Erin Go Bragh I: The Beginning 1969 - 1973

By Ruairi O' Cashel

Erin go bragh: The Beginning, 1969 1973

Roger M. Schlosser

Abstract

A new book on the modern Irish Troubles seems at once a bit late now that some thing of a peace has settled in the North of Ireland, but it is also possibly anticipating what is to come.

2016 will be the one hundredth anniversary of the 1916 Rising, or Irish Rebellion. In the Republic of Ireland there will be commemorations celebrating the birth of Eire. But in the North of Ireland there will be a different atmosphere since six counties of the Province of Ulster remain part of the United Kingdom. The fiftieth anniversary in 1966 inaugurated the recent round of the Irish Troubles in the North. What will the centennial bring?

In Erin go bragh, Roger M. Schlosser tells a story beginning in the late 1960s as the New Troubles are breaking out in the North of Ireland. An American college student, Rudy Castle, recently home from Vietnam, finds himself engaged in the recent Irish Troubles in large part because of his Irish American mother. She encourages him as a matter of family responsibility to uphold the honor of the family in fighting for Ireland.

He becomes a foreign exchange student in Scotland, but through an Irish acquaintance living in Chicago he becomes actively involved in the events first in Belfast and then farther a field for the cause of Ireland. The Chicago Irishman tells him the story of a Protestant girl who is mistaken for a Catholic by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and who pays the price for this mistaken identity. The story catches the imagination of Castle.

But it is the ghost of his dead grandfather and his living mother that really nudge him along the path set by the Republican Movement in the North of Ireland. As he gets more involved, in part because of the skills learned in the
U S Army and a growing awareness of his Irish heritage and commitment to the cause of Irish freedom, he meets and makes friends with some of the old and the newly emerging leaders of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. But at every turn the shadow of his mother crosses his past.

His post-graduate work transfers to Queens University and provides him with a good academic cover, but British Military Intelligence enlists him. He turns this contact into a double cross arrangement and also arranges a sting on a MI5 employee for the good of the Republican Movement.

A third woman and her sister tie him irrevocably to the North of Ireland as he comes to marry her and her sister marries his best friend from America. His future wife is ignorant of much of what he is involved in with the PIRA, but her sister is wise to whats going on. The sisters brother is also involved in Republican subversive activity.

After contacting members of his distant family in both the North and in the Republic, and after traveling to North Africa and Eastern Europe procuring arms, etc., Castle gets further involved in missions for the Provisional IRA and he feels his luck is running out, and the time has come for a hasty retreat out of Ireland for his home in western Michigan.

As Castle gathers his degree from Queens university and his new wife, fate places him at a going away party with old comrades only to be raided by the British Military.
Sanctuary is found in a Protestant womans house who is not only a fellow teacher of his new wife, but also that little Protestant girl who was mistaken for a Catholic from the story hed heard in Chicago, all grown up. Ironic and Irish at once.

Thus ends the first book of the trilogy, Erin go Bragh, The Beginning, 1969 1973, centering on the Modern Troubles and leading up to the one hundredth anniversary of the 1916 Rising, and around the role of Rudy Castle. The second book, Erin go Bragh, The Middle of an Era, 1973 1982, is followed by the third book, Erin go Bragh, The End of an Era, 1995 2003, and sees the fourth generation working for justice, liberty, and freedom in the North of Irela

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483631493

Ruairi O' Cashel

R. M. Schlosser was born in Michigan to a German father and an Irish mother, who raised him to be an Irish-American, in spite of his German last name. He taught at a community college, and was the founder and director of an Irish Foreign Studies Program focusing on the Troubles in the North of Ireland. Though retired now, he is still active in things Irish. He and his wife travel widely, read avidly, and spend time with their children and their spouses, and grandchildren, in and around the Great Lakes’ State.

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by Ruairi O’ Cashel.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This work of fiction periodically uses the names of real people who were involved in the most recent round of Irish Troubles. Readers familiar with the last forty years of the Twentieth Century in Irish history, especially in the North, will recognize the names and the figures introduced that are or were real. Most of the characters are fictitious as is the story.

Rev. date: 05/14/2013

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Contents

Introduction

Background

History: Background To The Modern Troubles

New School, Old School 1969

The Decision: The University Of Edinburgh

History: The Fall Of 1969

December 1969 And Into 1970

Spring 1970

History: Early 1970

Contact For The British

History: Late Summer 1970

Summer Break 1970

Fall 1970

Christmas 1970

History: Spring 1971

Eve’s Mission

Summer 1971

History: Fall 1971

My Mission Trip

Christmas 1971

History: The First Half Of 1972

Some Double Crosses

Summer 1972

Summer & Fall 1972

Vendetta

Deaths And Marriages Or Beginnings And Ends

History: The First Half Of 1973

The First Half Of 1973: An End Of ‘Ireland Forever’

DEDICATION

To my family: my wife, our children, and their

children, all Irish to one degree or another

by blood, association, or desire.

SPECIAL THANKS

To my Orange wife of over forty years

who made suggestions and corrections.

Any errors are mine alone.

INTRODUCTION

S everal years ago an Irish Nationalist from Derry who was living in Chicago at the time, told me a story of a girl about my age who was visiting a friend in Derry city some years earlier. She was set upon by the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s auxiliaries, the so-called B-specials or B-men, suffering physical and mental injuries.

The attack took place in the Catholic Bogside area below the walls of the old city of Derry back in 1956. What made it so significant was that the girl was a Protestant visiting a Catholic friend in this Catholic nationalist area. I don’t recall him saying how it was that she had a Catholic friend. They certainly did not go to the same school. I do not recall him explaining why she was visiting her Catholic friend. They certainly had little in common and probably did not cross paths during any typical day.

My friend painted a motion picture of the events. "At first the young Protestant did not respond to the shrill whistle, the stamping of running feet, and the shouts of ethnic and religious slurs coming from the uniformed men at the bottom of the street who were charging up the narrow road crushing all who were in their way.

"As the young girl stared down the street and saw the commotion down at the end of the road she probably had at the back of her mind a fleeting awareness of the trouble the Crown’s authorities always had in nationalist Catholic areas, and that the authorities had to use rough measures to curtail threats and insurrection that were often hatched in these districts. Loyalists needed to be vigilant at all times she had heard her father say dozens of times. But on this day and in this street there was no obvious rebel cause that she was aware of. There certainly was no recognizable threat or cause for alarm here and now. Kids were playing, neighbor women were out gossiping, and there were a few lone men hurrying along the sidewalk.

"She probably thought this rush of B-men coming up the street must simply be a drill, even though it looked real enough. And now there were screams from what appeared to be the local people being attacked by the B-specials. There were scuffles along the street, and the confusion was advancing her way. Her play friend was running and yelling for her to follow. But she did not run and follow her friend. She just stood where she was on the sidewalk at the entrance to an arched passageway and watched.

"It was happening right before her but she was simply an observer, not a participant. She was just watching the events unfold and she surely did not feel that she was a participant in any way. She was simply there. It was like theater, she was a spectator and she was detached from it all. Although she was transfixed and mesmerized by it all, at the same time she felt she was merely a spectator to this spectacle.

"If she sensed any fear or concern for her own well-being she did not heed the warnings nor did she take evasive action. After all, the authorities were her men, her police ‘specials’, and her very kind. It did not dawn on her till it was too late that they would have no way of knowing that she was one of theirs. The fact was that she was in enemy territory, playing with a Nationalist, and for all practical purposes she appeared to be a Catholic, and hence a potential enemy. It began to dawn on her that there always were, and certainly would be now, consequences for these indiscretions.

"She was pummeled as if she was a Catholic. For what would be in all probability the only time in her life she felt what it was like to be a Catholic in the North of Ireland, and at once she also felt what it was like for being a Catholic in the North of Ireland.

"As she lay in the hospital her bruised head and aching body did not prevent her mind from reflecting on those events and the circumstances surrounding her beating. Weeks later as she was healing from her injuries she reflected not only on the beating but even more on her attempt to defend herself by telling the uniformed assailant that she was loyal, and a Protestant, and that she was from the Diamond district in the ‘City.’ She loved the queen, idolized England and cherished being ‘British.’

Any one of these facts alone could have, and should have, saved her for everyone knew the ‘Diamond’ was Protestant, Unionist and Loyalist. But her assailant would have none of it. And now in her misery and in her elementary way she was reflecting on the cause of her misery and she could come to no other conclusion that being mistaken for a Catholic nationalist brat she was a legitimate target because every one in that neighborhood was a target. Even young eleven-year-old girls.

What I was to find out later from another source was that as she struggled to go deeper into the cause, she could not avoid the conclusion that her mistaken identity allowed the B-man to assume that she was Catholic and her membership to that whore church of Rome meant she could never be a true and loyal citizen of Britain. Furthermore, that her Roman Catholic act of faith negated any real and true pledge of loyalty to the crown, the Act of Union between Ulster and England, and any patriotic respect for the laws of Parliament and the Crown.

She would not articulate these truths in this fashion for some years, but she was sensing the reality of these observations with each throb of her discomfort. But the seed of this revelation was sown and would grow over the years. She would come to distrust, dislike and despise all of this Ulster Britishness. It started on that street in the Bogside and the nurturing of this rejection began in her convalescence.

She began to question her position in society. She began to question the society she was in. Her questions were answered hundreds of times over the coming years, and the answers were uncomfortable. Years later when I met that little girl all grown up, her rejection of what Ulster stood for led to more than denunciation. It led to a sort of rebellion or even revolution. But I was to learn this end of the story myself from her much later. This revelation was to be made manifest to me in a brutal way in the future, from the victim herself.

This Irish Nationalist from Chicago, who was telling me the story a few years before I met the victim, expressed the ironic conclusion that since the key victim of the riot had been a loyalist Protestant this fact infuriated the B-men later when they found out they had beaten a young Protestant girl. They blamed the nationalist Catholics for this oversight and injustice, as if the Catholics had set it all up and purposely had not explained to them who she was, he explained.

I said, You have got to be kidding?

He said he wasn’t, because a few days later the B-men returned to the area to teach the Catholics a lesson, because this time they were sure there would only be Catholic nationalists there to beat.

I said, What the hell was the lesson?

He answered, Who knows? They’re fecking Prods. It was just an excuse to attack the Bogside again.

I asked, How do you know they returned because they mistook the girl for a Catholic.

He said they yelled some thing to that effect during their later assault: You let an innocent Protestant girl get attacked, and You Taigs [Catholics] saw to it an innocent Protestant girl got caught up in your doings, and You’ll pay now for letting an innocent Protestant girl pay for what you Taigs did.

I thought, That is incomprehensible. It defies logic, common sense, and just plain decency.

As if he were reading my mind, he said, Crazy huh? But that’s the way things are up in the North. It is just crazy enough to make sense to the people up there, on both sides.

Each side understands this? I asked.

Aye, he said. They do. They all do.

At a later date I found out the lesson to this story from the young woman herself, but neither my Nationalist friend nor I had an inkling of the real consequences of this assault on that little Protestant girl. My Irish friend would be as surprised as I was when the truth of that story was revealed years later.

As I stood there trying to make sense of the northern Irish situation I was aware that deep down I actually did have an inkling of this clannish hatred and in a sense I also had a vague understand of some of it too. I guess my Irish was coming through. After all I am half Irish, and my mom’s Irish sides of the family were the strong ones who cultivated and left the strongest impressions on my generation. Even though I had a German father, my mind, heart and soul were Irish. But even this had an ironic twist to it.

My situation was that although I was only half Irish, my mother raised me as an Irish Catholic. Yet I also had a maternal grand father and a paternal grand mother who had been Protestants. I had Protestant uncles, aunts and cousins on both sides of the family. All of this might have made being an Irish Catholic somewhat difficult. But my Irish Catholic mother used to explain that our Protestant relatives and friends were our Protestants. And that we Catholics were their Catholics, and that made it all different, not impossible.

That wasn’t difficult she would explain, just complicated to outsiders or those who don’t take the time to understand our ways. The way she would explain this made it all acceptable even if a little complicated. It also harkened back to earlier events in my life that were the framework for dealing with Irish issues then and later.

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BACKGROUND

T his being said, by way of introduction, let me say that I am a German-Irish American from Hartford, Michigan, born in the waning days of World War II. My name is Rudy Castle, and although my folks were immigrants to United States, my cousins, and I are Americans. Now we are all Americans. Every one of my generation was born right here in the USA.

As comfortable as this was for all of us there were several events in the coming years that were to expand the horizon all the way to Ireland in ways that none of us could imagine. I was totally unaware of what was in store, and as events turned out I was the one from our generation that fulfilled the destiny that had been prepared by earlier generations, but especially by my mother and her dad, my granda.

There were three specific occasions in my life that had lasting importance to me. The first was back in about 1961 when I saw the movie Gone with the Wind. The time and setting of this movie was the American Civil War in the 1860s. A story was related in the movie about two uncles who were killed a century and a half before the American Civil War, but were still recalled as if these distant relatives had been snatched from life rather recently, leaving a personal scar on the heroin.

My own Irish mother, Kathryn Mary Castle nee Kelly, had told me a similar story about how the British had killed two of her Uncles, Seamus and Sean. At the time I thought the similarities between the two stories a simple coincidence. Many Irish families must have lost uncles to the Brits over the centuries and most large Irish families had Uncles named Jim and John, which as most know is Seamus and Sean in the Irish language. But about the same time a question came up in a high school class I was taking which caused me to ponder not so much the parallel between the stories as the circumstances of my mother’s story.

I inquired of my mom about her, our, uncles who were murdered by the Brits. She said the dastardly event took place at the time of the Battle of the Boyne. I retorted that the Battle of the Boyne was a long time ago, and not ignoring the obvious parallel with Gone with the Wind I complained that she, my only mother, had misled me by implying that the uncles in question had been familiar with her. Had played with her. Had held her on their laps and provided horsy rides on their crossed legs.

It was at this point that the second event occurred that was to shape my future in ways that I couldn’t have imagined. At my complaint concerning the time warp she had described between herself and our uncles, she simply stood her ground and stared at me as only a mother can when challenged by one of her own. She let about ten seconds pass in uncomfortable silence, and then explained, "The British killed my and ‘your’ uncles Seamus and Sean. So what if the ‘Boyne’ was some time ago, you must never let time interfere with your history."

The Battle of the Boyne was in 1690, so yes it was some time ago, about two hundred and seventy years ago! But to my mother’s way of thinking I had completely missed the point. The point being that the Brits, then as now were the enemy, guilty of heinous crimes and sins against the Irish in general, and our family in particular. I still don’t know if Mom’s story was real or an imaginative adaptation of the movie to her family.

So the Brits were the enemy, not Protestants, she would explain. Brits were not ordinary English, Welsh, Scottish, or northern Irish Protestant folk, but the ‘hard core Imperialists’ who held the Crown and Britannia over all.

She defined Brits for me time and time again so I understood the important distinctions and subtleties in that definition. I had much more difficulty then and later with her comment about not letting time interfere with history and the use of this sort of thinking as not just an Irish mantra, but as a universal attitude of many people to justify opposition, rebellion, and revenge and so on against others. Over the next forty years I was to travel on six continents off and on a couple of time a year. I saw this same sort of thinking put into practice with tragic effect time and time again. It is the stuff of history. Certainly it is the stuff of Irish history.

This brings me to the third incident that also was to have a similar ring to it. My maternal grandfather used to sing Irish rebel songs after he had a few jars and he’d get me and cousins to march around his dining room table and sing along with him. We were Irish, and we were proud of it and we’d surely get a chance he said to fight for Ireland. It was reminiscent of Frank McCourt’s depictions of his father in Angela’s Ashes. This had to be coincidence because our marches were in the late forties and early fifties, and McCourt’s book didn’t come out untill the nineteen-nineties.

There was a fat chance of any of us fighting for Ireland, because we all lived in the mid west of the United States, and the war looming on the horizon was potentially along the Iron Curtain, but more likely in Asia, specifically south east Asia.

And sure enough, in the fall of 1966 I found myself with a low draft number and by the next spring being drafted into the United States Army just in time for the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. My service time is not terribly interesting or directly related to my Irish years except that during my stay in the US military, I learned some invaluable military knowledge, learned to handle difficult circumstances with patient confidence, and also became proficient with weapons and explosives of various kinds.

Ironically, at about the same time as my entry into the US military was unfolding in the winter of 1967, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was formed. Being influenced by the Civil Rights organizations in the United States whose aim was at the very least the abolition of racial discrimination, in the North of Ireland NICRA sought a universal franchise establishing ‘one man one vote,’ the end of ‘gerrymandering’ and discrimination against employing Catholics by local government, fair housing allocation, and repeal of the draconian Special Powers Act giving martial law to the authorities against nationalist Catholics. Further, they sought to disband the Ulster Special Constabulary (B-Specials, or B-men).

Many, if not most Protestants in the North of Ireland, as well as all ultra-conservative Members of Parliament, saw NICRA as a Irish Nationalist, Catholic, Republican front hoping for not only civil rights but a United Ireland.

Quite frankly I was ignorant of what was happening outside of my base of operation; I was busy staying alive and making war. But it was while on leave that I met the Irishman from Derry for the first time at a party in Chicago. It was at this party he told me the story of the little Protestant girl who was mistaken for a Catholic in Derry.

After about three hours into the party neither of us was feeling any pain, and the talk was still of Ireland and things Irish, and the new Troubles in Ireland. He said he was here unofficially, which I took to mean illegally. This was no problem to me since most of my mother’s and my grandparent’s generation was also originally here illegally (thank you Canada).

I didn’t ask many questions nor did he do any overt recruiting up to this point. He did explain that since he was here for a while he intended to raise funds for the cause in Ireland. I gave him fifty bucks and became an instant friend. I talked about my family, especially the Irish side. He seemed genuinely interested, and he just let me ramble.

He asked how I heard of the party and I explained that a close friend was a graduate student at Loyola and he had invited me over to Chicago for the weekend. He was dating a girl who knew these kids who were having a party. Pretty innocent sounding. He said many of the kids were Irish sympathizers and were starting to collect money for the Irish cause of freedom.

He brought me up to speed on the civil rights movement in the North of Ireland, the new organizations besides the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, like People’s Democracy and the Derry Citizen’s Action Committee, and the marches and the loyalist violence being showered on these groups with the collusion of the police authorities. He spoke of Derry, Belfast and Armagh city and the antics of Reverend Ian Paisley and a Major Ronald Bunting. October and November of last year right up to today has made it obvious that these civil rights groups need protecting from the Protestant mobs and state, he said.

He asked if I had any interest in getting involved in the solution to the Irish problems. I hesitated only a moment and explained that after I settled up with my military commitment and secured a position at a graduate school I certainly would want to make my mother and her family proud. I was certain of that.

He laughed and said, You’re Irish alright. When you are in better shape we can talk some more.

He handed me another Guinness and said, "Slainte."

To Ireland, I said, but I was certainly too drunk to know if I was serious or not.

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HISTORY:

BACKGROUND TO THE MODERN

TROUBLES

N ineteen sixty six was a very significant year for Ireland and the Irish, whether Green, White, or Orange. For Nationalists, both in the twenty-six county Republic of Eire, called by some the South, and in Northern Ireland, called by Nationalists The North of Ireland, it was the Fiftieth Anniversary of the 1916 Rising. For Loyalists and Unionists in the North of Ireland that they called ‘Ulster’, it was the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Battle of the Somme during WW I where the ‘36 th Division’ from Ulster was nearly annihilated.

1966 was a year of remembrance, commemoration, and possibly restoration. It was a turning point for every person of interest in Ireland, for any person with an once of Irish blood coursing through his or her arteries and veins, but especially for a million and a half people in the North of Ireland. Things would never be the same.

At the end of the Anglo-Irish War (1919-21), beteen Irish Rebals an the British, known as the Tan War, twenty-six counties in predominantly the south of Ireland became the Irish Free State or Eire, and six of the original nine counties that made up the Province of Ulster became known as Ulster to the British and their Loyalist subjects or Northern Ireland (as described in the 1920 Government of Ireland Act). During the years leading up to this division two groups emerged who would reappear later in the century.

The first, the Irish Republican Army (transitioning from the old Irish Republican Brotherhood), would appear on the steps of the General post office in the 1916 Rising and would continue to reappear periodically to denounce and challenge the Partition or division of Ireland. They were seen as defenders of the minority Nationalist community in the 1920s, 30s and the 40s, and at the same time they were seen as champions of dissolving the ugly and unnatural Partition/division of Ireland in the 1950s.

The other group was the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) first formed in 1913, to ensure that a United Independent Ireland of all thirty-two counties did NOT materialize. This Protestant citizens army of Loyalists were committed to the Union with the United Kingdom, and during WW I they made up the bulk of the 36th Ulster Division that sacrificed itself during the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

This sacrifice ensured that the Protestants of the North of Ireland would not be abandoned by the UK to the Catholic majority of a thirty-two county Irish Republic. But the twenty-six County Free State to the south did emerge from warfare and Parliamentary procedure, which even the UVF could not prevent.

With the establishment of what came to be called the Stormont Government of Northern Ireland, a Protestant majority ensured a Protestant state for a Protestant people. The Catholic minority was discriminated against regarding jobs, housing and participation in government. Under the protection of a sectarian police force, the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) and a large part-time auxiliary force, the Ulster Special Constabulary Force (B-Specials), the UVF was reconstituted as a legitimate arm of the Northern government.

The UVF provided the legitimate arm of the law to enforce the draconian Special Powers Act which targeted the IRA specifically and the Nationalist-Catholic community generally. This Special Powers Act gave license to the Protestant Authorities to do what they needed or wanted to do to the Catholic minority in the North.

In the aftermath of yet another challenge to the Partition/division in the period 1956-1962 (Operation Harvest) by the IRA, they dumped arms, disengaged, and disbanded. What was left of he IRA under the new Chief of Staff, Cathal Goulding decided to go political instead of stressing the military side of the organization, taking a socialist agenda instead of the old traditional Catholic conservative economic and social attitudes, and threatening to drop the abstentionism" policy (abstaining from holding political offices even if elected) for one of participating in government strategy. The rank and file of IRA volunteers, though unorganized, were against Goulding’s direction of the nearly defunct organization.

This was the setting of the year 1966. IRA veterans like Joe Cahill, John Kelly and Billy McKee, all Northerners, saw Dublin based Goulding’s new slant as heretical to IRA dogma and it was Marxist to boot. To Gouldings Southerners of the new IRA the old veterans were romantic right-wingers longing for a fantasy 32 County Republic. If the new IRA people in Dublin had resigned themselves to the political status quo of the border, the establishment of the Stormont regime, and participating in politics; the old boys were still fuming over the border, Stormont, and the discrimination by the Stormont Government inflicted on Catholics in the North.

A year earlier Sean Lemass, the Irish Prime Minister had been invited up to Belfast by Northern