operation and immediate aftermath
Operation Demetrius began on Monday 9
August at about 4 am and progressed in two parts:
Arrest and movement of the detainees
to one of three regional holding centers: Girdwood in Belfast,
Ballykinler in County Down, or Magilligan in County Londonderry;
The process of identification and
questioning, leading either to release of the detainee or movement
into detention at Crumlin Road prison or aboard HMS Maidstone, a
prison ship in Belfast Harbour.
In the first wave of raids across
Northern Ireland, 342 people were arrested. Many of those arrested
reported that they and their families were assaulted, verbally abused
and threatened by the soldiers. There were claims of soldiers
smashing their way into houses without warning and firing baton
rounds through doors and windows. Many of those arrested also
reported being ill-treated during their three-day detention at the
holding centers. They complained of being beaten, verbally abused,
threatened, harassed by dogs, denied sleep, and starved. Some
reported being forced to run a gauntlet of baton-wielding soldiers,
being forced to run an 'obstacle course', having their heads
forcefully shaved, being kept naked, being burnt with cigarettes,
having a sack placed over their heads for long periods, having a rope
kept around their necks, having the barrel of a gun pressed against
their heads, being dragged by the hair, being trailed behind armored
vehicles while barefoot, and being tied to armored trucks as a human
shield. Some were hooded, beaten and then thrown from a helicopter.
They were told they were hundreds of feet in the air, but were
actually only a few feet from the ground.
The operation sparked an immediate
upsurge of violence, the worst since the August 1969 riots. The
British Army came under sustained attack from Irish nationalist
rioters and gunmen, especially in Belfast. According to journalist
Kevin Myers: "Insanity seized the city. Hundreds of vehicles
were hijacked and factories were burnt. Loyalist and IRA gunmen were
everywhere". People blocked roads and streets with burning
barricades to stop the British Army entering their neighborhoods. In
Derry, barricades were again erected around Free Derry and "for
the next 11 months these areas effectively seceded from British
control". Between 9 and 11 August, 24 people were killed or
fatally wounded: 20 civilians (14 Catholics, 6 Protestants), two
members of the Provisional IRA (shot dead by the British Army), and
two members of the British Army (shot dead by the Provisional IRA).
A mural commemorating those killed in
the Ballymurphy Massacre during Operation Demetrius
Of the civilians killed, 17 were killed
by the British Army and the other three were killed by unknown
attackers. In West Belfast's Ballymurphy housing estate, 11 Catholic
civilians were killed by 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment between 9
and 11 August in an episode that has become known as the Ballymurphy
Massacre. Another flash-point was Ardoyne in North Belfast, where
soldiers shot dead three people on 9 August. Many Protestant
families fled Ardoyne and about 200 burnt their homes as they left,
lest they "fall into Catholic hands". Protestant
and Catholic families fled "to either side of a dividing
line, which would provide the foundation for the permanent peace-line
later built in the area". Catholic homes were burnt in
Ardoyne and elsewhere too. About 7,000 people, most of them
Catholics, were left homeless. About 2,500 Catholic refugees fled
south of the border, where new refugee camps were set up.
By 13 August, media reports indicated
that the violence had begun to wane, seemingly due to exhaustion on
the part of the IRA and security forces. On 15 August, the
nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) announced that
it was starting a campaign of civil disobedience in response to the
introduction of internment. By 17 October, it was estimated that
about 16,000 households were withholding rent and rates for council
houses as part of the campaign of civil disobedience.
On 16 August, over 8,000 workers went
on strike in Derry in protest at internment. Joe Cahill, then Chief
of Staff of the Provisional IRA, held a press conference during which
he claimed that only 30 Provisional IRA members had been interned.
On 22 August, in protest against
internment, about 130 non-unionist councillors announced that they
would no longer sit on district councils. The SDLP also withdrew its
representatives from a number of public bodies. On 19 October, five
Northern Ireland Members of Parliament (MPs) began a 48-hour hunger
strike against internment. The protest took place near 10 Downing
Street in London. Among those taking part were John Hume, Austin
Currie, and Bernadette Devlin. Protests would continue until
internment was ended in December 1975.
Long-term effects
The backlash against internment
contributed to the decision of the British Government under Prime
Minister Edward Heath to suspend the Northern Ireland Government and
replace it with direct rule from Westminster, under the authority of
a British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. This took place on
23 March 1972.
Following the suspension of the
Northern Ireland Government and Parliament, internment was continued
with some largely cosmetic modifications by the direct rule
administration until 5 December 1975. During this time a total of
1,981 people were interned: 1,874 were from an Irish nationalist
background, while 107 were from a unionist background.
Historians generally view the period of
internment as inflaming sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland, while
failing in its goal of arresting key members of the IRA. Senator
Maurice Hayes, Catholic Chairman of the Northern Ireland Community
Relations Commission at the time, has described internment as
'possibly the worst of all the stupid things that government could
do.' The British Ministry of Defence (MoD) has assessed it
overall as 'a major mistake'. Others, however, have taken a
more nuanced view, suggesting that the policy was not so much
misconceived in principle as badly planned and poorly executed. The
MoD review points to some short-term gains, maintaining that
Operation Demetrius netted 50 Provisional officers, 107 volunteers,
and valuable information on the IRA and its structures, leading to
the discovery of substantial arms and explosives dumps.
Many of the people arrested had no
links with the IRA, but their names appeared on the list through
haste and incompetence. The list's lack of reliability and the
arrests that followed, complemented by reports of internees being
abused far in excess of the usual state violence, led to more
nationalists identifying with the IRA and losing hope in non-violent
methods. After Operation Demetrius, recruits came forward in huge
numbers to join the Provisional and Official wings of the IRA.
Internment also led to a sharp increase in violence. In the eight
months before the operation, there were 34 conflict-related deaths in
Northern Ireland. In the four months following it, 140 were killed.
A serving officer of the British Royal Marines declared:
It (internment) has, in fact,
increased terrorist activity, perhaps boosted IRA recruitment,
polarized further the Catholic and Protestant communities and reduced
the ranks of the much needed Catholic moderates.
In terms of loss of life as well as
number of attacks, 1972 was the most violent year of the Troubles.
The fatal march on Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972) in Derry, when 14
unarmed protesters were shot dead by British paratroopers, was an
anti-internment march.
Interrogation of internees
All of those arrested were interrogated
by the British Army and RUC. However, twelve internees were then
chosen for further "deep interrogation", using
sensory deprivation. This took place at a secret interrogation center, which was later revealed to be Shackleton Barracks, outside
Ballykelly. In October, a further two internees were chosen for deep
interrogation. These fourteen became known as "the Hooded
Men", or "the Guineapigs".
After undergoing the same treatment as
the other internees, the men were hooded, handcuffed and flown to the
base by helicopter. On the way, soldiers severely beat them and
threatened to throw them from the helicopter. When they arrived they
were stripped naked, photographed, and examined by a doctor.
For seven days, when not being
interrogated, they were kept hooded and handcuffed in a cold cell and
subjected to a continuous loud hissing noise. Here they were forced
to stand in a stress position for many hours and were repeatedly
beaten on all parts of their body. They were deprived of sleep, food
and drink. Some of them also reported being kicked in the genitals,
having their heads banged against walls, being shot at with blank
rounds, and being threatened with injections. The result was severe
physical and mental exhaustion, severe anxiety, depression,
hallucinations, disorientation and repeated loss of consciousness.
The interrogation methods used on the
men became known as the 'five techniques'. Training and advice
regarding the five techniques came from senior intelligence officials
in the British government. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)
defined the five techniques as follows:
...wall-standing: forcing the
detainees to remain for periods of some hours in a "stress
position", described by those who underwent it as being
"spreadeagled against the wall, with their fingers put high
above the head against the wall, the legs spread apart and the feet
back, causing them to stand on their toes with the weight of the body
mainly on the fingers";
...hooding: putting a black or navy
colored bag over the detainees' heads and, at least initially,
keeping it there all the time except during interrogation;
...subjection to noise: pending
their interrogations, holding the detainees in a room where there was
a continuous loud and hissing noise;
...deprivation of sleep: pending
their interrogations, depriving the detainees of sleep;
...deprivation of food and drink:
subjecting the detainees to a reduced diet during their stay at the center and pending interrogations.
The fourteen Hooded Men were the only
internees subjected to the full five techniques. However, over the
following months, some internees were subjected to at least one of
the five techniques, as well as other interrogation methods. These
allegedly included waterboarding, electric shocks, burning with
matches and candles, forcing internees to stand over hot electric
fires while beating them, beating and squeezing of the genitals,
inserting objects into the anus, injections, whipping the soles of
the feet, and psychological abuse such as Russian roulette.
Parker Report
When the interrogation techniques used
on the internees became known to the public, there was outrage at the
British government, especially from Irish nationalists. In answer to
the anger from the public and Members of Parliament, on 16 November
1971, the British government commissioned a committee of inquiry
chaired by Lord Parker (the Lord Chief Justice of England) to look
into the legal and moral aspects of the 'five techniques'.
The "Parker Report"
was published on 2 March 1972 and found the five techniques to be
illegal under domestic law:
10. Domestic Law ... (c) We have
received both written and oral representations from many legal bodies
and individual lawyers from both England and Northern Ireland. There
has been no dissent from the view that the procedures are illegal
alike by the law of England and the law of Northern Ireland. ... (d)
This being so, no Army Directive and no Minister could lawfully or
validly have authorized the use of the procedures. Only Parliament
can alter the law. The procedures were and are illegal.
On the same day (2 March 1972), United
Kingdom Prime Minister Edward Heath stated in the House of Commons:
[The] Government, having reviewed
the whole matter with great care and with reference to any future
operations, have decided that the techniques ... will not be used in
future as an aid to interrogation ... The statement that I have made
covers all future circumstances.
As foreshadowed in the Prime Minister's
statement, directives expressly forbidding the use of the techniques,
whether alone or together, were then issued to the security forces by
the government. The five techniques were still being used by the
British Army in 2003 as a means for training soldiers to resist harsh
interrogation if captured.
Irish Government
The Irish Government had deployed
internment without trial during the Civil War in the 1920s and again
during the IRA cross-border campaign in the 1950s. In December 1970,
Justice Minister Des O'Malley had announced that the policy was again
under consideration. The Irish Times reported that if internment were
introduced in Northern Ireland, it would follow in the Republic
almost at once. However, when British Ambassador John Peck sounded
out Taoiseach Jack Lynch on 30 July 1971 about this possibility,
Lynch replied that he had no grounds for introducing internment, and
that if he did his government would collapse. Lynch also advised Peck
to consider the consequences carefully.
After internment, the Irish government
took advantage of the nationalist backlash to press its demands for
radical changes in how Northern Ireland was governed. Paddy Hillery,
the Irish Minister for External Affairs, met British Home Secretary
Reginald Maudling in London on 9 August to demand that the Unionist
government should be replaced by a power-sharing coalition with 50/50
representation for the nationalist minority. This was a significant
break from Ireland's previous position, which had been to demand
unification. British Prime Minister Ted Heath's initial reaction was
a dismissive telegram telling Lynch to mind his own business. But he
then accepted the advice of his own diplomats that humiliating Lynch
and Hillery would make it less likely that they would deliver
cooperation in tackling the IRA. Thereafter Heath adopted a more
conciliatory tone. He invited Lynch for a two-day summit at Chequers,
his official country residence, on 6/7 September 1971. This encounter
seems to have changed his view of the problem: from then on, Heath
took the view that there could be no lasting solution to the Northern
Ireland problem without the cooperation of the Irish government, and
that the minority should have full participation in the government of
Northern Ireland. In that sense, internment and the violent reaction
against it led to a profound transformation in British policy.
Irish ministers made the most of the
leverage that the torture allegations had given them. Hugh McCann, a
senior Irish diplomat, noted the tactical advantage which Dublin
could gain through taking a case against Britain before the European
Court, which would take years to be adjudicated: 'it would 'make
the British much more careful in their handling of detainees... To
the extent that this would slow down their gathering of intelligence
information it would make it more difficult for them to make progress
in the direction of a military solution. If they succeeded in
containing the situation from a military point of view there would be
less incentive for them to take unpalatable political action'.
The implications are (a) that Dublin recognized the value of the
intelligence which the British were acquiring (albeit illegally), and
(b) that Dublin had a stake in impeding Britain's attempt to overcome
the IRA by military means, at least until London had implemented
radical constitutional reforms opening up the path to Irish
unification.
European Commission of Human Rights
The Irish Government, on behalf of the
men who had been subject to the five techniques, took a case to the
European Commission on Human Rights (Ireland v. United Kingdom, 1976
Y.B. Eur. Conv. on Hum. Rts. 512, 748, 788–94 (Eur. Comm'n of Hum.
Rts.)). The Commission stated that it:
...unanimously considered the
combined use of the five methods to amount to torture, on the grounds
that (1) the intensity of the stress caused by techniques creating
sensory deprivation "directly affects the personality physically
and mentally"; and (2) "the systematic application of the
techniques for the purpose of inducing a person to give information
shows a clear resemblance to those methods of systematic torture
which have been known over the ages ... a modern system of torture
falling into the same category as those systems applied in previous
times as a means of obtaining information and confessions.
European Court of Human Rights
The Commission's findings were
appealed. In 1978, in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR)
trial Ireland v. the United Kingdom (Case No. 5310/71), the court
ruled:
167. ... Although the five
techniques, as applied in combination, undoubtedly amounted to
inhuman and degrading treatment, although their object was the
extraction of confessions, the naming of others and/or information
and although they were used systematically, they did not occasion
suffering of the particular intensity and cruelty implied by the word
torture as so understood. ... 168. The Court concludes that recourse
to the five techniques amounted to a practice of inhuman and
degrading treatment, which practice was in breach of the European
Convention on Human Rights Article 3 (art. 3).
On 8 February 1977, in proceedings
before the ECHR, and in line with the findings of the Parker Report
and UK Government policy, the Attorney-General of the United Kingdom
stated:
The Government of the United Kingdom
have considered the question of the use of the 'five techniques' with
very great care and with particular regard to Article 3 (art. 3) of
the Convention. They now give this unqualified undertaking, that the
'five techniques' will not in any circumstances be reintroduced as an
aid to interrogation.
Later developments
In 2013, declassified documents
revealed the existence of the interrogation center at Ballykelly. It
had not been mentioned in any of the inquiries. Human rights group
the Pat Finucane Center accused the British Government of
deliberately hiding it from the inquiries and the European Court of
Human Rights. In June 2014, an RTÉ documentary entitled The Torture
Files uncovered a letter from the UK Home Secretary Merlyn Rees in
1977 to the then British Prime Minister James Callaghan. It confirmed
that a policy of 'torture' had in fact been authorized by the
British Government's ministers—specifically the Secretary for
Defence Peter Carrington—in 1971, contrary to the knowledge of the
Irish government or the ECHR. The letter states: "It
is my view (confirmed by Brian Faulkner before his death) that the
decision to use methods of torture in Northern Ireland in 1971/72 was
taken by ministers – in particular Lord Carrington, then secretary
of state for defense".
Following the 2014 revelations, the
President of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, called on the Irish government
to bring the case back to the ECHR because the British government, he
said, "lied to the European Court of Human Rights both on the
severity of the methods used on the men, their long term physical and
psychological consequences, on where these interrogations took place
and who gave the political authority and clearance for it".
On 2 December 2014, the Irish government announced that, having
reviewed the new evidence and following requests from the survivors,
it had decided to officially ask the ECHR to revise its 1978
judgment.
In March 2018, the ECHR announced a 6–1
decision against revising the original judgment. In September of the
same year, the ECHR refused to consider the case before its Grand
Chamber, meaning that the case cannot be appealed any longer.
