net’, he advised. ‘But if rod and net cannot succeed by themselves it may be necessary to do something to the water.’
Just before dawn one morning in August 1971, three thousand British troops descended on nationalist areas across Northern Ireland. Soldiers broke down doors and dragged men from their beds, hauling them off to internment. Under the Special Powers Act, it was legal to hold someone indefinitely without trial, and internment had been used periodically in Northern Ireland. But not on this scale. Of the nearly 350 suspects arrested that day, not a single one was a loyalist, though there were plenty of loyalist paramilitaries engaged in terrorism at the time. This disparity in treatment only compounded the impression, in the minds of many Catholics, that the army was simply another instrument of sectarian oppression. In planning the sweep, the army had relied on intelligence from the RUC, and, as one British commander later acknowledged, the largely Protestant police force consisted of people who were ‘partial to one extent or another, in many cases, to a considerable extent’.
But the lists of suspects that the RUC produced were not merely skewed to target Catholics – they were also out of date, and included many people who had no involvement whatsoever in the armed struggle. Because of the Irish tradition of naming sons after their fathers, elderly men were dragged off under the mistaken assumption that they were their sons, and sons were arrested because the authorities thought they were their fathers. (Sometimes, finding both father and son at home and uncertain about which one they were after, the army simply took both.) Nearly a third of the suspects seized that morning were released after two days. The army had arrested a bunch of people it wasn’t looking for while failing to arrest most of the people it was looking for, all while further embittering a Catholic population that was highly embittered to begin with. An official study by the British Ministry of Defence later conceded that internment had been ‘a major mistake’. In the words of one British officer who took part in the sweep, ‘It was lunacy.’
As the presiding counter-insurgency intellectual in Northern Ireland, Frank Kitson would forever be associated with internment. But he would later insist that he had not approved of the decision – that, on the contrary, he had warned his superiors that such a measure would prove counterproductive. His quarrel was not so much with the use of the practice in general as with the specifics of its application in this instance. Kitson had endorsed the use of internment in Kenya and elsewhere. While allowing that it was ‘not an attractive measure to people brought up in a free country’, he argued that internment could nevertheless shorten a conflict, ‘by removing from the scene people who would otherwise have become involved in the fighting’. He reportedly quipped, of locking people up without trial, ‘It’s better than killing them.’ This view may seem callous in retrospect, but the sentiment was echoed at the time in the British press. The Telegraph suggested that some of the Catholics who were locked up without charge ‘admit to preferring internment to the chances of being shot outside’.
Kitson’s chief criticism of internment in Northern Ireland was that it did not come as a surprise. Brendan Hughes, who knew a thing or two about intelligence himself, was not picked up in the raid – because he knew in advance that it was coming. In late July, the army did a kind of dry run, conducting searches and arrests, and the operation looked to Hughes like an effort to gather information. He was right. The army had devised this preparatory phase in order to make sure the addresses on its list were up to date. Another hint about the army’s intentions was rising from the ground twelve miles outside Belfast: on the premises of a former air force base, a capacious new prison camp was being constructed, a facility capable of housing large numbers of detainees. If you were paying attention, it was not a question of whether mass internment would be introduced, but when. Brendan Hughes, having realised this well in advance of the raid, simply went underground, along with his men. After the sweep, the IRA held a press conference to announce, with smug satisfaction, that the massive operation had succeeded in netting hardly any Provos at all.
Dolours Price was not one of those picked up. When the raids happened, she was