The past is never past -or so the saying goes. I know this to be true from recalling an incident like the ‘Pitchfork Murders’ that happened forty-five years ago in the townland of Aughnahinch, near Newtownbutler, County Fermanagh. Those who know a bit about our history know that the deliberate and systematic killing of Irish people by those in power in London goes back a long time in our history. The British were for centuries committed to colonial expansion and control –to making their empire the strongest in the world. Some people, deemed ‘uppity’ by the colonial power, had to be eliminated. It happened in the north of Ireland as it did in Malaya,Kenya, Aden and in the many other countries that the British colonized. A strategy to deal with counter-insurgency had been developed mainly in Malaya and Africa by a Brigadier Frank Kitson during the 1950s and 1960s. This counter-insurgency strategy involved assassination of undesirables and the use of pseudo gangs to carry this out and instil fear. One of the first pseudo gangs to be set up in Belfast in September 1971 was the Ulster Defence Association (UDA).
The murder in 1972 of two Fermanagh men, Michael Naan and his neighbour Andrew Murray, during the Civil Rights campaign, must be seen in the context of the British counter-insurgency strategy of spreading fear in the community and so undermining any potential popular uprising. The primary aim of the British was always to present the conflict in the north as between two warring factions with themselves acting as the ‘Pig in the Middle’, trying to keep the peace. It was a carefully constructed strategy by a government and military with much experience of dealing with insurgency in their colonies. As a result of this strategy in the north, many Catholics were killed as were others who showed sympathy for the cause of civil and national rights. The world was told by the media that those killed were victims of yet another outbreak of tribal violence in the north of Ireland. The New York Times consistently referred to the Catholic IRA and the Protestant UDA who were ‘at war in Ulster’.
Most people were so naïve or misinformed that they failed to realise immediately what the British were doing when they introduced ‘Operation Motorman’ in 1971. It is obvious now that the killings organised by the British in those years were part of a planned counter-insurgency strategy which had been proposed by a veteran of other colonial wars, Brigadier Frank Kitson. Within political and military circles, Frank Kitson was regarded as the expert on how to deal with ‘insurgency’ which was how they described the peaceful demand for civil rights.
The killings of innocent people by British soldiers in Ballymurphy in August 1971 and in Derry in January 1972, and the murder of the two innocent men, Naan and Murray, on a farm in county Fermanagh in October 1972 was part of the Kitson strategy of: 1. striking fear into the local nationalist communities and 2. making it appear that what was happening in the north was a sectarian conflict and 3. presenting the British role in Ireland as ‘peacekeepers’. The so-called ‘pitchfork murders’ in Fermanagh is one example of how the British strategy was implemented.
(to be continued)
The British establishment treated their own people with the same ruthlessness: Peterloo, Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Suffragettes, the Miners.
The only serious plan the Brits had for here was run. Still is.
Is fear rith maith na drochseamh. Slan Agaibh gach dhuine.
“Most people were so naïve or misinformed that they failed to realise immediately what the British were doing…….”
That was then. Do you reckon people nowadays know or realise what the British are doing in say, Syria,Libya etc in the present day? Their policies didn’t go away you know.
Fair point Wolfe.
In an interview with the Daily Express in the early 70’s that darling of the Irish Media Barry McGuinness stated that he had been turned off violence when two good friends of his Michael Naan and Andrew Murray had been “murdered by the IRA”. He never withdrew the allegation even after the conviction of the British soldiers responsible.No wonder the British and Free State media love him.