The Police and the Army in Northern Ireland

Abstract

When the clashes between the Catholic Civil Rights marchers and the Reverend Ian Paisley’s Protestant demonstrators began in 1968, the Royal Ulster Constabulary had no press office. Moreover, the RUC was geared to its traditional role of protecting the Province against the IRA. Its intelligence organization provided plenty of information about the IRA and, through their mutual connections, about the Civil Rights Association (later known as NICRA) but very little about the self-proclaimed Protestant ‘loyalists’, who they had always assumed were ‘loyal’ to the Crown and to the police. When the Protestant campaign of deliberate obstruction, confrontation and later of violence against NICRA began, the RUC were quite unprepared for it, and especially for the public relations task of handling the flood of complaints from the two sides, both of which resented anything the police might do which afforded any protection whatever to the rights of the other side or which inhibited any action, however violent or provocative, by their own side.