British counter- insurgency practice in Northern Ireland in the 1970s – a legitimate response or state terror?

The UK government has portrayed its role in Ireland as that of the neutral broker, the reluctant peacekeeper between two bitterly divided sectarian factions. This ‘community relations’ or ‘two warring factions’ explanation for the conflict is pivotal to the British state narrative that the UK has been the victim of a terrorist campaign. Evidence that the state itself used terror or that its relationship to one of the ‘factions’ was anything but neutral casts doubt on the ‘peacekeeper’ status that Britain has assumed ( Jamieson and McEvoy, 2005). This chapter will analyse counter-insurgency practice in the 1970s with a focus on locally recruited security forces in the fight against the IRA. Declassified British government documents show knowledge at the highest levels of government of loyalist paramilitary infiltration of the local security forces. Using the Ulster Defence Regiment, the then largest regiment in the British Army, as a case study, the authors will show that successive governments tolerated an illegal and deadly relationship between paramilitaries and security forces as part of a counter-insurgency policy. The result was state terror.