The attacks began on July 21st when 5,000 workers were driven from their jobs. They continued over the following days with the looting of shops, the burning of homes, and arson and gun attacks on places of worship. The scale of the outbreaks was horrific: men dragged from their beds and murdered in front of their families, babies shot in their mothers' arms, streets raked with gunfire, bombs thrown into the midst of playing children. The horror reached a crescendo with the murder in cold blood of five members of one family - a father and four sons.
This is not Bosnia in 1990, but Belfast in the years 1920-1922; and these awful events are recalled in a startling new book, Northern Divisions; The Old IRA and the Belfast Pogroms 1920-1922, by the historian Jim McDermott (Beyond the Pale Publications, £12.99 sterling).
Belfast pogrom
The Concise Oxford Dictionary gives the following definition of the word pogrom: "organised murder, originally of the Jews in Russia". This aptly describes what happened to Belfast Catholics in this terrible time. Constituting only a third of the population, they suffered 267 deaths and countless injuries; 23,000 were driven from their homes, up to 11,000 lost their jobs and 500 Catholic-owned businesses were destroyed.
Catholic enclaves came under nightly attack from Orange mobs, particularly the small area around the Short Strand in east Belfast where there were numerous attempts to burn down St Matthew's church. York Street in the Docks area, Clonard, and the Marrowbone district of Oldpark were other small Catholic areas that came under constant siege from snipers and arsonists.
It was in this atmosphere that the Belfast IRA functioned. It had existed in the city from the days of the Irish Volunteers and at the height of the Troubles numbered upwards of 1,000 men constituted in the Third Northern Division. It produced operatives of exceptional calibre including Joe McKelvey, who was one of the four anti-Treaty prisoners executed by the Provisional Government in December 1922, Sean McEntee, who went on to become a Fianna Fβil government minister, and Seamus Woods who for a time was Assistant Chief of Staff of the Free State Army.
Despite being poorly armed and operating in a very hostile environment, the Belfast IRA was determined to play an active role in the War of Independence. But its vulnerability quickly became apparent. The inquest into the murder of Tomβs MacCurtβin, the Sinn FΘin Lord Mayor of Cork in May 1920, named RIC District Inspector Swanzy as one of those responsible. Michael Collins ordered revenge.
Swanzy was transferred to Lisburn in Co Antrim for his own safety and it was here that the Belfast IRA tracked him down and killed him in August 1920. The reaction was beyond their worst expectations. Catholic homes (including the parish priest's house) and businesses were burnt in retaliation and after three days of looting and destruction, the entire Catholic population of 1,000 could take no more and fled the town en masse.
Inevitable reprisals
This pattern was soon to establish itself. IRA attacks were followed by the inevitable reprisals. Many of these were the work of Orange mobs and UVF gunmen, but there is clear evidence of an official policy of reprisal at senior level.
District Inspector Nixon, working from Brown Square Barracks, almost certainly led the RIC gang which carried out the worst atrocity of the Troubles when five members of the McMahon family were murdered in March 1922. They returned to their grisly work a week later when seven civilians were murdered in one night (one of them bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer) in what became known as "the Arnon Street massacres". These murders followed the killing of RIC men and Specials and were widely seen as direct reprisals.
It seemed that the Catholics of Belfast were being held to ransom for the good behaviour of their co-religionists, not only in Belfast, but in other parts of the country. Faced with this terrible dilemma, the IRA were forced into the role of defenders of the Catholic ghettoes and pressured increasingly into sectarian conflict. By 1921, they had taken to bombing trams carrying Protestant workers from the shipyards. In May 1922, an IRA unit entered Garret's cooperage in the dock area, lined up four Protestant workers and emptied their revolvers into them.
The Treaty and the outbreak of the Civil War in the South were a decisive blow against the IRA in Belfast. Allied to the introduction of internment and the Special Powers Act in March 1922, these events were to sap morale and lead to increasing security successes for the new RUC. Many Belfast IRA men, including the author's grandfather, joined the Free State Army, swayed by loyalty to Michael Collins (who was still talking about invading the North a week before his death) and the belief that the best hope for Northern nationalists lay with the Provisional Government.
Last casualty
By the end of 1922, armed action in Belfast had practically ceased. The last recorded casualty of the Troubles in the city was Mary Sherlock, a young Catholic shot dead in October on her way to church in the Short Strand area. Ironically, the first casualty in July 1920 had been another young woman, Maggie Noad, from the same small Catholic district.
Jim McDermott has written a compelling work of scholarship on a subject long shrouded in myth and speculation. Northern Divisions will serve as the definitive study of this terrible period in Belfast history and will help explain attitudes to the Northern state which have persisted to this day.